Five winners of the Turner prize are demanding an end to BP's sponsorship of the National Portrait Gallery, stepping up the campaign against big oil's involvement in the arts.Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing and Mark Wallinger are among a group of almost 80 leading artists, including winners of the BP portrait award,...

VENICE, Italy — Acqua alta: high water. It's something Venetians have learned to live with, when the city floods under high tides and strong winds. It mainly happens in the winter, but even under the mild May sunshine, the crowds sipping coffee in Saint Mark's Square will sometimes get their feet wet. At these times, the lines between lagoon,...

Painter Joyce Pensato spent most of her life within blocks of the Brooklyn street where she grew up, working in semi-obscurity some decades before the neighbourhood turned remotely hip. Long admired by fellow painters such as Christopher Wool, Pensato only gained wide recognition in the mid-2000s for her dripping portraits of Felix the Cat, Batman...

The forest and the house are two psychologically-charged domains in the Western imaginary, both ruled by the play of light and shadow. When we can't see the far edge of the trees, a forest becomes an unfathomable mystery, and its secrets take on a more threatening character with the fall of night. The house, on the other hand, is the most intimate...

The 58th edition of the Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff–from London’s very own Hayward Gallery–proves to be as interesting as its title promises. Venice is an easy city to get lost in, and it’s easy to see why Proust dubbed the city’s labyrinth of alleyways a network of 'innumerable slender capillary...

There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries,...

When I became an art critic in 1981 one of the first artists I met and wrote about was Sean Scully. At that time I was teaching philosophy in Pittsburgh and he, having recently moved to New York, was as yet without a dealer. We are almost the same age, and to some extent we grew up together. When we first met, he had just made the transition from...

In his 1914 neorealist manifesto, Charles Ginner rails against the 'academism' of 'weak or commercial painters,' who adopt the methods of creative artists and derive formulae from them, becoming 'Formula-Machines.' To circumvent such 'academism,' Ginner advocates for artists to anchor their works in their 'personal vision of nature and attitude...

The secluded London studio of Shirazeh Houshiary foxes my Uber driver entirely. But I shouldn't be surprised that the Iranian-born artist is off-grid. Among a heap of volumes that litter her studio floor is Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, the quantum physicist whose luminous texts explain why Newtonian laws of space and time can only...

Last week, after reading the interview 'Have Aliens Found Us?' between the writer Isaac Chotiner and Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, in The New Yorker, I thought about Susan. She would have liked it, I imagined, because it discusses the fact that all the images of Oumuamua – an interstellar and possibly alien object detected...

In the opening image of John Akomfrah's Mimesis: African Soldier (2018), we are confronted by a row of black and brown faces who smile nervously and knowingly into the camera. They represent the faces we seldom see in war documentaries or history books; their smiles evoke a quiet sense of unease and foreboding. Once the colonial subjects of empire,...

For centuries, artists and philosophers have theorised about the relationship between private and public space, materially and conceptually. In Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life (1947), he discusses the relationship between personal and private life as an 'interconnectedness', where our internal and external lives mutually inform one...

There can be no doubt that Richard Long is one of the giants of British art. Or so a very impressive curriculum vitae would lead one to suppose. He is now in his early 70s. He made his reputation almost half-a-century ago, as what was then called a Land Artist – going for epic walks, often through very remote locations.

Strange Days: Memories of the Future is overwhelming: complex, at times annoying and confusing, repetitive, uplifting and baffling. Like life, really. Films and videos by 21 artists are spread over three floors of the Store X on London's Strand.

Portraiture is an enduring art form, thanks to the narcissistic tendencies of the human race.

The one constant running through all of my writing on Whitney is his works on paper, which I am thinking about in the broadest sense—from the densely linear graphite concatenations he made in the late 1980s to the gouaches in fruity Popsicle colours from the past few years. It is clear to me that Whitney’s works on paper form a distinct body within...

It was a telling coincidence that the opening of the tenth Liverpool Biennial, curated by Kitty Scott (a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario) and Sally Tallant (Director of the Liverpool Biennial), timed with Donald Trump's state visit to the UK.

Between Wimbledon and the FIFA World Cup, there's been plenty of distractions from London's unusually Mediterranean weather of late.

Cory Arcangel’s Brooklyn studio is tucked away in a former warehouse and shipping complex, between an elevated expressway and a strip of docks thrusting westwards into the Hudson River. While the building is impossible to miss, the studio itself is well hidden, and I become lost in a warren of identical hallways, each leading instead to a...

'I met Jen when she was a baby!' Joyce Pensato tells her studio manager, Elizabeth Ferry, when I arrive. It's true that I met her about 14 years ago, in her former Williamsburg studio, and the experience was formative and unforgettable. The studio was a massive first floor space that felt completely exposed to the street and elements, as if its...

Many of the art spaces in early '90s Berlin were located in vacant, abandoned, often ruined buildings that artists had taken over. Artists were running studio collectives and co-ops, outfitting surprising storefronts, and creating nightclubs and music programs. One very influential artist for me was Daniel Pflumm, who was organizing the...

Can Contemporary Chinese art be revived as a tool for social critique? Returning to the traditional medium of painting, Liu Xiaodong, whose solo exhibition '25 Oil Paintings: 1993-2007' was up at Yallay Gallery in Hong Kong in March, makes a renewed case for this question, departing from the legacy of socialist realism that has occupied the medium...

With a recent gallery installation at Dia:Beacon and an upcoming solo show at the Whitney in New York, Mary Corse is having a significant, well-earned moment of recognition. Working as a dedicated artist since the 1960s, she is one of few women connected to California’s west coast Light and Space movement. Directionally, though, her artistic focus...

Adopting social architecture as a mode of critique is a technique that has become synonymous with Santiago Sierra’s artistic practice. If the results are often painful, the frequent criticism made of his work that it perpetuates the brutality of an already merciless society is misleading. In 2006, Sierra stated his work is produced not as an image...