MARGATE, England — Every year the Turner Prize judges trawl through dozens of exhibitions around the world to find new and fresh voices in contemporary art. The four nominees are then presented in a group show, and part-way through a winner is announced and awarded the £25,000 (~$32,000) prize. If the Turner Prize tries to capture the...
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge) How did you first encounter the work of Nam June Paik? Paik accosted us in Paris, on the rue de Seine, in front of his hotel, La Louisiane, during the open market. Then he ran up to his room and brought us back a catalogue of his current show.
All four artists nominated for this year's Turner Prize draw on political histories: some wide-ranging, others highly localized; one contained within the last decade, another drawing on a text from the early 15th century. With one subtle exception, none of them are directly exploring the themes that emerged after the electoral shocks of 2016...
We primacy vision: what we see, we take as truth. It may be cliché but clichés are colloquial truths, developed through relatable experiences that come to structure experience. When first drafting this review, I had begun: 'Imagine a silence...' but what is an image of silence? How can we even conceive of an image of an absent sense?
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...
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...
For this exhibition, London-based artist and filmmaker Daria Martin took as a starting point the dream diaries kept by her Jewish grandmother Susi Stiassni, whose family fled Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1938, when Stiassni was sixteen, in response to the looming threat of Nazi occupation.
Michael Krebber is known for understated objects and an overstated reputation. My goal in visiting his latest exhibition was not only to scrutinize the paintings but also to experience a new arc in what has been a long and stimulating narrative of cultivated persona.
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.
Art is more often a conversation than a monologue. Great and not-so-great artists have always wanted to surround themselves with paintings and objects that can speak to their own creative efforts. The most famous example of this desire perhaps is Henri Matisse, who as a young and struggling painter bought a small canvas by Paul Cézanne, Three...
There is something utterly majestic about block letters — even more so at a staggering height of 12 feet. Such is the case of the letters 'IM' in the painting "Invisible Man (after Ralph Ellison)" (2008) by Tim Rollins & K.O.S.
Who would have thought a story about an aqueduct could be so salacious? Riddled with corruption, intrigue and drama, the story of the first aqueduct in Los Angeles - completed in 1913 and led by William Mulholland - is well known, thanks to Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown. Now it has piqued the interest of architect/artist Oscar Tuazon, who...
The statues of male statesman opposite the Houses of Parliament now have a woman in their midst. Prime Minister Theresa May and London Mayor Sadiq Khan were among the crowds attending today's (24 April) historic unveiling of Gillian Wearing's statue commemorating the life of Suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square.
In the events that transpired during the Arab Spring of 2011, citizens of several Middle Eastern countries took to the streets to protest the oppressive regimes that their respective leaders forced generations of innocents to endure. One of these oppressors was Bashar Al-Assad, the President of Syria. Al-Assad took power in 2000, after running...
The US artist and activist Tim Rollins, known for launching the Art and Knowledge education workshop in the Bronx in 1982, has died aged 62. Pittsfield-born Rollins began his career as the assistant of the artist Joseph Kosuth, earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1980. His work with students—some of them with...
In celebration of its 250 th birthday, London's Royal Academy Of Arts explores the historic practice of life drawing in a revolutionary way. Beginning with the Academy's 18 th -century origins, From Life continues to the present and, most intriguingly, moves into the future. Historical paintings hang alongside works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Jenny...
Entering Andrew Grassie's new exhibition, you'd be forgiven for thinking: is this it? Seven tiny images in a single white room? Five minutes, and I've looked round all the paintings at Maureen Paley gallery, read the three-paragraph press release, and moved onto my second round. Grassie's paintings are all the same size, no bigger than a...
British artist Gillian Wearing is famed for work that explores family constructs, challenging traditional and perhaps outdated notions of family and identity. Back in 2008, she delved into the realms of northern Italian family life with A Typical Trentino Family, revealed in the form of a life-sized statue, depicting a real family from the area....
The US artist Oscar Tuazon connects the functional possibilities of sculpture to the politics of public art, exploring the confrontation between industry and ecology, the urban and the natural. Two events this year represented a clear synthesis of the various ideas Tuazon has developed in his work over the past decade.
On that isolated, unvisited, traffic island that is Parliament Square, 11 men are elevated upon plinths. Most of them have been there a long time. Now a woman is to join them. I had assumed, on a hurried first look at the reports, that suffragist Millicent Fawcett was to be portrayed as yet another Edwardian figure standing aloft on a lump of...
Münster, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is a worthy contender for the title of bicycle capital of Europe. Visitors heading to the city's decennial event, Skulptur Projekte, saw bicycles parked or abandoned immediately outside Münster Central Station, a telling sign that the event and city is best experienced on two wheels, and on a leisurely...
Outside of the fairs this week, don't miss the exhibitions on view at Basel's tops museums and institutions, including Wolfgang Tillmans, Wim Delvoye, Jérôme Zonder, Yan Xing and Richard Serra, amongst others.
The Fondation Beyeler picked a versatile artist for its first major photography exhibition. German-born Wolfgang Tillmans has tested the medium over his career since the 1990s, applying photography to art-historical genres such as still-lifes, landscapes and abstraction. He has experimented with techniques, from using photocopiers to forgoing the...
I feel lucky to be alive during the time that Wolfgang Tillmans is making art. That was my immediate reaction leaving the 48-year-old photographer's stunning survey at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Over the course of the past three decades, Tillmans has been such a consistently inventive and influential artist that it has become dangerously...