I first met Tom Nozkowski in the late 1970s at his show at 55 Mercer Street.The paintings were so great. He was so great—a lovely open generous funny brilliant man. His work opened a path for many painters.I remember one summer day in the 1980s Peter Acheson and I set out to climb a mountain in the Catskills. It was a blazing hot clear day...

It takes some restraint not to reach out and touch the art when walking through a Kohei Nawa exhibition. From the stuffed animals covered in glass bubbles in his 'PixCell' series to the polished, futuristic blades of Throne, and the voluptuous objects coated in bedazzled grains from his "Particle" series, these sculptures have tactile...

I remember exactly where and when I decided to write a book about the moon: lying on my back in a dentist's chair, waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect. To distract his patients, the dentist had tacked a poster to the ceiling: a NASA image of the earth from space at night. I was struck by the way so much of the northern hemisphere glitters...

I'm preoccupied, at the moment, with the generosity of Robert Rauschenberg's art. This preoccupied his contemporaries, too, as John Giorno makes clear:'The most important thing I got from Bob Rauschenberg was just being with his mind [...] when you spend a lot of time with a great person's mind, somehow it has a profound effect on you. One sort of...

A Bigger Splash, a semi-fictionalized documentary about David Hockney opens with a ringing phone. A slideshow of photos flashes across the screen, and the shrill ringing goes on. Ten seconds... Twenty seconds... Forty... Over a minute goes by, and no one picks up. It dials up the anxiety on a film that, ostensibly, is about an artist and his work....

According to a photo posted on Facebook by Christina Li, guest curator of artist Shirley Tse's exhibition at the pavilion, a notice in English and Italian at the entrance reads: 'Due to unforeseen circumstances, the exhibition Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice will be closed on June 12, 2019. Please excuse us for the...

It was 50 years ago, but Penelope Seidler still recalls how she got involved in Wrapped Coast, the first Kaldor Public Art Project. 'I can remember John coming back from a trip and he said "Christo wants to wrap up a coast, that's what he wants to do. Do you know anywhere where he could do it?"' Seidler pauses, 'I was sort of bemused. I...

A major figure in Japanese contemporary art, Kohei Nawa reinvents sculpture by associating cultural tradition and new technologies. We sit down with the 44-year-old Osaka-born, Kyoto-based artist.

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,...

February, 1888. A small, cheerless room in the south of France. Vincent Van Gogh has come here to escape the grey Paris light, but this doesn't seem much better. He flings down his heavy pack, takes a seat on a lone wooden chair, unlaces his boots. Yes, you think, have a nap; this is all exhausting. But no – he arranges the beaten-up old shoes on...

In 1968 Keith Sonnier created his first artwork using neon. Untitled (Cloth and Neon) comprises a flashing curved tube filled with the gaseous element, hung on a wall surrounded by pinned scraps of pastel tulle and satin. The work is messy and feels ephemeral. It appears in Until Today, now at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and it seems as if the...

Hockney–Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature is unabashedly a David Hockney (b. 1937) exhibition but with a twist, it winds the modern master's works around his lifelong fascination with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). It's a daring pairing, and as Edwin Becker, Head of Exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum, told me, 'It's the first time we've dedicated our...

AMSTERDAM — Entering Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum is like walking into a painted fantasy forest. Tree trunks are rendered in red, blue, pink, purple, yellow, electric green; leaves are hinted at with quick brushstrokes, or cartoonishly outlined. In the galleries upstairs, we come out of the trees into a...

A few months ago, I reviewed Eyes Wide Open: Saul Steinberg and Philip Guston at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery, which got me thinking about Steinberg, whose work needs to be reconsidered.Steinberg's life story – and how he brought it into his work – seems especially relevant in an age when immigrants, the dispossessed, and stateless are hated,...

'Matisse once said: two kilos of blue are bluer than one kilo of blue. Which is a very good remark, but in green it must be three kilos.' So says David Hockney in an interview with Hans den Hartog Jager, published for the first time in the exhibition catalogue for 'Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature' at the Van Gogh Museum.

The painter Robert Ryman (1930–2019) is best known for his commitment to painting with the colour white. Those lucky enough to have met him will agree on his disarming clarity, concision, and plain-spoken charm – conveyed in his self-deprecating chuckle, his penchant for the cuisine of the southern United States, and his aversion to the term...

On Art, a new collection of essays by Ilya Kabakov, recently translated and edited into English by Matthew Jesse Jackson, begs a closer look at the life of an artist in permanent flux.One reason Ilya Kabakov's decades-long career is so interesting is that it maps with cartographic intensity life under a broken Soviet system, later transformed by...

The Romanian-American cartoonist Saul Steinberg represented a distinctly mid 20th-century phenomenon, one so familiar we tend to forget how bizarre it is. He was born in 1914 to second- and third-generation Russian Jewish immigrants in a small town in Romania and grew up in what he later called 'the Turkish Delight manner', in a milieu where...

Line is central to everything that James Siena's makes, from drawings and paintings to structural sculptures made of toothpicks and bamboo skewers. His lines — which run the gamut from pure form and geometric abstraction to evocations of wrinkled, sagging flesh in his portraits of old men — consist of repetition, increment, and...

DENVER — Tara Donovan's artworks are unexpected: they borrow manufactured goods, but they are never readymades; they are theatrical and serial, but rarely considered minimalist; and they are massive in scale, but never outsourced. Fieldwork at the MCA Denver revisits Donovan's contributions from the last 20 years, bringing her wall-based and...

The intersection of art and technology may appear to be a modern phenomenon on the surface, but this relationship is as enduring and universal as the discipline of art itself. Not only does technology have the ability to disrupt current practices in the art industry, but it can also challenge our understanding the world around us, and efforts to...

STROLLING WITH THE ARTIST Kiki Smith down the not-entirely-gentrified East Village block where she lives and works, in a townhouse with a cherry-red door, can take a remarkably long time. It's not that she isn't nimble — at 64, she has energy to match her famously prodigious output, able to navigate in a billowing black cotton shift around...

Madison Square Park succeeds for that same reason. In one of the city’s most congested areas, it provide an oasis for the white collar workers and wealthy elites that have populated the Flatiron District for centuries. But ceramicist Arlene Shechet has little interest in padding this peaceful narrative with Full Steam Ahead, an exhibition of public...

The stark white room is punctuated by abstract black forms — jagged, organic, dramatic and playful — that sprout up from the floor or dangle languidly from the ceiling. Glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, they shift ever so slightly as you walk down the long gallery space, a former bank building. Around each corner, a new...