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...

The female body. Its bones and limbs, its emotions, its animal instinct, its bodily functions, its secrets and anxieties, its sexuality, its illnesses and pain.There is no part of it that has been left unexplored by the fearless American artist Kiki Smith, a pioneer of contemporary feminist art who has grappled with female beauty, shame, mortality...

While substantially reprising Fred Wilson's contribution to last year's Istanbul Biennale, his current exhibition, Afro Kismet at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, continues an investigation that began with the artist's U.S. pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. He used that earlier occasion to examine representations of Africans in early modern art from...

Two exhibitions opening simultaneously at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY (Keith Sonnier: Until Today), and the Dia Art Foundation/Dan Flavin Art Institute in nearby Bridgehampton (Keith Sonnier: Dis-Play II), allow viewers to explore a wide range of sculptural and installation works, along with early video and sound pieces by one of the...

The Art Newspaper: The Serpentine Mastaba is your first major sculpture in the UK. What is so special about this form?Christo: Mastaba is an old word coming from the first urban civilisation 7,000 years ago, when people moved from the countryside to mud houses in Mesopotamia, which today is Iraq. When for the first time archaeologists discovered...

Christo has been working with barrels since the start of his career, and many of his early works using them will appear in the Serpentine Gallery exhibition accompanying The Mastaba: 'retracing all that story,' as Christo puts it. In 1958, he was wrapping and stacking them and eventually he started filling rooms in galleries. The most famous of...

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...

Yto Barrada is one of the most prolific artists working today, blurring the boundaries between different techniques, disciplines, and hierarchies in art and culture. The New York-based French-Moroccan artist's primary material is history, with its gnarly paths and unforeseeable findings. In her expansive work, anecdotes from oral or documented...

Before the restoration of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, birds flew in through holes in the roof. The animals roosted in the 19th-century structure that was once a haven for Eastern European Jews on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but it had fallen into a decline because of a shrinking membership and its leaking sanctuary was closed off half a century...