Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945, Barbara Kruger began her career as an editorial designer, followed by a picture editor at Condè Nast Publications. She started making art in the early 1970s and gradually developed her unmistakable and unique formal language using a powerful combination of image and text.
Since the mid 1990s, Barbara Kruger has diversified her practice and embraced a series of aesthetic expansions which includes working with film and audio installations. This progression into large-scale immersive installations is fuelled by the artist’s longstanding interest in architecture and desire to address the viewer directly within whole environments.
Barbara Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She was awarded The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and currently teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Solo shows include the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1983, Kunsthalle Basel, 1984, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal, 1985, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1986, the Serpentine Gallery, London, 1994, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2000, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2010-2011. Group shows include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1988, Tate Liverpool, 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2004, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2006, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007. Upcoming group shows include That’s the Way We Do It: The Techniques and Aesthetic of Appropriation at the Kunsthaus Bregenz from April 16 to July 3, 2011.
Related Press Kara Walker, Barbara Kruger, and Charles Atlas Dissect Modernity Hyperallergic : 7 May 2018 LOS ANGELES — Art is humanity's attempt to articulate life's intangible experiences. That idea is reflected in the title of Unspeakable, a new exhibition at UCLA's Hammer Museum. Museum director Ann Philbin and chief curator Connie Butler have created a trilogy of video installations from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, each projected in...
Related Press Books, Wefts, and Black Lives Matter at the Baltimore Museum of Art Hyperallergic : 27 May 2017 Like the Baltimore Museum of Art's books, Louise B. Wheatley's textiles and Pendelton's mixed-media ventures pack a punch (actually, hers is more of a lingering touch). With her, you don't see it coming; with him, you can feel the vibrations down the block. Her mists/his missiles, resounding, both.
Related Press Barbara Kruger: back to the futura Dazed Digital : 12 October 2016 Barbara Kruger’s art hits you like a punch to the jaw. You’ve seen her work, even if you’ve never been to one of her shows – photography overlaid with coloured boxes filled with bold white Futura Oblique, or caps locked sans serif text that bears down at you from gallery walls and the sides and roofs of buildings. It’s...
Related Press A celebration of women who made it to the top of the art world Hyperallergic : 19 August 2016 The current show at Sprüth Magers gallery, Eau de Cologne, has a title that might seem like a play on the words (that’s what I initially thought), but it is actually quite straightforwardly unironic. It is simply the name of the art magazine published by Monika Sprüth between 1985 and 1989 that presented interviews with and essays about...
