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...
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 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...
Diane Arbus started taking pictures in the early 1940s and went on to study photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and later, Lisette Model. Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967, she was one of three photographers to be included in the landmark exhibition, New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A year after her death she was the first American photographer to have work selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennale.
Read MoreThe Museum of Modern Art hosted a major retrospective that travelled through the United States and Canada from 1972–1975. In 2003, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organised Revelations, a full-scale retrospective that then toured to museums in the United States and Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2005–2006). In 2009, the National Museum Cardiff presented an exhibition of Arbus’s works as part of the Artist Rooms collection created by Anthony d’Offay.
The most recent retrospective, Diane Arbus, began at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2011, travelling to the Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and Foam, Amsterdam, through 2013.
Arbus’s work has been surveyed in substantial publications, including: Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972); Magazine Work (1984); Untitled (Aperture, 1995); Diane Arbus Revelations (Jonathan Cape, Random House, 2003); and Diane Arbus: A Chronology (Aperture, 2011).
Diane Arbus was born in 1923 in New York City, where she died in 1971. Public collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Text courtesy Timothy Taylor.
Related Press The Evolution of Diane Arbus in 35mm Hyperallergic : 21 April 2017 In 1962, documentary photographer Diane Arbus switched from using a 35mm camera to a medium-format Rolleiflex, which offered higher resolution images in a distinctive square format. This equipment change coincided with developments in her practice that propelled her to international fame. Her work from the early 1960s through her death in 1971 is...
Related Press 'In the beginning': Diane Arbus' early works go on show at the Met Breuer Wallpaper* : 15 July 2016 'I don’t press the shutter. The image does,' Diane Arbus once said. 'And it’s like being gently clobbered.' That softly smothering sensation, at once mellow and menacing, pulses through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition of Arbus’s early work. On view until 27 November at the Met Breuer, Diane...
Related Press Photography Is An Art And Always Will Be Sean O'Hagen for The Guardian / 11 December 2014 : 13 December 2014 Imagine, if you will, the following scene. I pop into the National Gallery to view the 2014 BP National Portrait Award and look in bemusement at the exhibition, which is mostly comprised of rather old-fashioned paintings. It’s an uninspiring show, a hotchpotch, as are most exhibitions drawn from open submissions. Inexplicably enraged by this,...
