This summer in Venice the Biennale is stealing all the attention. Which is why contemporary art lovers might miss an exceptional Philip Guston (1913-1980) exhibition at Gallerie dell’Accademia. Guston, an American painter with a distinctive verve, is known for having...
Xavier Douroux tragically passed away on 28 June. He was one of the most influential and most astute figures in the world of contemporary art in France with Le Consortium in Dijon, which he co-founded with Franck Gautherot as well as a book publisher via Les Presses...
I’m no different to any other journalist covering the art market. I love writing pieces filled with exclamation marks that detail how an artist who was worth 3,000 has seen one of his works go for 300,000 less than a year later, is now represented by a major gallery...
Hans Ulrich Obrist (Huo) is one of the most famous superstars of contemporary art. The artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery and self-described exhibition maker was generous enough to inaugurate our new video series: 10 times 50 seconds. -1 What is the first...
DOCUMENTA It attracts serious attention in contemporary art circles but there isn’t an awful lot of love for it. Documenta, the legendary mega-exhibition, happens every five years in the sad, small German town of Kassel. The show has always been intellectual and...
While History shows as a whole, and the Renaissance in particular, that posterity has a predilection for works by artists afflicted by madness, the art market is far more rational agent. Artworks that are too large, too complicated, too noisy, in other words too...
The brilliance of certain artists lies in their ability to force you to really look at what they have to show. It’s true of German-born, London-based artist Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Slowly but surely he’s become one of the superstars of contemporary art, and...
In the '90s HBO aired ‘Dream On’, a US series where the lead character at key moments had flashbacks of clips from TV shows he’d watched in his childhood. It was a way of saying that all adults born since the '60s are TV babies, shaped by its images, its theme tunes,...
Imagine buying a painting for $19,000 in 1984 it being sold for $110.5 million in 2017. That’s what happened on Thursday 18 May at Sotheby’s when the hammer fell on the sale (with fees) of a Jean Michel Basquiat canvas from 1982 depicting a skull against a blue...
Regardless of what people say each time about the overall standard at the Venice Biennale, and despite the growing number of challengers from Sao Paulo to Shanghai, this event remains the queen of the world’s contemporary art shows. With 900 works at the international...
If the role of art in your life amounts to concerns such as whether the painting in your living room matches the colour of your sofa then you should probably steer clear of the 57th Venice Biennale where the largest exhibition, the international pavilion, is ‘curated’...
It can be difficult finding one’s way among all these biennales – the new tourist panaceas – flourishing across the planet. This rainy spring, for example, in Jutland in the middle of Denmark, separated by 80km and only a few weeks apart from each other, there is a...