Tag: contemporary art
Xu Zhen
Friday, December 8th, 2017 Blog,In 2009 Xu Zhen decided he would “set aside his identity as an individual artist” and become a corporate entity. For the next four years, MadeIn Company (as in “Made in China”) would produce a dazzling variety of work for international museums and galleries. In 2013, its booming success encouraged the Company to release its […]
Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean
Friday, December 8th, 2017 Art Column,“I will always be grateful to popular culture,” Pipilotti Rist told an interviewer in 2001. As a recent video clip by Beyoncé shows, popular culture should also be grateful to her. Pipilotti Rist: Sip my Ocean, at the Museum of Contemporary Art reveals the many and various ways this remarkable Swiss multi-media artist embraces popular […]
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium
Friday, November 17th, 2017 Art Column,It may be the acid test of political correctness but it should be possible to dislike Robert Mapplethorpe’s work without being viewed as homophobic. Mapplethorpe often said he didn’t wish to be known as a “gay artist”, but he is such an icon for the LGBT community it’s virtually impossible to dissociate his work from […]
Gerhard Richter
Friday, November 10th, 2017 Art Column,For decades Gerhard Richter has been one of the world’s most successful living artists, with work in museums and leading private collections all over the planet. The current record price for one of his paintings stands at US$46 million. Now comes the the biggest test of a long and distinguished career: Can he make it […]
Cressida Campbell: Who wants the world?
Friday, October 20th, 2017 Blog,Berlin in January was cold, with snow falling in light drifts. Inside the CFA Gallery on Am Kupfergraben, just across the River Spree from the Museum Island, everything was bright, white and climate-controlled. In a large central gallery on the first floor were massive oil paintings by Australia’s most commercially successful painter, Tim Storrier – […]
Anri Sala: The Last Resort
Friday, October 20th, 2017 Art Column,Historians can never agree about the so-called “Age of Enlightenment”. The narrow definition has it beginning with the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and ending with the French Revolution in 1789. The long version begins somewhere in the late 1600s and fizzles out in 1815 with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. As the dates are […]
Istanbul – The Art of Optimism
Friday, October 6th, 2017 Blog,“We are a thin-skinned country,” admitted Selim Yenel, “We are intolerant.” There was no argument from the international journalists assembled around the table. In the face of successive questions about government censorship and repression, the Undersecretary of the Turkish Ministry for EU Affairs Ambassador provided answers no-one could dispute. Asked about the political persecution of […]
White Rabbit: Ritual Spirit
Friday, October 6th, 2017 Art Column,Last week I was in China meeting artists from each end of the contemporary art spectrum. In Suzhou I saw a breathtaking show of brush-and-ink painting by Li Huayi (b.1948) an artist who has divided his life between China and San Francisco. In Shanghai I visited Xu Zhen (b.1977), one of the most successful artists […]
Sydney Contemporary 2017
Friday, September 15th, 2017 Art Column,It was both pleasing and wryly amusing to learn that sales at this year’s Sydney Contemporary Art Fair topped $16 million. For a commercial gallery sector feeling unloved and unvisited this figure represents a resounding endorsement. Nevertheless, before breaking out the champagne it’s worth putting that achievement into perspective with a glance at Day One […]
Jenny Watson
Friday, September 8th, 2017 Art Column,One imagines teachers at the Julian Ashton Art School sending their pupils across the road to the Museum of Contemporary Art, to see Jenny Watson: The Fabric of Fantasy. For the traditionally-minded it’s an object lesson in how not to make art. If there are any cynics among those students, they might say: “…nevertheless, it […]