The day before French businessman François Pinault unveiled his plans for his new museum in Paris, opening in late 2018, by chance I met Tadao Ando while sat at Café de Flore in Saint Germain des Près. The Japanese architect’s English is patchy, his French even more...
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...
(David Hockney studio did not allow photos or videos in the exhibition even for journalists ) There are artists who dream about pictorial revolutions and there are those who celebrate easel painting as it has always been. Painting has its great adventurers, those who...
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...
If there is one unmissable modern art exhibition this summer it has to be Portraits by Cézanne (1839-1906) at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GWacaEf4I0 In 60 paintings it proves many things, first of all the museum’s pulling...
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...
Overlooked during her lifetime, Carol Rama is enjoying a spectacular success two years after she died at the age of 97. Currently the Palazzo Ca’Nova in Venice and the New Museum in New York are both showing the artist’s work. Hailing from Turin, Carol Rama produced a...
The tragedy of great artists is their far-sightedness means they’re often misunderstood. Take the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), one of the very big names in world photography, someone who in the 1930s was throwing himself into a new genre we refer to...
On 25 and 26 May, the fifteenth edition of Loop took place in Barcelona. A one-of-a-kind fair devoted solely to video art, it takes an original formula for a genre that which is still finding its bearings. In a hotel in the city centre, 44 galleries each had a room...
Magisterial, beautiful and comprehensively documented. ' Primitive Picasso' at the Musée du Quai Branly is pieced together like a police investigation and questions commonly held assumptions about the greatest painter of the 20th century,Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Or...
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,...