https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59UEnXYLGNc Love was the message For an artist, producing a recognized masterpiece means being immediately put on the global map of the art world. In 2016 Arthur Jafa (born in 1960) created an extraordinary film...
Julie Mehretu: “the power of the blurred image” in her new paintings following her retrospective at the Whitney Museum
https://youtu.be/vf-yRayDV-Y Incomprehensible words The relative danger of contemporary abstraction made by famous artists is that it engenders among art critics an outpouring of words that are most certainly lyrical, but also...
Xinyi Cheng: when attitudes become colours, at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris
https://youtu.be/wHFpfwlMM7w Harald Szeemann “When attitudes become forms.” In 1969 the great exhibition curator Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) came up with this expression as a title for an exhibition on the actions of artists, their...
Palazzo Grassi, Venice: Drink in the paintings of Marlene Dumas
A punch in the stomach This exhibition is like a punch to the stomach. No taboos. No filters. Marlene Dumas (born in 1953) is like that. South Africa https://youtu.be/a-VOuV1POEA She lays herself bare and in doing so plunges you into a certain...
Mark Bradford: his breathtaking new series of paintings in Porto on the hunt of the unicorn
https://youtu.be/_3THFMe0qow Without paint For centuries, art was the result of an almost identical action: applying layers of paint with varying degrees of thickness to produce forms and create artworks. The American artist Mark Bradford has...
The private life of Andy Warhol from T to V
https://youtu.be/aeC76ncf66w The Andy Warhol diaries It’s hard to find a more fitting idea than that of a TV documentary made about the artist who wanted to be a television star: Andy Warhol. Netflix has just released a documentary series made...
The sale of the Loïc Malle Collection: Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Yves Klein and early Rashid Johnson
https://youtu.be/O3TJaji4dVs 17 billion dollars in 2021 at auction Through hell and high water the world still has faith in art, or at least in the art market. The global public health crisis was not yet over when 17 billion dollars’ worth of...
Michael Armitage in Madrid before Basel: beauty makes the social message even more powerful
https://youtu.be/PW4IZ8UlY70 Opulent It’s an opulent kind of painting. Contrasting and shimmering hues, shapes arranged in spirals seemingly the product of reflections or anamorphoses. And these blurred representations, which even seem to have...
Art Dubai: from revisiting the region’s modern masters to exploring NFTs
The future “We know the future is a source of anxiety. To greet visitors we have therefore created an avatar to accompany them on their journey.” Brendan McGetrick is the creative director of the museum that has just opened in Dubai: the Museum...
Kunstmuseum in Basel: Louise Bourgeois augmented through the eyes of Jenny Holzer
https://youtu.be/5ZQQ5IQ-UQQ Before everyone else It’s not a good thing to be right before everyone else. The artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) whose work is haunted by themes of trauma and femininity only started to gain recognition in the...
The Arco fair in Madrid with Joan Miro, Christian Boltanski, Thomas Schutte, Olafur Eliasson and Trisha Baga
Specialities Each fair has its own speciality. Some, like Frieze in London, New York and Los Angeles, are oriented towards novelties that tend to be very on trend. Art Basel in Switzerland and now Miami primarily displays the “blockbusters” of...
What can the Venice Biennale from the times of covid teach us? The artistic director Cecilia Alemani responds
https://youtu.be/a1VAviBtf5Y Finally the Venice Biennale Amid the great lethargy that’s descended on the world over the past two years, things have continued to advance, albeit at a slower pace and in a different way, including in art. This...