https://youtu.be/7hcG_sptgfI Like a little dead The German artist Thomas Demand (born in 1964) is a strange kind of photographer. He creates images that are all based on the same principle. In actuality, he has always created illusions of...
The new Ambani cultural centre: Mumbai the ‘maximum city’ and contemporary art
Big numbers The Indian Ambani family is famous for various reasons. Firstly due to the father, Mukesh, an astute businessman who is largely responsible for growing his own father’s textile business, to the point of turning it into a...
Poussin obsessed: an exhibition reveals the erotic side to the 17th-century painter
https://youtu.be/K8ekvjgV9MA No taboos Super-erotic and without taboos. Nicolas Poussin(1594-1665), an artist’s artist favoured by art historians, considered to be the most austere of his era, had a period that was decidedly risqué. The...
Ugo Rondinone in Geneva: love and death shared with Hodler and Vallotton
https://youtu.be/ZXcus1rGJxQ Global Ugo Rondinone (1964) is one of the star artists on the global contemporary art scene. The Swiss national is represented by six galleries around the world. He works primarily in the fields of sculpture and...
A meeting with Lee Ufan in his Japanese studio
https://youtu.be/1LrnSLhWSqE Erudition and execution “The act of painting is the longest and the most difficult. You need the erudition of a composer, but also the execution required to play the violin.” Eugène Delacroix wrote these words in...
Alex Katz at the Guggenheim museum: What matters to me is the idea of the present moment
https://youtu.be/ewBKSBa7aoc Guggenheim Not all artists merit the Guggenheim. The famous spiral-shaped building in New York designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is a death knell for those whose career is half-baked, overly repetitive and...
Contemporary art seen from Sao Paulo (to Arles)
Turbulent events Brazil continues to face turbulent events. In 2021, while the vast country was still in shock from the chaos of the pandemic but also amid major upheavals from the reign of Bolsonaro, who openly declared his antipathy towards...
Christian Marclay: images of sounds at the Centre Pompidou
Forms of sounds What forms can we give to sounds? It’s a strange question, but it was posed in the early 20th century by major artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. In our current age there is another artist, the Swiss American who...
Anri Sala: Two minutes before death against the soundtrack of a clarinet
https://youtu.be/Vn-WM_Uzuz8 The shuttle Challenger On 28 January 1986 the American space shuttle Challenger exploded, exactly 73 seconds after take-off. There were seven astronauts on board, including Ronald McNair, a seasoned musician who...
Travel through space with Yves Klein
https://youtu.be/OZeB6jA9KY4 With Saint Rita of Cascia “Saint Rita of Cascia, patron of impossible and desperate cases, thank you for all the powerful, decisive, marvellous help that you have given me up to now (…) Even if I am personally...
Tate Modern: this is how art history is made. Cézanne’s influence from Gauguin to Lucian Freud
Visual gust of wind Seeing a substantial exhibition of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is like being caught up in a visual gust of wind. There’s the beauty of the reddish and green hues that caress you, but also the simplified or even crude forms, the...
The new natural illusions of Olafur Eliasson
https://youtu.be/ohJSf3ag_9Q A new vocabulary There are certain artists – and they are rare – who are capable of inventing an entire vocabulary. This is true of the Icelandic-Danish artist who lives in Berlin, Olafur Eliasson (born in 1967),...