https://youtu.be/3XqOHlB25_8 In the corner of your mind Imagine that you were to give form, all in one place, to the fragments of ideas that you cherish, the ones that inhabit a certain part of your brain. Not the ideas that feed into...
Mondrian: The Beyeler Foundation masterfully analyses the mystery of his move from figurative to abstract art
Dormant mystery In all major visual creation there lies a dormant mystery. Why does the artist decide to change style as if overnight? For the occasion of its summer exhibition, the excellent Beyeler Foundation in Basel has chosen one of the...
Kehinde Wiley ahead of his exhibition at Orsay: “At the Louvre the history paintings are made to physically dominate you”
Errors of judgment Writing about contemporary art also involves making errors of judgment on art that is currently being made. The creative output of the major protagonists is still in gestation and the viewer’s framework for understanding it...
Maya at Musée Picasso:In the Picasso family, the beloved eldest daughter
https://youtu.be/K82lsVnLhtc Blockbuster The Picasso signature is a guarantee of success, and exhibitions exploring the life of the Spanish painter, from his diet to his status as a foreigner via his collections of tribal art, have proliferated...
Fondation Louis Vuitton: Simon Hantai is reinstated with his impressive polychrome series
https://youtu.be/IvpNpXftP38 Not retinal art The 20th century will be defined as the period when art was completely called into question. It was Marcel Duchamp who proclaimed, very early on and contrary to what people had hitherto...
Douglas Gordon and Alberto Giacometti: elective affinities with a ghost
https://youtu.be/m4zh9NOUhzc After Zidane How do you exist in relation to Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) when you make sculpture? The Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (born in 1966), former Turner Prize laureate and co-author with Philippe...
Arthur Jafa: the largest exhibition on the American artist has opened in Arles at the Luma Foundation
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...
Maryan: the forgotten Polish artist’s “truth-paintings” at Moca in Miami and Kamel Mennour in Paris
https://youtu.be/tqRrN8CRO_E Zeitgeist Success in art is quite often linked to an element that may be considered superficial, and which is described in all languages using a German word: the zeitgeist. For a very long time Pinchas Burstein,...
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...