“The transformation from the established model of the Academy to an increasingly free-market system was slow and piecemeal.”
Published in 1996, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art is still one of the basic books for understanding the making of the art market. Written by Picasso scholar Michael [...]
“I think of simple forms, formal economic solutions, but using elements that already carry a very important social and symbolic burden.”
Chilean artist Patrick Hamilton has been living in Madrid since 2014. His prolific artistic trajectory started in the mid-1990s in Santiago de Chile, where he also oversaw a successful artist-run gallery called González [...]
“The experimental Marxist exhibition was a complex, multilevel, conceptual installation that even for a trained spectator of the time was something like a UFO coming down from heaven.”
Arseny Zhilyaev is a Russian artist based in Moscow and Venice. He is also the editor of Avant-Garde Museology (2015), published by e-flux in collaboration [...]
“The autonomy of kitsch comes from the disobedience of the Western canon, especially in areas like Latin America where it matters a damn.”
By Paco Barragán
Chilean artist Arturo Duclos was one of the youngest members of the so-called Escena de Avanzada, the political and conceptual movement in the mid-1970s and early [...]
“The installation design functions to reframe in a very powerful way the meaning of the experience and the meaning of the work of art.”
Published in 1998, The Power of Display is still one of the most fascinating and essential books if we want to understand the history and practices of Modernist museum exhibitions. [...]
“Our first modernity in Latin America is indigenous, not a discovery in Paris in the 1870s, something happens there that resists academic, scientific and rational thought.”
By Paco Barragán
On the ocassion of his recent solo show “Juan Dávila: Imagen Residual/After Image” at Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile, we spoke to Juan [...]
“We as artists have to find the way how to confront the state and capitalism.”
Santiago Sierra is Spain’s most well-known international artist. To some, his work is polemic; to others, it is pertinent, but it does not leave anyone indifferent. It reflects on the contradictions and paradoxes of the capitalist system, of which [...]
“Conservation is about the way the artwork can be perceived and not only about how it is presented.”
Dutch Sanneke Stigter holds a Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Between 2004 and 2011 she was head of conservation of contemporary art and modern sculpture at the Kröller-Müller Museum. The [...]
“I often see progress as retrogression.”
Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodríguez (1977, Bayamon) has from the very beginning achieved a particularly recognizable style. His eerie and intriguing work deals with concepts like memory, history and vigilance and is rather “un-Caribbean” in style.
By Paco Barragán
Paco Barragán - Puerto Rico is a small island with [...]
“With the introduction of violence and sexuality the identification with the victim or the perpetrator is stronger and more intense.”
Dutch artist Ronald Ophuis (born in 1968, Hengelo) has, since the late 1990s when I first saw his work in Amsterdam, built up a consistent pictorial oeuvre in which history, memory and narrativity emerge [...]
