By Michele Robecchi
When the eminent professor Arnold Bode initiated Documenta in 1955, his primary goal was to show the ‘Entartete Kunst’ (degenerated art) erstwhile banned from his country by giving movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and fundamentally anything remotely abstract the first opportunity to be viewed in post-war Germany. It was clearly [...]
By Paco Barragán
Biennials have become very popular. They are like ready-mades, and like ready-mades, carry contradictory connotations. By “popular,” I mean a kind of artistic platform or product that is globally ubiquitous. Through this article I will introduce a critical perspective to the biennial phenomenon based on two paradigms: the economic and conceptual [...]
Xaviera Simmons creates photographs, installations and multimedia works that use landscape as a base on which to layer complicated characters and open-ended, non-linear narratives. Using an amalgamation of histories and memories as communicated over time through text and images, Simmons creates new characters that depart from and engage with the histories locked within [...]
By F. Javier Panera
At a time when technology is starting to blur copyright boundaries, more and more voices are indicating that the contemporary artist has become a mere manager of information, destined in some cases to imitate himself and in others to “reprogram existing works,“ in a strategy similar to that of a [...]
By Max Ryynänen
If you read a pile of old art journals you cannot but notice that art talk has changed a lot during the last two decades. Institutional matters have taken over. Not long ago, it was commonplace to debate only artists and their work. Now even mainstream art magazines publish critical notes [...]
By Jeff Edwards
No Olvidado (Not Forgotten) is the title of one of Andrea Bowers’ largest and most well-known works, but the phrase could easily serve as a statement of purpose for a great deal of her artistic output. Covering three walls of her 2010 exhibition “The Political Landscape” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles [...]
By Marco Antonini
The questions of what art is and what it means to make art have been adapted to diverse social, political and cultural contexts throughout history. Forms of art are not physical phenomena or chemical processes, as they rarely adapt to scientific methods and can hardly be studied in quantitative terms. Philosophical, [...]
By Michele Robecchi
Paul McCarthy is contemporary art marmite. Love him or hate him, it’s impossible to deny his influence and relevance. Yet, even according to many of his supporters, “The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship,” his recent solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth and possibly one of the largest [...]
The Brooklyn-based artist Mickalene Thomas creates visually arresting works in which she often gives African-American women a starring role. Her large-scale paintings, collages, installations, photography and video work take on the popular portrayals and stereotypes of black femininity and boldly answer back to them using her keen eye to break limitations. Not surprisingly, [...]
By Michele Robecchi
Undisputable geniality and stunning longevity were two of the main ingredients that made Frank Lloyd Wright reach his legendary status, yet there was a time, in the mid-1920s, when the life of the man whose work would revolutionize architecture as we know it, seriously hit the skids. Self-exiled in Wisconsin, and [...]
