By Daniel Bonnell
When approaching one of Baselitz’s massive up-side-down paintings you must be on guard. His art acts as walls of seeking and suffering, simplicity and complexity, and profound yet primal beauty. To think about it is to destroy it-one must simply be with the work and if any answers are sought it [...]

By John Valentine
It is not my intent in this short essay to conduct an in-depth critique of E.H. Gombrich’s masterful work in the psychology of perception and its relation to figurative drawing. His book Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation is justifiably famous. Rather, my goal is to [...]

By Scott Thorp
“Hackers are free people, just like artists who wake up in the morning in a good mood and start painting,” stated Russian President Vladimir Putin as he denied Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (1). This is funny (ironic) coming from Putin. But in the overall spectrum of things, [...]

By Michele Robecchi
Personal relationships-even when at the mercy of exhaustive public scrutiny or documented by copious correspondence-remain intricate, intangible affairs. It is difficult to establish when and how they effectively start, finish (if they really do) and shape the people involved. They form a constantly mutating world made of mysteries, nuances and innuendos, [...]

Toke Lykkeberg is a Danish curator, critic, consultant and director of the exhibition space Tranen. Currently, he is developing Tranen’s program with a focus on “extemporary art,” i.e. art that is not of its moment, but rather out of time. He has curated, among others, the shows “Welcome Too Late” (2017) at Kunsthal [...]

Nat Muller is an independent curator and writer. Her main interests are image politics and contemporary art in and from the Middle East. Recent exhibition projects include “Spectral Imprints” for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in Dubai (2012) and “This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time” at Stedelijk [...]

By Lisa Jaye Young
When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, how much will your art collection be worth? In 1989, almost thirty years ago, the Guerilla Girls posed this now infamous question to the art world.  In a perfect world, one that we clearly do not yet enjoy, it would [...]

By Paco Barragán

There was a time when ‘modern’ (without the superfluous article) was more contemporary than ‘contemporary’. Think of Alfred Barr, Jr.’s indefatigable crusade for the modern in his essay “Modern Art Makes History, Too” published in 1941 in the College Art Journal. Now it seems that ‘the contemporary’ is the new [...]

By Michele Robecchi
There were great expectations last spring when Ruben Östlund’s film The Square was premiered in Cannes. Finally, so it seemed, the contemporary art world would be the recipient of a well-researched, intelligent, and caustic study safely distant from the vapid clichés that have dominated every production on the subject so far. [...]

“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 [...]