Magazine

Notes and Reflections on Rothko in Paris­ by Dana Gordon

Paris was cold. But it still had its satisfying allure, beauty all around. The grand Mark Rothko exhibition is in a new museum in the snowy Bois de Boulogne, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a flashy ...

How Drawing Revitalized Post-War America - at MoMA

With COVID restrictions in New York lifting, several museum shows whose runs were extended during the pandemic shutdown are beckoning. Among the best for fans of abstraction is Degree Zero: Drawin...

Jim Hodges Turns New York's Grand Central Into an Abstract Installation

Jim Hodges is one of those rare abstract artists whose work manages to express the most troubled aspects of the spirit of our time while simultaneously expressing its beauty. A new installation by...

The Female Side of Minimalism at Thaddaeus Ropac

Every year, various exhibitions claim to herald work by marginalized artists unfairly left out of the historical canon. Often, the artists are in fact successful, just not “famous,” and the work h...

Two New Abstract Artworks Revealed as Part of Art Mapping Piemonte

Culture. People. Planet. Those are the three goals of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo (FCSP), the philanthropic organization that recently partnered with the Piedmont Region of Northern Italy to...

How Abstract Expressionism Influenced Sculpture - A Guggenheim Show

A recently opened sculpture exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York feels confused when it comes to the legacy of white, patriarchal art movements from the past. Knotted, Torn, ...

Martin Barré, The Forgotten Abstract Artist, at Centre Pompidou

The retrospective Martin Barré, on view from 14 October 2020 through 4 January 2021 at the Center Pompidou, offers the most comprehensive look yet at the always-evolving career of this enigmatic a...

Gerhard Richter's Last Major Work? Stained Glass at a Monastery

Gerhard Richter has amassed a catalogue raisonné that now approaches 1000 major works, many of which are considered masterpieces. Yet, it is his most recent, and some say final, major work—a set o...

José Parlá's Abstract Love Letter To New York City

José Parlá is quickly becoming one of the most beloved public artists in the world. His first public mural, unveiled early in 2011, graced an interior wall of a condominium development in Toronto....

Centre Pompidou Celebrates Henri Matisse’s 150th Birthday

In 1971, the French poet Louis Aragon published an unprecedented work of literature titled Henri Matisse, which Aragon described as a novel. It more closely resembles a loose amalgam of memoir, po...

Inside Donald Judd's MoMA Blockbuster

Though he passed away in 1994, Donald Judd remains one of the most influential American artists ever. This spring, we will have a chance to reconsider his legacy thanks to the retrospective Judd, ...

Gagosian Paris Gathers Artists Who Create Art Blanc sur Blanc

An exhibition at Gagosian Paris titled Blanc sur Blanc (White on White) has once again ignited the timeless debate about the validity of all-white art. This conversation goes back at least as far ...

IdeelArt Presents Homage to the Square Exhibition Curated by Richard Caldicott

An interdisciplinary artist known for his groundbreaking series of photographic abstractions, Caldicott has long been fascinated by the multitudinous properties of the square. Some of the oldest r...

Mnuchin Gallery Thinks It's Time You Heard About Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Mnuchin Gallery in New York recently announced it will present Chasing Down the Image, a solo exhibition tracing the entire career of Mary Lovelace O’Neal, in early 2020. This is great news for fa...

Finding Contemporary Insights in the Art of Leon Polk Smith

In the 1940s, the American artist Leon Polk Smith pioneered a unique abstract visual language that added curvilinear properties to the flattened planes and simplified geometry of Neoplasticism. An...

The Most Important Collection of Latin American Abstract Art Opens at MoMA

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) has become recognized as the largest and most influential collection of Latin American abstract art in the world. In 2016, its founder Patricia Phe...

Female Abstract Artists Finally Get in The Much-Overdue Spotlight

The Katonah Museum of Art in New York recently spotlighted overlooked female abstract artists from the past in an exhibition titled Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. S...

A World of Beauty, Science and Visual Delights-Takis On Tour

It is rare that an art exhibition gives me chills, yet it happened numerous times as I toured Takis: Sculptor of Magnetism, Light and Sound at the Tate Modern. Knowing little about the artist befo...

Behind the Scenes of Maison Matisse, Soon To Be Opened in Paris

It has been nearly 65 years since Henri Matisse died: sixty-five years since this artist who spent his career committed to the expression of beauty created anything new. This year would also have ...

Hans Hartung's Triumphant Return to Paris, Courtesy MAM

On 11 October 2019, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM) will re-open, following a year-long renovation, with Hans Hartung: La fabrique du geste, a large-scale retrospective tracing the entire c...

A Word on the 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum by Donald Judd

Few contemporary art destinations are more notable than Marfa, Texas. Though some complain that the mecca of Modernist asceticism has lately become more of a laboratory of Post-Modern avarice, at ...

Bernar Venet's Arc Majeur To Become World's Tallest Work of Public Art

If you drive the E411 in Belgium between Luxembourg and Namur in the coming weeks, you might notice a fantastical form rising up from the horizon. “L'Arc Majeur,” the latest work by French sculpto...

The Splendor of Alberto Burri's Grand Cretto of Gibellina

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the start of construction on the Grand Cretto, by Alberto Burri, a sacred work of land art built on the site of a lost Sicilian town. Nowhere in the history...

Richard Kalina Curates an Abstract Art Show at DC Moore Gallery

Richard Kalina is easily one of the most informed experts on contemporary art in America today. He has taught at Fordham University, Yale and Bennington College; is an influential art critic with ...

Pier Paolo Calzolari and an (Abstract) Art that Happens

Pier Paolo Calzolari has returned to Naples for the first time in more than 40 years, with a grand survey of his entire career at The Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (a.k.a. Museo MADRE). T...

Bernard Frize, Without Remorse at Centre Pompidou

Bernard Frize has returned to Paris this summer for his first major exhibitions there in 15 years. Bernard Frize—Without Remorse is on view until 26 August at the Centre Pompidou, and Bernard Friz...

Get Hypnotized by Bridget Riley at the National Galleries of Scotland

When the Edinburgh Art Festival opens in July, it will premier multiple groundbreaking surveys, including the first ever British collage survey, which traces the method back 400 years through more...

How Queer Artists Used Abstraction to Express Themselves

A number of exhibitions are currently on view in consideration of Pride Month, as well as the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots—protests following a police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Vil...

What Do Ranjani Shettar and Wassily Kandinsky Have in Common?

Late in 2018, Shearsman Books in Bristol, England, published the first ever color edition of Klänge (Sounds), the only book of prose poetry that Wassily Kandinsky ever published. Accompanying his ...

David Novros' Kinesthetic Experiences at Paula Cooper

A week after the closing of David Novros: Paintings 1966, a sparse exhibition of three historic works at Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles, Paula Cooper Gallery in New York opened David Novros...

Inside the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019

A mystical world of color, sound, and hair extensions awaits visitors to the Icelandic Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale. The installation is the creation of Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, a.k.a. Sho...

Un Art Autre - Abstraction in Postwar Paris at Levy Gorvy

In 1952, the French art critic and curator Michel Tapié coined the phrase “Un Art Autre,” meaning “art of another kind,” to refer to a trend he perceived in abstract art away from rationality, and...

5 Abstract Art Exhibitions to See During the Biennale 2019

Today we offer our round up of five of the most exciting abstract art exhibitions you can see while visiting the 2019 Venice Biennale. The 58th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia ...

Lee Krasner at the Barbican - A Look at An Artist of Her Own

This summer, The Barbican Art Gallery in London will mount Lee Krasner: Living Colour, the first European retrospective of the work of Lee Krasner in more than half a century. The exhibition will ...

Joan Mitchell's Polyptych Paintings Land at David Zwirner

Visitors to The Long Run exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (which closes 5 May 2019) were no doubt transfixed when they first set eyes on the selection of large-scale dipty...

Art Of Desire - Huguette Caland at Tate St Ives

This summer, Lebanese-born artist Huguette Caland will have her first solo museum exhibition in the United Kingdom, at the Tate St Ives in Cornwall. Born in 1931 in Beirut, Caland moved to Paris i...

Hirshhorn Extends Charline von Heyl’s Critically Acclaimed Exhibition

Two months after it opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, Snake Eyes, a retrospective of the work of Charline von Heyl, was closed to the public—a casualty of a pr...

Victor Vasarely's Shaping Forms at Centre Pompidou Paris

For the first time in more than 50 years, a major Victor Vasarely retrospective is on view at a French museum. Centre Pompidou opened Vasarely: Sharing Forms this past February, bringing together ...

Whitney Celebrates the 1960s Color Paintings in a New Exhibition

Bob Thompson died of a heroine overdose at age 28, but he completed nearly 1000 paintings and drawings in his brief career. The Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated his work in a 1996 ret...

5 Current and Upcoming Exhibitions of Female Abstract Artists to Visit

In celebration of International Women’s Day, we are taking time to draw attention to five of our favorite exhibitions by female abstract artists in 2019. Some are on view right now, others are upc...

Blog Home Emma Kunz's Drawings, Between Spirituality and Abstraction

This Spring, Serpentine Gallery in London will open Emma Kunz - Visionary Drawings, the first exhibition of the work of Emma Kunz (1892–1963) in the United Kingdom. A Swiss-born Spiritualist, ...

Ellsworth Kelly's Windows at Centre Pompidou

Right before he died in 2015, Ellsworth Kelly donated “Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris” (1949), to Centre Pompidou. Regarded as his masterpiece, the painting has confounded viewers, critics, a...

The Abstract Art Inside the Schulhof Collection

When Hannelore B. Schulhof died in 2012, she bequeathed eighty works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, with the instruction that they be held in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Ve...

Norman Lewis’s American Totem, Whitney Museum's Newest Acquisition

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York recently announced its acquisition of “American Totem” (1960) by Norman Lewis, the first painting by Lewis to enter the Whitney collection. The acqui...

At Yossi Milo Gallery, A Group Show of Artists Painting with Light

On 17 January 2019, Yossi Milo Gallery in New York will open a group exhibition examining the contemporary state of Concrete Photography. Titled Painting with Light, the exhibition will include wo...

The Met Explores the Profound Legacy of Abstract Expressionism

The Met Fifth Avenue in New York opened Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera this week. Featuring more than 50 major works by some of the most compelling abstract artists of the past century, the ...

Arshile Gorky to Get the First Italian Retrospective in 2019

The Ca' Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice will mount an ambitious Arshile Gorky retrospective in 2019. Titled “Arshile Gorky: 1904 – 1948,” it will coincide with the run of the ...

The Joy of the Colorful Abstract Art at Mnuchin Gallery

Mnuchin Gallery in New York is currently showing The Joy of Color, a celebratory group show of colorful abstract art dating from 1939 to 2018. The exhibition offers a unique glimpse into the multi...