Magazine

Vivid Compositions of 5 Los Angeles-Based Artists at Brand Library

The Brand Library in Glendale, California, is an architectural spectacle. A former mansiondubbed Miradero (meaning vantage point), its majestic white facade sparkles amid tree-covered hills and va...

Mitchell-Innes and Nash Salutes the Art of Julian Stanczak

The painter Julian Stanczak died earlier this year in his hometown of Cleveland Ohio, at the age of 88. Prior to his death, Mitchell-Innes and Nash in New York had been planning what would have be...

UK's First Major Retrospective of Alberto Giacometti at Tate

Among contemporary artists, Alberto Giacometti is one of the most revered masters of all time. Though the sculptor, painter and draughtsman lived his entire life in the 20th Century, he created a ...

Reinterpreting Collage - Brenna Youngblood

If, like many art lovers, you constantly carry with you the baggage of having looked at tens of thousands of images of art in your life, you might, when glancing quickly over the work of Brenna Yo...

Celebrating 100 Years of De Stijl at The Open Air Museum de Lakenhal

As we recently announced, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Dutch art movement De Stijl. The founders of the movement, such as Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld, are remem...

What Was The Dematerialization of Art Object?

Lucy Lippard—giant of American art criticism, author of more than 20 books, and co-founder of Printed Matter, the quintessential seller of books made by artists—turned 80 this year. Despite her mu...

Female Australian Abstract Artists at Newcastle Art Gallery

We love any opportunity to discover the hidden geniuses who helped make abstraction what it is. So many stories from abstract art history remain untold. One current exhibition in which we are part...

Colors of De Stijl Artists at Kunsthal Kade

This year marks an extraordinary milestone for the Netherlands: the 100th anniversary of the founding of the art movement De Stijl. De Stijl artists sought to reduce visual composition to its most...

The Mesmerizing Art of Fahrelnissa Zeid Gets a Tate Retrospective

Complexity may be the best word to define the life and the art of Fahrelnissa Zeid. Born in 1901 into a family with roots in both politics and art (her father was a diplomat, her brother was the w...

The Legacy of Lee Hall, Artist and de Kooning Biographer

Lee Hall, artist, writer, educator, biographer, university administrator, advocate for the less fortunate, and outspoken truth teller about the New York art world, has died. In the 1960s, Hall dev...

Le Corbusier - Between Architecture and Fine Art

Within the contemporary architecture community, the name Le Corbusier is as likely to arouse praise as derision. One of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century, Le Corbusier was more tha...

Interview With American Abstract Painter Dana Gordon

New paintings by Dana Gordon are on view at Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn until 4 June 2017. We recently had a chance to catch up with Gordon and talk to him about this exciting new body of work. I...

How Gutai’s Kazuo Shiraga Suddenly Rose to Fame

A generation ago, the name Kazuo Shiraga would not have meant anything to most curators, academicians and art collectors in the United States. Neither would the word Gutai have gotten much of a re...

Forms of American Landscapes - The Art of Letha Wilson

The relationship between humanity and nature is complicated. Like everything we love, we strive to understand nature, imitate it, and exalt it; but then inevitably we also try to possess it, captu...

The Versatile Photographic Practice of Ryan Foerster

Conservation is one of the core ideas of photography. Capture a vision of reality. Do not waste time by letting it slip away. Conserve a fragment of the moment so it might be experienced after the...

Alfred Leslie - From Abstract Expressionism to Figurative Painting

Anyone who visited the Bruce Silverstein booth at Frieze New York 2017 was offered a rare treat: a selection of realistic paintings by Alfred Leslie spanning from the late 1960s, when he first cha...

Young Abstract Artists to Keep an Eye On

As an introduction to these profiles of ten emerging abstract artists we think deserve your attention, my editor asked me to comment a bit on the state of contemporary abstract art. This seemingly...

The Allure of Lynda Benglis’ Biomorphic Forms

In the early 1980s, Lynda Benglis submitted a design for a fountain to an art competition for the Louisiana World Exposition, scheduled for the summer of 1984. A Louisiana native herself, Benglis ...

Redefining Photography - The Mediums of Kate Steciw

If we were conducting an investigation into the term Post Internet Art, Kate Steciw might appear at first to be an excellent Artist of Interest. Steciw makes abstract, three-dimensional objects us...

The Important Legacy of Saloua Raouda Choucair

Years ago on a visit to Beirut, Dia Art Foundation Director and former Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan saw some work in a gallery by an artist she did not recognize. She inquired about it and w...

The Abstract in the Design of Ron Arad

Since his professional career began in the 1980s, Ron Arad has primarily been recognized as an industrial designer. That is because most things Arad makes are useful in everyday life and can easil...

The Lyrical Legacy of Magdalena Abakanowicz

In the heart of downtown Chicago, 106 massive, headless, iron figures occupy a grassy field at the south end of Grant Park, two blocks from the lakeshore. The figures seem to be walking in all dir...

Drawing Line in Space - The Art of Gego

Gego, otherwise known as Gertrud Goldschmidt, is one of those rare artists who devoted all her energies toward exploring the expressive potential of a single aesthetic element. In her case, the el...

The Most Beautiful Examples from the Illy Coffee Cups Art Collection

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Illy coffee cups: those iconic, elegant, white ceramic demitasses with the perfectly circular handles. Italian architect and designer Matteo Thus, one of th...

Can We Consider Andreas Gursky an.. Abstract Photographer?

The physical world often seems like a vast and indifferent place; a fact German photographer Andreas Gursky will not let us forget. Some call Gursky a documentary photographer because of the reali...

Was Hilma af Klint the Mother of Abstraction?

The first time most people heard the name Hilma af Klint was in 1986, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art included her work in an exhibition titled The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 18...

How Natalia Goncharova Shaped Russian Futurism

Natalia Goncharova has not yet gotten her due. As a young painter she was a monumental force in the Russian avant-garde, working and exhibiting alongside some of the most important names in early ...

Reflections in the Water - Barbara Vaughn Photography

One measure of the success of an abstract photograph is how easily it allows viewers to look beyond evidence of objectivity, and to open themselves up to connections with the unknown. By such a me...

The Art and Life of Clyfford Still

In 1936, the portrait painter Worth Griffin invited Clyfford Still to join him on a summer excursion to northern Washington to paint the portraits of tribal leaders at the Colville Indian Reservat...

Peter Shire - A Star of the American Ceramics Art

The work of Peter Shire looks like what might have come about had students at the Bauhaus been given recess. It is functional and abstract, decorative and fun. Its visual language, full of vivid c...

The Curious Sculptures of Sarah Braman

The objects Sarah Braman creates are uncanny. Assembled from a range of found consumer products, industrial materials and traditional art mediums, they are instantly familiar, but also somehow ali...

A Fine Relationship between Calligraphy and Abstraction

Calligraphy is where symbol and gesture meet. At its core, calligraphy is writing. It utilizes the traditional tools of the writer: pen and ink, or brush and paint. But the objective of writing is...

The Abstract Landscapes of Franco Fontana

“The purpose of art,” says Franco Fontana, “is to make visible the invisible.” This could seem like a strange thing for a photographer to say since the essential purpose of the camera is to captur...

How Photogram Introduced the Non-Representational to Photography

A photogram is a cameraless photograph: an image burned onto a photosensitive surface without the use of a machine. Photograms predate photographs. The earliest photographic images of reality capt...

The Abstraction Shining in Neon Art

Zdenek Pesanek was the first to make neon art. Pesanek was a kinetic artist known previously as the inventor of the Spectrophone, or color piano. His earliest neon works were abstract sculptures, ...

The Power of Steel in the Sculptures of the Late Alf Lechner

When he died on 27 February 2017, Alf Lechner was one of the most prolific sculptors in the world. Yet he was not widely known outside his native Germany. The reason for his relatively low profile...

Justice to Pissarro by Dana Gordon

For over a century, the painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) has been considered the father of modern art. His ascendancy, which began around 1894, had a tidal influence on the development of the avan...

When William Klein Turned to Abstraction in Photography

William Klein is considered one of the most influential photographers of the past century. His reputation comes largely from his work as a street photographer, a genre he all but invented in the 1...

What's in The Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art ?

The Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art may be the most important collection of abstract art you never heard of. Ten years after its inception it changed its name to the Tremaine Collection,...

The Legacy of Sir Howard Hodgkin

The renowned British abstract painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin was among the most decorated artists of his generation. He represented Britain in the 1984 Venice Biennale and won the Turner Pr...

The Story of Abstract Textile Design

Abstract textile design is not new. If fact, few elements of human culture are older. It is hard to say exactly how long textiles have existed, since unlike pottery or stone tools woven cloth disi...

The Assembled Art of Barbara Kasten

At first glance the art of Barbara Kasten may not seem subversive. Kasten builds architectonic sculptural compositions in her studio then lights and photographs them, transforming temporary, three...

Fernand Leger, Between Abstraction and Cubism

Because of the brightly colored, flat paintings of everyday objects he painted beginning in the 1930s, Fernand Léger is considered one of the forefathers of Pop Art. But Léger first became known f...

When Georgia O'Keeffe Created Abstract Art

It is a challenge when interacting with art to ignore the clichés, allegories and judgments heaped upon it by others, and to simply come at it with an open mind. This is particularly difficult wit...

The Infinite Art of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is timeless. At nearly 90 years old, this visionary artist still works in her studio every day from nine in the morning until six in the evening. When she finishes each night she retu...

Virtual Reality in Art - A Powerful New Game-Changer

Virtual Reality art is nothing new. In the 1960s, Morton Heilig invented the Sensorama, considered by some to have been the first Virtual Reality artwork. Heilig described his invention, which imm...

Willem de Kooning - The Man of Many Contradictions

Willem de Kooning is easy to love and easy to hate. De Kooning is an epic figure in the story of 20th Century abstract art, partly because of his work and partly because of his personality. Born i...

Why the Grid Paintings of Stanley Whitney Matter

The recent paintings by American abstract painter Stanley Whitney have a distinct grid-like quality. They are architectonic stacks of colors, evocative of Neo-Plasticist television color bars. And...