Magazine

NGV’s Special Bond with Artist Robert Hunter, on View in Melbourne

By the time Australian painter Robert Hunter died in 2014 he had earned an international profile, and was considered by many to be the most influential abstract artist in Australia. It was an amaz...

Mary Corse: A Survey in Light at The Whitney

A major retrospective of the career of Mary Corse is on view this summer at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Titled Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, the exhibition touches on many of ...

Holding Color, Material, and Light - Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner

Suzan Frecon is a master of nuance. She recently opened her first ever solo exhibition in Asia, at the Hong Kong location of David Zwirner gallery. The exhibition itself is subtle—half a dozen pai...

Günther Förg and the Fragile Beauty of Rebellious Art

This year is the fifth anniversary of the death of German artist Günther Förg. Marking the occasion, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has organized a major survey of his entire career titled Günther...

The Interweaving Process of Bernard Frize

The George Pompidou Center in Paris will open a retrospective of the work of Bernard Frize in 2019. In anticipation of that exhibition, the Simon Lee Gallery in Mayfair, London, recently opened a ...

No Boundary Between Reality and Imagination - Katharina Grosse at the Gagosian

Katharina Grosse is perhaps the most honest artist working today. I say that because, when asked by an Art21 documentary film crew why she does the kind of work that she does, Grosse answered, “I ...

Frank Auerbach’s Landscapes and Portraits in New York

A compact and elegant show of paintings by the great British painter Frank Auerbach is currently on view at Timothy Taylor New York. Frank Auerbach: Landscapes and Portraits examines multiple deca...

Clare Rojas’ New Solo Show Egret Merges Abstraction and Story

In Egret, her new solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago, Clare Rojas challenges one of the basic misconceptions about abstract art—that non-objective images cannot tell stories. The ter...

Female Artists in the Contemporary Reductive Art in an Exhibition in Kyiv

More than 100 years after it was painted, “Black Square” (1915), by Kasimir Malevich, remains one of the most influential works in the history of abstract reductive art. With this painting, as wit...

Rosemarie Castoro, Lydia Okumura and Wanda Czelkowska in the Land of Lads, Land of Lashes

This June, the London Ely House location of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac will open what promises to be among the most impactful gallery exhibitions of the summer. Land of Lads, Land of Lashes will juxt...

Tal R's "This is Not Detroit" at MOCAD

On 11 May, a new exhibition of work by the Israel-born Danish painter Tal Rosenzweig, known professionally as Tal R, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The show has me confused and ...

What Per Kirkeby Left Behind

News broke this week that the Danish artist Per Kirkeby died at age 79. His death comes as a huge loss to the contemporary art world, though at the same time his long time fans also realize that t...

Udo Zembok Creates an Open Space in France

Udo Zembok has been working with glass as an artistic medium since 1976. Zembok sees glass not only as a physical material, but as something more—he sees it as a metaphysical intermediary between ...

100 Years of Art and Abstract Photography at Tate

The conversation around abstract photography has gotten quite interesting in recent decades as digital photography and photo manipulation has become ubiquitous. Now a new exhibition opening in May...

The Dia Art Foundation Honors Dorothea Rockburne

Fans of Dorothea Rockburne rejoice! Dia:Beacon in upstate New York has opened a long-term exhibition of works Rockburne created in the 1960s and 70s, many of which are monumental in scale and have...

A Spotlight on Clinton Hill at Frieze New York

A solo exhibition of the work of Clinton Hill was one of the most buzzed about presentations at the 2018 Frieze Fair in New York, though many who saw it had to confess they had never heard the nam...

Artist Gerson Leiber Dies Hours Before His Wife Judith—A Look at Their Legacy

Gerson Leiber is reported to have painted every day for more than seven decades. That streak ended on 28 April 2018, when Leiber died of a heart attack just hours before his wife Judith, to whom h...

How The Last Monet Inspired American Abstract Expressionists

Among the most memorable and well-known works ever created by Claude Monet, the great co-founder of French Impressionism, are his Water Lilies. Yet what many fans of Impressionism may not realize ...

Patrick Heron and his Impact on Post-War Abstract Art

Later this month, a retrospective of the work of the brilliant British abstract painter Patrick Heron will open at the Tate St. Ives. It will be a homecoming for the artist in more ways than one. ...

Can Robert Motherwell’s “At Five in the Afternoon” Break New Sales Records?

Robert Motherwell’s At Five in the Afternoon may be the most meaningful painting the artist made. In fact, an argument could be made that the painting is the most important Abstract Expressionist ...

10 Textile Pieces from the Sheila Hicks Exhibition at Centre Pompidou Paris

As a major Sheila Hicks retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris comes to an end this week, we are reminded once again of the sheer power of the oeuvre this influential artist has created, and of...

Painting the Painting Itself - Abstract Artist Marcia Hafif Dies

Abstract painter Marcia Hafif has died at age 88. Despite being a prolific multidisciplinary artist who experimented with film, installation art, drawing and conceptual art, Hafif is remembered pr...

Groundbreaking Abstract Female Artists on View in London

Anyone interested in the topic of abstract female artists simply must try to get to London sometime in the next month. The exhibition Surface Work, which is taking place concurrently at Victoria M...

At Centre Pompidou, Artists from the People's Art School Vitebsk

When recounting Modernist art history it is tempting to focus only on Paris, since most 20th Century innovators from everywhere else in the world eventually came to that city. But the story of Mod...

Ram Kumar, India's Foremost Abstract Artist, Dies

Ram Kumar, one of the last two surviving members of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group (PAG), has died at age 93. Along with the other seven members of the group, Kumar was instrumental in encou...

The Legacy of Trailblazer of Abstract Art, Gillian Ayres

British abstract painter and printmaker Gillian Ayres has died at age 88. Her death leaves an empty spot in the world of art, and also in the worlds of education and role-modeling. Ayres was easil...

Three Chinese Artists Wed the East with the West in New York

A revelatory exhibition of recent Chinese abstract art is currently on view at Boers-Li Gallery in New York. Featuring the work of three artists—Wu Dayu, Yu Youhan, and Zhang Wei—Brush and Beyond ...

Re-Visiting Color Field and Op Art of Celebrated Polish Artist Wojciech Fangor

Wojciech Fangor had a knack for expressing both simplicity and depth in his art. Originally trained as a realist artist in his native Poland in the 1930s, he spent the early years of his career de...

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Honors Abstract Expressionist Sculptor Herbert Ferber

Herbert Ferber was an enigma. He was one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century, and yet most people today have never heard of him. Ferber hobnobbed with the most famous of the famous...

Artist Andy Bauch Hid $10,000 Worth of Cryptocurrencies in his Abstract Lego Artworks

Based on the number of articles generated per exhibition hour, New Money, an exhibition of 14 new works by Andy Bauch, easily became the most written about show of the year during its three day ru...

Willem de Kooning's 1975 "Untitled XII" - Sold at Art Basel Hong Kong for $35 Million!

Last week, at Art Basel Hong Kong 2018, the team at Lévy Gorvy gave the art world a lesson on how to sell a modern masterpiece. The dealer sold “Untitled XII” (1975) by Willem de Kooning for $35 m...

Behind the Abstract Object Paintings of Otis Jones

Otis Jones has been described as a Texas Minimalist. You would be forgiven for not knowing what that moniker might mean. Texas is the Lone Star State—that could potential sound minimal; one lone s...

An Abstract Homage to Walt Disney, Courtesy Bertrand Lavier

A small selection of works by French artist Bertrand Lavier is the subject of the latest exhibition at the 60-square meter London location of the Paris-based Kamel Mennour gallery. Titled Walt Dis...

How Ismail Gulgee Contributed to Abstraction in Pakistan

At the time of his sudden death in 2007, Ismail Gulgee was the most famous artist in Pakistan. He was beloved not only for his immense talent as a painter and sculptor, but also because he built a...

The Galaxies and Universes of Robert Pan

The inaugural exhibition at the new Bermel von Luxburg Gallery in Berlin is a showing of new works by the Italian-born abstract artist Robert Pan. There could not have been a more appropriate choi...

Behind Josh Sperling’s Dynamic “Composites”

American artist Josh Sperling recently wrapped up his first international solo exhibition, at Perrotin, Paris. The work was colorful and whimsical—a perfect introduction to what Sperling does. One...

Howardena Pindell - Finally in the Spotlight

Two concurrent Howardena Pindell exhibitions recently opened in Chicago—one, a complete retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago; the other, at Document Space, presents an in-...

Richard Tuttle and his Thoughts of Trees

Twenty-three new works by Richard Tuttle debuted in South Korea on 9 March, at Pace Gallery Seoul. Each of the works is made out of the same materials, and each is contained within a nearly identi...

Yinka Shonibare - A Post-Colonial Hybrid

A new sculpture by Yinka Shonibare, MBE was recently installed at the southeast entryway to Central Park, in the center of Doris C. Freedman Plaza. The swirling, energetic, colorful, fiberglass fo...

Improvisation and Uncontrolled Creativity in Gestural Abstraction

When we say that a work of art is gestural, what do we mean? A gesture is a signal; a sign; a movement of the body. Gesture is one of the aspects of a painting that tells us about the painter. We ...

Were the Neanderthals the Very First Creators of Abstract Cave Art?

A recent report in the journal Science has scientists buzzing about the origins of human culture. The report, which was published on 23 February and was co-authored by 14 scientists representing f...

Andy Woll’s 150 Paintings of Mount Wilson

Western Wear, a solo exhibition of the work of Andy Woll on view at Denny Gallery in New York through 25 March, could be the basis for a masters course in art criticism. Objectively, it mostly fea...

The Many Sides of Sarah Morris’s Art

If I was asked to list the most subversive abstract artists of our time, Sarah Morris would be near the top of the list. Morris makes films and paintings. She employs the language of typology in b...

Kupka, Pioneer of Abstraction, At Grand Palais

František Kupka thought of his artworks as organisms. As material objects, they came into being as the result of natural processes. Those processes included the ecological systems that led to the ...

Maija Luutonen - A Star Shining Bright on the Finnish Contemporary Art Scene

Finnish artist Maija Luutonen was recently given an important opportunity—and an even more important responsibility. She was chosen as the first artist to participate in a groundbreaking new art p...

The Luminous Constructs of Al Held

The first Al Held painting I ever saw was called Flemish VII—a black canvas covered with a jungle of overlapping geometric shapes outlined in white. The first thing that jumped into my mind when s...

How Do 5 New York-Based Contemporary Artists Draw Upon Ellsworth Kelly’s Legacy?

The exhibition Painting/Object, currently on at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, examines five contemporary artists making work in conversation with the art of Ellsworth Kelly. It has been 69 ...

How Tarsila do Amaral Invented Modern Art in Brazil

Two weeks ago, the exhibition Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Known colloquially in Brazil as just Tarsila, this influential ...