Magazine

The Artist Who Painted the Sky, Every Sunday for Seventeen Years

Byron Kim is an abstract artist, but he has a troubled relationship with abstract art. Some of the evidence of that troubled relationship was recently put on public view in the exhibition Sunday P...

Amy Sillman’s Narration versus Abstraction

The current Amy Sillman exhibition at Gladstone 64 gallery in New York has my head spinning. Titled Amy Sillman: Mostly Drawing, it features a new series of works on paper, which, as the title sug...

The Everlasting Legacy of Jack Whitten

Jack Whitten—celebrated abstract painter, social philosopher, and cultural leader—is dead at age 78. In an exhibition career that spanned more than 50 years, Whitten created an artistic legacy bas...

London to Get Re-acquainted with the Work of Elaine Sturtevant, Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

If you are a fan of philosophy and art, mark your calendar—the work of Elaine Sturtevant, known professionally as Sturtevant, returns to London this year, with the exhibition Vice Versa. On view f...

Who are the Most Innovative Representatives of Chinese Abstract Art Today?

The phrase “Chinese abstract art” is troubling for me. China is home to the longest, continuous tradition of art making on earth today. That tradition is immense and complex, far more so than the ...

LA Art Scene Legend Ed Moses Dies at 91

Ed Moses, pioneer of the California avant-garde, died peacefully on 17 January 2018, in his Venice Beach home, surrounded by family. Many people today do not know who Moses was. Or if they know th...

Robert Morris - An Artist and Sculptor Like No Other

Robert Morris defined art by barely defining it at all. He said, “Art is primarily a situation.” Rephrasing that in human terms, imagine if you met Morris at a party and he was introduced to you a...

Behind the Light and Space Movement at MCA Chicago

I credit the Light and Space Movement with first opening my mind to abstract art. In my youth, I was irritated by anything I could not understand. Abstract art only added to my confusion, and incr...

When Miriam Schapiro Used Computers to Generate Geometric Abstract Art

Miriam Schapiro was a legendary figure in the art world for more than half a century. She was a masterful visual artist, an influential teacher, and a brilliant theorist. But her most commonly kno...

The Magic of Polly Apfelbaum’s Installations in Vienna

Polly Apfelbaum installations are oft described in mythic terms. In 2016, art critic Christopher Knight, writing for the Los Angeles Times, described the Apfelbaum installation Face (Geometry) (Na...

An "Artist of Vivid Forms" - Elizabeth Murray

Over the course of her 40-year career, Elizabeth Murray built a unique aesthetic legacy—one that was undeniably serious, and yet also one at which it is impossible not to smile. As an artist, she ...

Our Ephemeral Future – How Contemporary Abstract Artists Engage with the Environment

The coastline is where earth, wind and water meet. Poetically, it is a place teeming with allegory, where things can only stay the same through constant change. It is both concrete and abstract—an...

Jaanika Peerna Interview: These Waters Have Stories to Tell

Jaanika Peerna embodies nature. In her performances, she flows with the rhythms of air and water. To the eye, her movements appear both intuitive and inevitable. She is creating something new on t...

Dynamism and Conflict in the Art of Ali Banisadr

Ali Banisadr is an emergent master. His impossibly complex oil paintings open magical windows into imaginary space. Lush and dynamic, to view one is to be drawn into it. The Iranian-born Banisadr ...

The MoMA Collection Honors its Artists' Revolutions in “The Long Run”

A gauntlet has been thrown down, daring us to change the way we think about the careers of artists. The challenge comes via an essay written by Ann Temkin for The Long Run, a recently opened exhib...

The Den Mother of Abstract Expressionism - Betty Parsons

Betty Parsons died 35 years ago, when I was 13 years old. I never knew her. Theoretically, I guess I could have met her, had I known to try. But I had no idea she existed until it was much too lat...

How Art Recovery Found Stolen Hans Hofmann Paintings After 12 Years

Art theft may soon become less lucrative. That is largely thanks to the efforts of one of the most successful art detectives in the world—Brooklyn-born Christopher Marinello, who recently made new...

The Evolution of Art for Charles Gaines

Several works by Charles Gaines will be making their way around the United States over the course of the next two years, in a touring exhibition called “Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffri...

Matters of Freedom - A Look Back at Concrete Art

Along with Suprematism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Neo-Concrete Art, and Minimalism, Concrete Art is one of half a dozen geometric abstract art movements that emerged in the 20th Century, roughly b...

Why Es Devlin Was the Star of the 2017 Art Basel Miami

I confess: I recoil when people in the entertainment industry call themselves artists. I think entertainment and art are fundamentally different—though I admit I cannot say exactly how. That is wh...

Bloomberg Profiles Michael Krebber - ‘An Artist That Investors Love’

Michael Krebber recently became the latest abstract artist to be featured in the pages of Bloomberg. Is that a surprise, that Bloomberg, a company that since 1929 has been dedicated solely to matt...

The Abstract Renaissance of Raoul de Keyser at SMAK

Raoul de Keyser was a master at making work that embodies the ideas of response and reduction. He responded to reality, intuitively interpreting the visual landscape of his life. But he reduced th...

The Best Art of 2017 by The New York Times - How Much of it was Abstract?

Each year, the New York Times art critical team takes on the Herculean task of assembling an end-of-year round up of the most noteworthy aesthetic experiences of the year. Their Best Art 2017 repo...

ABSTRACT / NOT ABSTRACT by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch at Art Basel Miami Beach 2017

Art Week Miami 2017 has closed, and with more than a dozen concurrent fairs and scores of pop-up shows around the city, it is safe to say no one saw everything. But despite the competition, the Je...

At Auction, A Sculpture to Mark Andy Warhol’s Relationship with the Abstract

An abstract Andy Warhol sculpture estimated to be worth as much as a million dollars was brought up for auction earlier this month, but not by any of the big auction houses. It was offered by John...

To Dot, Pour and Puddle - The Abstract Side of John Armleder’s Art

John Armleder entered 2017 with simultaneous retrospectives of his work in two American coastal art capitals: New York, at Almine Rech Gallery, and Los Angeles, at David Kordansky Gallery. Anyone ...

How an Abstract Digital Drawing by Claire Malrieux Responds to Weather

Claire Malrieux has a knack for devising artworks that elucidate the concept of abstraction in fascinating ways. Her most recent work, Climat General, premiered at the 2017 Venice Biennale in the ...

A Brief Look at the East Village Art Scene of the 1980s

The East Village art scene of the 1980s is the stuff of legends. Bordered by 14th Street, Houston, Bowery and Third Streets, and the East River, the neighborhood began its modern existence as a de...

How Erwin Redl Sheds Some Light on the World with LED Installations

A major outdoor installation by Erwin Redl recently opened in Madison Square Park, in Midtown Manhattan. The site-specific sculpture is called Whiteout. It consists of 900 LED lights suspended fro...

Space-Filling Sculptures and Unusual Materials - The Art of Karla Black

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote, “There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.” It seems comparing things is just what humans do. It i...

Gottfried Jäger - Pioneer of Contemporary Abstract Photography

A dual evolution has been going on between computers and humans for some time, and German abstract photographer Gottfried Jäger could be considered one of the earliest examples of a cross-over bei...

How CIA Funded Abstract Art Became a Cold War Weapon

I first heard about the existence of CIA funded art about a decade ago, when I came across an old article in the Independent referencing a British television series that aired in 1995-96 called ...

Why Richard Anuszkiewicz Was a Major Force of Op Art

Art movements never die. They just nap until some new genius wakes them up again so they can pick up where their past masters left off. Or sometimes, as in the rare case of Op Art, thanks to one o...

A €50 million Fake - The Story of Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square, Red Square”

The recent story of an alleged Kasimir Malevich painting, Black Square, Red Square, has shone a potentially embarrassing light on two major cultural institutions in Germany: the Kunstsammlung Nord...

In Memory of Trevor Bell, A Look Back at the St Ives School of Painting

The passing of the great British painter Trevor Bell is being mourned as the end of an era. Bell is widely regarded as the last of the St. Ives School Modernists. The town of St. Ives is a histori...

Why Laura Owens’ Approach to Painting Is so Innovative

More than once I have heard an artist say that Laura Owens saved painting. It is an odd statement. It implies painting was in danger of being destroyed at some point, presumably in the past four d...

Mary Corse's Art in the Spotlight – Finally

It is sort of a pun to say Mary Corse is having a moment in the spotlight. This multidisciplinary artist has been working with light as an artistic medium since the 1960s. But whereas Corse has be...

UNESCO House - An Art Museum in Paris You Didn't Know About

Right in the heart of Paris, in the popular 7th arrondissement, just one and a half kilometers southeast of the Eiffel Tower, a secret art museum hides in plain sight in a place called UNESCO Hous...

Capturing the Transience of Time - The Photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto

Dual exhibitions going on through 22 December at the Paris and London locations of Marian Goodman Gallery explore the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, acclaimed photographer, sculptor and conceptual arti...

Becca Albee’s Innovative Way of Evoking Overlooked History

A traveling installation by Brooklyn-based artist Becca Albee has got me thinking about unintended connections—those misunderstandings that come from our interactions with art, some of which are i...

Mary Weatherford’s Art Journey from the West to the East Coast

The word that comes to my mind when looking at the neon paintings Mary Weatherford has been making recently is, “Eureka.” They have that inexpressible something—a sense of wonderment, a shock of l...

Key Figures in Malaysian Abstract Art

This year marked the 60th anniversary of Hari Merdeka, when, on 31 August 1957, the Federation of Malaya claimed independence from the British Empire. And as an exhibition currently on view in Kua...

Between Industry and Craft - Patricia Urquiola

This winter, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will open the first ever solo exhibition of the work of designer Patricia Urquiola. This exhibition will offer viewers not only a chance to admire a cur...

Fifty Years of Pioneering Art in India - Nalini Malani at Centre Pompidou

A new exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Nalini Malani: The rebellion of the dead, retrospective 1969-2018, offers viewers a comprehensive glimpse at the work of an artist who, perhaps more than any o...

Boundless Energy - The Art of Julio Le Parc

The world has rediscovered Julio Le Parc. The Argentinian-born, France-based artist, who is still active in his studio today in his late 80s, helped define kinetic art in the 1960s and was an earl...

My Plastic Bag - Cheryl Donegan at Kunsthalle Zurich

For artists, it always has been, and hopefully always will be, perfectly reasonable to ask, “What is art?” Cynics, investors, politicians, academicians and other determined non-artists may mock th...

MoMA in Paris - Hosted by Fondation Louis Vuitton

A highly touted exhibition of modern art opened in Paris this week, and it is inspiring quite a bit of celebration. But perhaps it should inspire an equal amount of consternation as well. Being Mo...

The Lightness and Transparency of Gina Werfel

In a 2013 interview in the Huffington Post, Gina Werfel and her husband Hearne Pardee, both lifelong painters and longtime teachers at UC Davis, were asked where their practices intersected and wh...