With three exhibitions running simultaneously this summer, the Japanese artist hovers over Berlin like a vast alien spacecraft, zapping us with cringeworthy one-liners, showering us with torrents of platitudes about peace and love. In a rare triple play, her Gropius Bau summer blockbuster coincides with the Neue Nationalgalerie’s exhibition and she’s even taken over the enormous Neue Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) billboard.
Read MoreThe 20th century is a cruel farce performed by puppets in a cardboard museum in South African artist William Kentridge’s grotesquely funny, constantly disconcerting film interpretation of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. Lenin and Stalin, their faces’ photographs fixed on jerky figures made from scraps, transforming sporadically into living dancers hidden under collaged costumes, monstrously dominate a puppet cast that also includes the bullish-looking but revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky along with Trotsky and Shostakovich himself.
Read More‘Shirin Neshat: Born of Fire,” the internationally renowned Iranian-born artist’s first solo museum show in the New York area in 20 years and the first ever on the East End, will open Sunday at the Parrish Art Museum. Neshat has spent her career examining what it means to exist between two cultures. “Born of Fire” consists of specific bodies of work from four different time periods. The first, the photographic piece “Women of Allah” (1993-1997), was created after Ms. Neshat returned to Iran in 1990, her first time there since 1974, when she left to study art in Los Angeles.
Read MoreWilliam Kentridge’s solo exhibition, To Cross One More Sea, was a multimedia showcase displayed at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, with drawings, puppets, prints, sculpture and a three-channel film. The 19-minute projection explored a part-historical, part-fictional ocean journey of artists, particularly surrealists, who fled Vichy France in the early 1940s.
Read MoreThe past decade or so has brought a great reassessment of Ono. Beatles fans who stupidly blamed her for the band’s breakup have either piped down or realized the true root of the split: money, credit and basic human dynamics. Ono detractors, who mocked her wailing vocal performances, have perhaps realized that her work was not meant to play alongside the latest Doobie Brothers single. A list of respected popular artists — David Byrne, Lady Gaga, St. Vincent — have spoken of her influence.
Read MoreGerhard Richters Œuvre umfasst mehr als 4.000 Gemälde und Objekte. In einem bis heute sechsbändigen "Catalogue raisonné" sind auf insgesamt 3.536 Seiten 4.118 einzelne Arbeiten unter 957 "Werknummern" verzeichnet. An diesem umfangreichen Opus arbeitet Dietmar Elger, der Leiter des 2006 begründeten Dresdner Gerhard-Richter-Archivs, bereits seit 2002, also seit fast einem Vierteljahrhundert. Und doch ist das Verzeichnis nicht vollständig. Es schweigt sich über das Frühwerk aus – das eigentliche Frühwerk des Studenten und angehenden Malers in Dresden. Aber da gab es etwas. Ein kleiner Einblick ist seit kurzem möglich.
Read Morehe Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) has charmed the art world with her monumental, intricate installations made of threads and found objects. In an interview, the artist discusses her latest institutional exhibitions—”Chiharu Shiota : The Soul Trembles” on view at the Grand Palais in Paris through March 19, 2025 ; and “Chiharu Shiota : The Unsettled Soul” on view through April 28, 2025 in Prague—life between two homes, and her wild guess as to exactly how many kilometers of thread she has used over the years to complete her intricate, spell-binding installations.
Read MoreTo move a heavy black curtain to witness the story of separation. This is the gesture by which one becomes a spectator of Body of evidence, the exhibition on Shirin Neshat (Iranian, now settled in New York) at the PAC in Milan, which invites us to spy from behind a material and metaphorical curtain that acts as a boundary between the real of the Milanese streets and the surrealistic setting of the works on display, narrating the Iranian culture of division.
Read MoreMore sweetly play the dance (2015) by the South African artist William Kentridge (born Johannesburg, 1955) is a work that combines video, animation, drawing, music and performance to create an immersive and multidimensional experience. It is a notable example of how Kentridge explores themes of history, politics, memory and identity, using a visual language that mixes the ephemeral with the permanent and the tragic with the optimistic.
Read MoreAre we living through a Yokossance ?
Though the 92-year-old conceptual artist, musician and Beatle widow Yoko Ono has spent much of the past decade far from the public eye dealing with health issues, each year seems to bring a new opportunity to reassess her contributions to culture. In the 2020s alone, there has been a tribute album, a small shelf’s worth of biographies and, just last year, a blockbuster, career-spanning show of her artwork at London’s Tate Modern.
"Some Suns Fell Off" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery reframes nationalism through poetic fragments and disrupted forms that lay bare the inherent arbitrariness of our ideological constructions. Nationalism, religious fundamentalism, social identity and political polarization are themes Gupta has frequently addressed in her work. They manifest here with renewed resonance as the exhibition opened in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. election.
Read MoreArtiste pluridisciplinaire, Shirin Neshat a abordé la photographie, la vidéo, le cinéma et le théâtre, créant des récits hautement lyriques ainsi que des visions politiquement chargées qui remettent en question les questions de pouvoir, de religion, de race et la relation entre le passé et le présent, l'Orient et l'Occident, l'individu et la collectivité.
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