Archive

Whitney Biennial 2019

Edition 2019 looks great, goes wide and speaks loudly, but is it off mission? Lost in this bi-coastal perceived zeitgeist of identity politics is an unbiased survey of art-making with no agenda but the deep need to make it, and…
Casey Reas – interview: ‘There is an increased understanding that software is central to our lives’

Reas is known as the man who helped to create the open-source programming language Processing and brought coding within the grasp of visual artists. Here, he talks about how his work has changed over the course of his career and…
Orson Welles: the graphic artist

A film and a book on Welles’s artwork provide another lens through which to observe one of cinema’s most fascinating protagonists
Frieze New York 2019

This year’s fair demonstrated a more open-ended approach than usual, exhibiting and promoting diverse art-making practices. By devoting attention to new trends, as well as to forgotten and little-known artists, the organisers created a well-balanced and engaging display
Imaginary Cities

The digital artist Michael Takeo Magruder transforms urban maps from the British Library into data-driven artworks
Lawrence Lek – interview: ‘AI could become the ultimate content creation mechanism. It could also signal the death of the author’

Lek talks about artificial intelligence taking over from human creativity, and AIDOL, his feature-length film on the subject, now showing at Sadie Coles, London
Victor Wong – interview: ‘The human is inspired by the machine and the machine is modified by the human’

Artist-inventor Victor Wong talks about his robot artist AI Gemini, how he feels about his invention and how it might develop in the future
Nye Thompson – interview: ‘The bots are actually the primary audience for the show’

In her project The Seeker, a system of machines looking at images on screen, analysing them and whispering to one other, we humans are merely peripheral intrusions, says Thompson. It’s scary, but exciting
Joanna Piotrowska: All Our False Devices

In this installation at Tate Britain, Piotrowska’s black-and-white photos and 16mm films of intimate, airless interiors expose the latent erotics of the home
Jack Whitten: Jack’s Jacks

Embellished with sparkling gemstones and richly coloured tiles, Whitten’s memorial paintings on show here are not only extraordinarily beautiful, but communicate so much about the artists and musicians to whom they are dedicated
Artist Rooms: Self Evidence – Photographs by Woodman, Arbus and Mapplethorpe

In their intimate and groundbreaking portraits, Woodman, Arbus and Mapplethorpe dared to show the diversity of identity and their struggle to exist on their own terms
Yorkshire Sculpture Park opens Weston visitor centre

A visitor pavilion by Feilden Fowles opens up an overlooked area of the 500-acre sculpture park. The Weston responds to its setting with a sensitive design – part sculpture, part architecture – utterly in tune with the landscape
Angelica Mesiti – interview: ‘I really want to maintain ambiguity and possibility in my work’

Representing the Australian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, Angelica Mesiti is showing a multiscreen video installation entitled Assembly, which uses music to explore the power and complexities of collectivity
Chihuly at Kew: Reflections on Nature

As an artist who seeks to create works that appear as if they came from nature, placing interventions throughout such a beautiful botanic garden, Dale Chihuly succeeds in mirroring and augmenting its pre-existing splendour
Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition

This show takes us through the ephemera of Kubrick’s films – from female mannequins and a giant shiny white penis from A Clockwork Orange to a letter to the director from the woman who played Lolita – but is it…
Antonello da Messina

A must-see exhibition at Milan’s Palazzo Reale unites two-thirds of the surviving paintings by Sicily’s greatest Renaissance painter
Aliza Nisenbaum – interview: ‘I was torn between wanting to be a social worker or a painter’

The Mexican-born, New York-based artist talks about her first UK public commission, a mural at Brixton underground station, which offers an intimate portrayal of Transport for London staff as part of the Art on the Underground series
Jonathan Baldock: Facecrime

Baldock looks as if he is having fun, pulling faces in mud and decorating them in glaze, and the mood is infectious. He seems less interested in the details of cultural history than in producing the aesthetic of the ruin…
Jonathan Monk: Exhibit Model Four – plus invited guests

This exhibition comprises a wallpaper of Monk’s photographs from the past 20 years, along with artworks from a sprawling list of his ‘invited guests’
Irina Nakhova – interview: ‘I want my works to provoke curiosity’

The Russian artist talks about her latest exhibition, Museum on the Edge, at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, and explains why she sees art not as a profession, but rather as her way of being
Perilous Bodies

The 19 artists in this exhibition use photography, video, installation, sculpture and painting in a timely reminder of the injustices faced by oppressed people across the world
Sea Star: Sean Scully at the National Gallery

In this exhibition of more than 30 of Scully’s paintings, prints and pastels, JMW Turner’s The Evening Star provides the jumping-off point for the artist’s works
Tadao Ando – Emaki Drawings

At this French sculpture park, whose landscape is dotted with his structures, the Japanese architect has designed, in his inimitable style, a new pavilion to exhibit drawings of 10 or so of his schemes
Oscar Murillo: Violent Amnesia

Spread across the various spaces of Kettle’s Yard, Murillo’s works address the recurrent theme of the movement of people across borders and human labour in a global economy