Archive

Alicia Kopf: ‘My idea is to appropriate polar history to a present-day story of survival’

Catalan artist Alicia Kopf has won acclaim for her novel Brother in Ice, which sits at the pinnacle of a cycle of artistic projects about the Arctic and the Antarctic. Here, she talks about her own epic story
Teresa Lawton: Tipping the Balance

Lawton’s paintings are inspired by her love of Dorset, where she explore the shapes and colours of the landscape, always in awe, she says ‘of the silence and mystery of nature’
Etel Adnan

In a bold juxtaposition with works by Paul Klee, the oil paintings, poems, carpets and tapestries of Etel Adnan reflect the qualities she shares with the painter who inspired her – an intense, visceral response to colour and a preoccupation…
Shelley Himmelstein: Soccerscapes – Fifa World Cup Series; Michael Sorgatz: Kaleidoscope Dreams

Gallery director Randall Harris explains how this double show came about, while Himmelstein talks about how she captures the movement and energy of the players and the excitement of fans in her soccerscapes and Sorgatz discusses his mesmerising dreamscapes
Patrick Heron

Patrick Heron’s postwar abstraction places figure and ground on an equal footing and exploits the all-important edge between forms and colours to create intense expressions of musicality and emotion
Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams

From individual buildings to large cityscapes, all the sculptures in this first US retrospective of Kingelez’s work exude his optimism and vibrancy. And, thanks to virtual reality, MoMA gives us the chance to walk the streets of one of his…
Ruimteveldwerk: ‘It is more like an understatement that creates an experiment than an artwork’

A social experiment investigating themes of being offline, privacy, and silence in the city brings about surprising results in Bruge’s Saint Trudo almshouses as part of this year’s triennial
Nevermore: Leonid Lamm, Selected Works

This retrospective of the artist, who died last year, shows the brilliance, courage and impeccable work ethic that made Lamm such an important figure in postwar Russian and American art
Jene Highstein: Space and Place

Deborah Najar’s carefully considered and sensitive choice of Highstein’s works is accompanied by short videos, photographs, archival material and correspondence between the artist and her father
Joana Vasconcelos: I’m Your Mirror

Joana Vasconcelos has filled the Guggenheim Bilbao with work from the past 20 years. She talks about craft, the importance (or otherwise) of scale, and how she seeks to expose and explode the myths and realities around female experience
John Powers: ‘Abstraction isn’t a technology or technique, it’s more an ethos (striving to be a virtue)’

Responding to the history of the city of Bruges, John Powers’ 15-metre-tall steel tower was constructed in situ for this year’s triennial and references long-neck swans and a medieval beheading
Bruges Triennial 2018: Liquid City

Bruges Triennial 2018: Liquid City
Starting from the Desert: Ecologies on the Edge – Second Yinchuan Biennale

There are some strong individual showings at the biennale, but its curatorial framework is a mystery and, despite its title and location outside a vastly expanding city on the edge of the Gobi desert, it shows nothing that is critical…
At Altitude

With its focus on the aerial image, At Altitude puts our terrestrial world into perspective with a broad range of works. It’s intriguing but, somehow, it misses the mark
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing

A photographer of fierce resolve and compassion, Dorothea Lange knew how to capture the very essence of struggle
Katharina Sieverding: ‘I also make fake news’

Part of the collateral programme of this year’s Manifesta Biennial in Palermo is a career-spanning solo exhibition by the Czech-born, German artist. Here, Sieverding talks selfies, fascism and fake news
Theaster Gates: Black Madonna

Gates hopes to challenge and confront the prevailing European narratives of racial and religious authority by reclaiming the power of print as a medium for black emancipation
Lee Bul

The Korean artist’s London retrospective shines brightest when it is clear and direct
Giacometti

This thoughtful and revealing survey of an artist the Guggenheim exhibited in 1955 with Giacometti’s first-ever museum show and the museum’s first large-scale sculpture show focuses on rarely seen works in plaster to illuminate the genius of a mastery laid…
Beyond Ophelia: A Celebration of Lizzie Siddal, Artist and Poet

Best known as Millais’ Ophelia, Lizzie Siddal was a Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet in her own right. She died young, with no particularly established reputation, and this small exhibition is only the second entirely in her honour
Samaneh Moafi of Forensic Architecture: ‘We are taking something that is already composed and pulling it apart, deconstructing it’

Forensic Architecture has never designed a building. Instead, it acts as an architectural detective agency to expose human rights abuses. Samaneh Moafi, one of its project leaders, talks about art prizes, the innovative potential of multidisciplinary collaboration and the role…
Alex Mirutziu: ‘I’m interested in error, misunderstanding, correction’

The Romanian artist talks about his latest exhibition, examining the life and work of Iris Murdoch, and discusses the biomechanics of writing, necrophilia and the novelist’s teddy bear
Royal Academy of Arts 250th Summer Exhibition

Grayson Perry’s eclectic, irreverent approach in coordinating the 250th-anniversary exhibition plays to its strengths. With the works of hundreds of amateur artists alongside those of professionals and the Royal Academicians, it is a far more insightful and accurate reflection of…
Baldwin and Guggisberg: ‘If you’re not in a white cube it forces you to take into consideration the reality that’s around you’

Having just installed 10, mostly blown-glass pieces around Canterbury Cathedral for their exhibition Under an Equal Sky, Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg talk about these new works and the resonance between their historic setting and their chosen issues of migration,…