Category: Articles

  • The Ars Electronica Festival 2016: Radical Atoms and the Alchemists of our Time

    This year’s festival includes more than 30 exhibitions, around 20 concerts and visual art and sound performances each day, an open-air drone show, plus symposiums, lectures and workshops

  • Megan Rooney – interview: ‘My mother taught me how to be a maker’

    The artist talks about working with clay, birdseed, lipstick and papier-mache and about excess, draught snakes and the domestic sublime

  • Noble Prospects: Capability Brown and the Yorkshire Landscape

    To mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of the great 18th-century landscape gardener, this exhibition brings together portraits of Capability Brown and his clients, along with original plans, drawings and documents

  • SFMOMA’s extension: a new visual vocabulary

    With Snøhetta’s new building now open, SFMOMA has more exhibition space than Manhattan’s MoMA, and more dedicated walls for photography than the Getty, and with its vast collection, it is an essential destination for any art lover

  • Setouchi Triennale 2016

    Once every three years, the islands of Japan’s Seto Inland Sea are transformed by an influx of artists bringing new ideas through a variety of works and installations

  • Kienholz: Five Car Stud

    Even with its harrowing subject matter, Edward Kienholz’s controversial civil rights work deserves to be celebrated. This exhibition examines it in its original context of display, alongside other, often disturbing, works from 1959-1994

  • The Neo Naturists

    Disaffected by the politics of Thatcherism and an art world overtaken by masculine neo-expressionism, the Neo Naturists covered their nude bodies in paint and burst on to the 1980s’ London club scene in an attempt to explore body image and…

  • Paula Modersohn-Becker: An Intensely Artistic Eye

    Following the artist’s progress from a small German artists’ community to the bright lights of Paris, this exhibition captures Modersohn-Becker’s constant striving to simplify and distil the essence of her subject

  • Daniel Sinsel

    A pulse of eroticism runs through this collection of Sinsel’s new work, as he teases the distinction between painting and sculpture, using materials ranging from the ordinary to the rarefied

  • The world is yours, as well as ours

    This exhibition takes the visitor on a whirlwind tour of some of China’s most recent abstract work, ranging from figurative landscapes to digital glitches to the eternity of the circle

  • The New Blockheads

    This retrospective looks at the work of a group of performance artists from St Petersburg in the late 1990s, who used irony, the grotesque and absurdism to reflect the transitional and uncertain world around them

  • 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (BB9): The Present in Drag

    Mixing physical locations with digital content, The Present in Drag is a brilliant parody that builds a clever, self-deprecating critique of the present, presenting the visitor less with an experience than with a lifestyle

  • Georgia O’Keeffe

    Tainted by the myth of erotic undertones, O’Keeffe’s work is shown by this long overdue retrospective to be far broader and more brilliant than is widely known. But it still doesn’t entirely do her justice

  • Performance, Audience, Mirror

    Celebrating moving image from the 1960s to the present day, this exhibition explores experimentation, performance and documentation in film-making

  • Pierre Lassonde Pavilion

    The new pavilion for the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec is a glorious building that nearly doubles the complex’s exhibition capabilities

  • Co-thinkers

    The focus of this exhibition, with work by canonical American and European artists, is less on the art itself and more on being inclusive for all those who visit to enjoy it. As one of the curators says: “Disability does…

  • Carlo Carrà: Metaphysical Spaces

    The works presented here show some of Carrà’s key metaphysical works, charting his jettisoning of movement, fragmentation and volatility in favour of calmer, more cryptic and perspective-bound compositions

  • Venice Architecture Biennale 2016: Reporting from the Front

    From the poster image for this six-month-long event to the immersive installations of exquisitely resculpted waste at the entrances to the main buildings, this biennale is all about the architect’s role in solving issues caused by dwindling resources

  • William Eggleston: Portraits

    The first exhibition devoted to the American photographer’s portraiture undersells the works’ beauty, allowing name to triumph over form

  • Niki de Saint Phalle: Je Suis Une Vache Suisse

    Despite traumatic experiences early on in life, Niki de Saint Phalle produced vivacious, playful and exuberant works, proof that creativity can emerge from destruction

  • Tate Modern Switch House

    After more than a decade and over £250m in funds, Tate Modern’s new sibling has opened its doors, displaying an exhilarating approach to accessibility, flexibility and curatorial innovation

  • Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France

    Offering the quiet thrill of a cool oasis in the park, the Frick Collection has mounted a connoisseur show of little-known work by a master of his time that both instructs and refreshes

  • Peter Howson: A Survey of Prints

    This retrospective of prints produced over four decades by Scottish artist Peter Howson, one-time member of the New Glasgow Boys and a former war artist, provides an interesting parallel with his paintings

  • Diane Arbus: in the beginning

    Burnished by a brilliant installation, this early work shows the storied American photographer already fully in control of the technique and vision that were to so greatly influence generations of artists to come