Jeff Koons: EASYFUN-ETHEREAL
New to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood is a colorful show of work by Jeff Koons presented at Gagosian Gallery. ‘Easyfun-Etherial’ is a series of paintings the contemporary artist began in the 1990s. First shown at the Guggenheim Berlin in 2000, the series expanded to include twenty-four large-scale paintings in total. Each of the layered, stylized works offers a spontaneously comprehensive depict...
this time, this place
Any and all Art Basel Miami-goers will undoubtedly find themselves exploring Miami’s Design District between visits to the art and design fairs, private collections and museums. This week only, stop by Chrome Hearts to see the show ‘this time, this place’, located in the gallery atop the luxury brand's retail space, for the ultimate high fashion meets fine art experience in Miami Beach. ‘this time...
Tadao Ando – The Challenge
World-renowned architects are just as deserving of museums shows as some of history’s greatest painters. Last year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art hosted a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of the late architect’s birth, while most recently, Paris’ Pompidou Center opened a major retrospective honoring the work of Japanese architect, Tadao Ando.
Freaks - A Cult Film by Tod Browning
Freaks, a 1932 American pre-Code horror film produced and directed by Tod Browning, was considered too shocking for audience viewing at its initial time of release, so several scenes were cut, resulting in an abridged runtime of 64 minutes. Based on a cast of real sideshow circus performers, the film chronicles the lives of these entertainers, driven by one character in particular, Cleopatra, a co...
Moon Dancers: Yup’ik Masks and the Surrealists
Opening this week at Di Donna Gallery is a fantastic show celebrating the intersection between nineteenth and early twentieth century Yup’ik masks from the central Alaskan coast, and early twentieth century avant-garde works of the Surrealists. The exhibition brings together notable sculptures and paintings from the surrealist movement in conversation with rare Yup’ik masks; the commanding, humani...
Villa Necchi Campiglio
Tucked away in the center of Milan lies a 20th century architectural marvel that goes by the name Villa Necchi Campiglio. The Necchi Campiglio family, members of Milan’s wealthy industrial elite of the 1930s, commissioned leading Italian architect Piero Portaluppi to design this utterly stylish safe haven to distance themselves from the traditions of everyday life.
Jewelry: The Body Transformed
Jewelry is the oldest form of bodily adornment known to man, having the ability to convey a message and transform the object’s wearer much like clothing, oftentimes in a far more subtle and sentimental manner. In the latest exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, jewelry is explored through the lens of its transformative capabilities and the manners in which ornaments activate the bodies the...
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict
A behind the scenes look at the story of the art world’s most wildly eccentric patron and collector, Peggy Guggenheim. “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict” documents the personal and professional highs and lows throughout the bohemian life of a woman who dictated the discourse of early 20th century art. From her move to Paris as a young girl in 1920, where she befriended avant-garde artists such as Cons...
Studio 54
In 1977 Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell opened Studio 54, a nightclub in an abandoned CBS television studio on west 54th Street in Manhattan’s Theater District. In just six weeks and with no liquor license, the duo revolutionized New York City nightlife, making Studio 54 an overnight sensation and the most popular late night destination in the entire world.
Grey Gardens
If a real life tale of two wildly eccentric personalities inhabiting seemingly incomprehensible living conditions is a compelling plotline, then the 1976 American documentary ‘Grey Gardens’ is a film for you. The story chronicles a mother daughter duo, both named Edith Beale, two formerly upper-class women – and relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis – whose reclusive tendencies have forced them into...
Sketches of Frank Gehry
What makes Frank Gehry one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, living architects? If his 80+ rule-breaking structures erected around the world aren’t reason enough, perhaps the film ‘Sketches of Frank Gehry’ will offer ample insight. In 2000, Gehry afforded filmmaker Sydney Pollock extensive insider access to his studio – over the course of five years – unmaking his genius process of creation. F...
Je Suis Couturier
The late-and-great Tunisian master of the female form, Azzedine Alaia, once famously proclaimed, “I am not a designer, I am a couturier”. Alaia often knew women’s bodies better than they did. He spent his lengthy career focusing feverishly on cut and technique, up until his final days working in his atelier this past November. Admired by many for his renegade tendencies, Alaia famously rejected fa...
Urs Fischer 'PLAY'
For his latest show ‘PLAY’ at Gagosian Gallery, Swiss-born, New York-based artist Urs Fischer puts an atypical spin on the classic game of musical chairs. In his characteristic, neo-surreal fashion, Fischer challenges convention through his work, inviting viewers to interact with nine office chairs that seemingly have lives of their own, moving gracefully around an open space, responding to the pu...
Things - Urs Fischer
Leave it to artist Urs Fischer to make the visually irrational seem, well, somewhat rational. Amidst the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan stands a life-size rhinoceros – produced from a 3D scan – carved out of aluminum, sheltered by commanding arched windows in a vacant building on Fifth Avenue. Whether or not you have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this African-dwelling animal in the...
Gerhard Richter Painting
In the spring of 2009, legendary German painter Gerhard Richter granted filmmaker Corinna Belz insider access to his studio while working on a series of large-scale, colorful abstract paintings. This remarkable film documenting the artist at work, painting passionately to classical music and manipulating each wet canvas with squeegees of varying sizes, offers viewers a fly-on-the-wall perspective ...
Celebrating Tintoretto
Jacopo Tintoretto, one of the most celebrated and preeminent Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, is widely known for his large-scale narrative scenes and thoughtful, prolific portraits. In celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Tintoretto’s birth, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art honors the late artist’s legacy through an exhibition centered on an innovative, lesser known as...
Bacon - Giacometti
This summer the Foundation Beyeler, Basel’s Renzo Piano-designed jewel box of modern masterpieces named after its founder Ernst Beyeler, presents an extraordinary show highlighting the work of two of modern art’s most prized figureheads, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. Last year, the museum’s galleries hosted an early career retrospective of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. This year, ...
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures
If a picture is worth a thousand words than the photographic oeuvre of controversial American artist, Robert Mapplethorpe is sure to serve as history’s most detailed depiction of downtown New York throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. ‘Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures’ is a chilling documentary honoring the life and career of the late artist, who passed away of AIDS in 1989, which brings together a...
Jean Dubuffet Théâtres de Mémoire
The work of French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet is internationally recognized and praised in the constructs of 20th century art history on account of his resourceful utilization of unorthodox materials and his unique approach to the two-dimensional presentation of space. New York’s Pace Gallery is celebrating the prolific career of Jean Dubuffet in a show honoring his monumental body of work...
King Lear
Actress Glenda Jackson is back on Broadway in the latest adaptation of William Shakespeare’s royal-family tragedy, King Lear. The Shakespearean drama depicts the story of an aging King Lear, played by Jackson, who disposes of his estate between three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia – played by Elizabeth Marvel, Aisling O’Sullivan and Ruth Wilson, respectively – ultimately denying the younge...
The Art of the Steal
Whether or not you’re familiar with the world famous Barnes Collection, The Art of The Steal is a Must See documentary. Dr. Albert C. Barnes, an unfriendly chemist from Pennsylvania who made his fortune in the early 1900s from inventing a drug to treat gonorrhea, amassed a collection of late-19th- and early-20th-century art, estimated today to be valued at $25 billion. Barnes, a terribly cranky ma...
Hilma af Klint: Painting for the Future
Born in Stockholm in 1862, Hilma af Kint began producing strikingly radical abstract paintings just after the turn of the 20th century. Klint’s deftly rendered early works were some of the first examples to rid artwork of any representational context, developing a visual and metaphysical language later adapted by her internationally recognized, widely-exhibited contemporaries. Years before Vasily ...
Eames: The Architect & The Painter
Arguably the most important American designers of the 20th century, husband and wife team Ray and Charles Eames lived life with no boundaries. The duo met during WWII while working on the design of plywood splinters when they developed a construction technique to bend plywood, thus unlocking the key to mass-producing Charles Eames’ initial wooden chair design. The pair soon married and established...
Tom Wesselmann: Standing Still Lifes
Pop art icon Tom Wesselmann produced nine monumental works between the years of 1967 and 1981, which make up a series known as the “Standing Still Lifes”. For the first time in history, the complete body of work is being presented in a single show at Gagosian Gallery on 24th street. Each large-scale work is composed of multiple, shaped canvases depicting commonplace objects, carefully positioned i...
Delacroix
Widely regarded as one of art history’s most prominent figures, Eugène Delacroix forever transformed the trajectory of nineteenth century European painting though his unique style, daring choice of subject matter, vibrant color palettes and bold brushwork. Throughout his over four-decade-long career, Delacroix explored a rich variety of themes including literature, history, religion, culture, anim...
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Prado Museum located in the heart of Madrid, Spain houses one of the world’s finest collections of Renaissance art. Despite the museum’s hundreds of masterworks by the likes of Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Raphael and Rubens, The Garden of Earthly Delights by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, housed in the building’s lower galleries, is amongst the most impressive and complex works ever created in...
What A Day Was This
Opening on March 8th in the lobby of Lever House, Gordon Bunshaft’s iconic glass skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, is a site-specific installation, titled ‘What a Day Was This’, by young, New York-based artist Adam Pendleton. This unique show, commissioned by the Lever House Art Collection, incorporates a wide range of techniques and media, two recurrent themes in Pendleton’s multi-disciplinary pra...
The Art of Tailoring
While the world knows Azzedine Alaïa, the late Tunisian fashion designer who rose to prominence in the 1980s, by his famed bodycon dresses and sculptural construction techniques, few had been granted access to understand ‘Azzedine the collector’, an equally important yet exponentially more discrete facet of Alaïa’s four-decade career in fashion. Now, with the help of Carla Sozzani and curator Oliv...
The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller
If you find yourself in midtown Manhattan this week, stop by Christie’s to experience the prolific collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller, on view through the weekend until auctions begin with the 19th and 20th Century Art evening sale on Tuesday, May 8th. The Rockefellers spent their lives, in part, devoted to acquiring exceptional objects, with an esteemed focus on Impressionist, American and...
Damien Hirst Colour Space Paintings
Damien Hirst began his prolific series of Spot Paintings, among his most recognized works, back in 1986. The British artist’s initial creative motivation was to produce paintings that were painted by a human trying to paint like a machine. While the first two works within the series were loose and less minimal than the subsequent pictures, the mechanized technique behind this body of work eventual...
The Salon Art + Design Fair
Every November The Salon Art + Design welcomes the world's finest international galleries exhibiting historical, modern and contemporary furniture, groundbreaking design and late 19th through 21st century art. Visitors will find designs by the great 20th century masters, as well as creative works by today's most innovative young artists. Look for Art Deco, Mid Century Modern from America, France, ...
Dan Flavin at Chiesa Rossa
In 1996, American Artist Dan Flavin was invited by Italian priest Giulio Greco to create an artwork for the restoration of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa Church in Milan. Flavin completed a site-specific design for the 1930s neo-Roman style Catholic Church, constructed by architect Giovanni Muzio, two days before his death. One year later, in 1997, the project was finally realized in thank...
Jean-Michel Basquiat – Xerox
Was there ever an artist more New York than Basquiat? Reminiscent of the city’s graffiti facades and walls plastered in advertisements, Xerox at Nahmad Contemporary highlights an often-unexplored corner of the late artist’s body of work: largescale collages using xerox copies as the medium. Basquiat’s fascination with the xerox machine, and indeed his use of technology in his art in the early 1980...
Roma
News that ‘cinema is dead’ has not yet reached Mexico, and Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film ‘Roma’ is the proof! Based on Cuarón’s own upbringing in a middle-class home in 1970s Mexico City, Roma is a humane, masterfully tender portrait of Cleo, the family’s housekeeper and nanny. A pivotal work of social and emotional realism, which chronicles a year from Cleo’s perspective, the film taps into the tr...
Josef Albers in Mexico
During their first visit to Mexico, in the winter of 1935–36, Josef and Anni Albers knew that they were in a “country for art like no other.” The couple returned to Mexico thirteen times by the late 1960s, developing a passion for pre-Columbian art and architecture that would influence Josef’s abstract painting and prints and fuel his innovative approach to photography. In 1933, after the Nazis c...
Urs Fischer, BLISS, 2017
First shown at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Rome, Italy, Urs Fischer's Bliss, 2017, a single large-scale sculpture, is now on view at 39 Spring Street through the end of the year. The interactive installation is a MUST GO for adults and children of any age! Read below for a short excerpt taken from the show in Rome's press release. "Almost three meaters tall [...] Bliss is realised in plasticine, ...
Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory
I went up to San Francisco last week and saw the luxuriously spacious Vija Celmins exhibition curated by Gary Garrels. Celmins, an acclaimed Latvian-American artist, came to LA in the mid-1960s and worked in Venice Beach, making surreal paintings, drawings and sculptures that are at once elegantly understated and maniacally intense.
David Hockney
For nearly 60 years, David Hockney (British, born 1937) has pursued a singular career with a love for painting and its intrinsic challenges. This major retrospective—the exhibition's only North American venue—honors the artist in his 80th year by presenting his most iconic works and key moments of his career from 1960 to the present. Working in a wide range of media with equal measures of wit and...
The Gospel According to André
It is about time fashion’s favorite, larger-than-life personality got his turn in the spotlight. In the newly released film, ‘The Gospel According to André’, director Kate Novack chronicles the vivacious life of former Vogue editor André Leon Talley. From his humble beginnings in North Carolina and his early days in New York City answering phones for Andy Warhol, to assisting Diana Vreeland at The...
Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
In an age when technology and connectivity are so closely aligned with culture, artists have grown to achieve new levels of celebrity and fame, sometimes even surpassing that which their work merits. Many can attribute Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali as the earliest and most noteworthy examples of this contemporary phenomenon, but truth be told, it was perhaps Frida Kahlo who pioneered this notion o...
Musée Yves Saint Laurent
The work of twentieth century fashion’s most renowned and respected designer, Yves Saint Laurent, is forever immortalized through the recent opening of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech. The late couturier’s love affair with Marrakech began in 1966, when he and his partner Pierre Bergé first visited the Moroccan city; a holiday that had a career-long influence on Saint Laurent’s life and w...
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
This week’s ‘Minnie Muse Must See’ is Netflix’s latest documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. The film chronicles the turbulent life of American author Joan Didion, whose personal struggles have unquestionably contributed to her literary success in her writing of novels, screenplays, essays and autobiographical works. Didion, who grew up in the 1930s and 40s in Sacramento, California,...
Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Foundation Louis Vuitton
As fashion month comes to a close, there is one Parisian show happening off the runway that is sure to leave you speechless and definitely wanting more. The work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is taking the French capital by storm in the newly opened exhibition honoring the late artist’s legacy at the Foundation Louis Vuitton. The career long retrospective, aptly titled ‘Jean-Michel Basquait’, celebrat...
Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel
Since rising to prominence in the late 1980s as a member of the group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), Sarah Lucas has become one of the UK’s most influential and internationally recognized talents. Since representing Britain at the 56th Venice International Art Biennale in 2015 with a major solo exhibition titled ‘I SCREAM DADDIO’, Lucas’ work in sculpture reflecting objectified represe...
Adam McEwen: 10, FEELS LIKE 2
10, FEELS LIKE 2, featuring the work of New York-based contemporary artist Adam McEwen, is the latest site-specific exhibition commissioned by the Lever House Art Collection. The show’s immersive installation plays off the landmark structure’s iconic architecture – for which the Lever House Collection is named – and the sleek materiality of the building’s lobby-turned-gallery space.
Marc Newson
Is design art? This age old question will certainly be put to rest by the latest exhibition at Gagosian Gallery featuring new work by Sydney-born, British designer Marc Newson. Using his practice as an opportunity to explore and enhance what already exists in the world, Newson seeks to simplify, beautify and technologically improve everyday life through methods of design and innovation. From the...
Visitors to Versailles
During the reign of Louis XIV, the royal palace of Versailles and its glorious gardens played host to flocks of French and foreign visitors, including royalty, ambassadors, dignitaries, musicians, artists, writers, tourists and day-trippers. This magnificent public court on the outskirts of Paris was an international hub of communication and world relations in addition to being open to the decentl...
Artists' Jewelry, From Calder to Koons
On March 7th the Musée des Art Décoratifs, located in the western wing of the Palais du Louvre, is opening an extensive show devoted to artist jewelry, highlighting the private collection of Diane Venet. Over the past three decades, Madame Venet has amassed over 230 pieces by the likes of Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Niki de Saint Phalle and Louise Bourgeois, amongst man...
Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again
It’s hard to believe that America hasn’t experienced a full-scale retrospective of one of its most beloved and celebrated icons, Andy Warhol, in over 30 years. Opening this week at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again” is the first comprehensive survey of the late Pop artist’s work in over three decades; reasserting Warhol’s overwhelming importance to a new...
Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth
Since opening its doors in September 2015, The Broad has made its blue-chip collection – formed by namesake founders Eli and Edythe Broad – available to the city of Los Angeles. Now, the museum is playing host to equally as influential traveling exhibitions such as “Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth,” which opened in last week, marking the first major survey of the American Artist’s work in...
Peter Halley ‘New York, New York’
The Lever House Art Collection’s latest show is a two floor immersive experience by Peter Halley called ‘New York, New York’ – an apt title considering the artist is a Manhattan native and has been working in his hometown since the 1980s. A central figure of Neo-Conceptual, abstract painting and printmaking, Halley is known for his colorful, Day-Glo canvases that employ the geometry of architectur...
The Value of Good Design
Is there an art to good design? The Museum of Modern Art’s latest exhibition entitled 'The Value of Good Design', certainly suggests there to be, arguing that while utility and aesthetics are not generally unanimous, at the highest level of design we oftentimes expect them to be.
Michelangelo
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently home to a-once-in-a-lifetime exhibition celebrating the work of visionary artist and inventor Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Michelangelo’s considerable virtuosity in the fields of paintings, drawing and sculpture provide the foundation for all forms of Western art, as they are known today. Hailed Il Divino (“the divine one”) by his contempo...
Margiela, Les Années Hermès
The city of Paris is fully embracing the genius of Martin Margiela. Between a brilliant retrospective which opened earlier this month at the Palais Galliera, celebrating Margiela’s two-decade-long run as creative director of his namesake maison, to a recently opened show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, highlighting the Belgium designer’s hugely influential tenure at Hermès, there is no denying t...
American Masters: Basquiat
From living on the street and tagging buildings in downtown New York as a teenager, to collaborating with Andy Warhol, dating Madonna and achieving worldwide critical acclaim in less than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat will forever be remembered as the voice of a generation. In his shockingly short career, Basquiat developed a visual language and style that came to define the 1980s New York art sc...