Articles

Consider if you will the bolster, a firm tubular pillow used in continental Europe. Right now some 420 of them flood the atrium of the Musée des beaux arts in Calais. They flow from a balcony to the ground floor, where they puddle in a spotlit maze. Amidst this intimate nest, abject puppets sprawl, and play out dark vignettes. But although there is a story here, the narrative is as private as a locked bedroom.

“Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957”, curated by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston Massachusetts and featuring archival materials, plus work by close to 100 artists, is the first major exhibition to focus on this unique moment of educational and artistic experimentation in Asheville North Carolina. With no external oversight, on the grounds of a former summer camp, progressive educator John Rice began designing Black Mountain's buildings collaboratively with a small group of students and colleagues who had seceded from a school in Florida that dismissed him for questioning its pedagogical strategies.

I’m an artist who makes videos, installations, performances, prints. My undergraduate degree is in Computer Science, and my graduate degree is an MFA in Art Criticism. So I am a person who is “good at computers”, but who has spent a lot of time thinking about art, technology, aesthetics, and politics. I use my programming abilities to create art that is connected to the theoretical and critical positions that interest me: the nature of images, the power of the archive, and the nexus of the political and the spiritual.

It seems that in recent years, we’ve been looking and even longing for the stars like we haven’t in decades. NASA announcements and films as Avatar, Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian reached millions of eager people. Have we, in spite of our optimism and belief in technological possibilities, abandoned all hope for our home, plagued as it is by continual crises and human pollution? Are we unconsciously searching for a new one in outer space?

New research in the archives has made it possible to pinpoint the exact location of Johannes Vermeer’s world-famous 'The Little Street'. Frans Grijzenhout, Professor of Art History at the University of Amsterdam, consulted seventeenth-century records that had never before been used for this purpose and clearly indicate the site of 'The Little Street' in Delft.

I would like to create a response in people, a feeling or a thought. I am always thinking of my audience as an intelligent one that can think and feel something.

Following the weekend of the November 13th Paris tragedy I was looking to escape my sadness through an immersion into art and its transformational powers. I thought I might find this by visiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to see Random International’s Rain Room exhibition.

Andrew Sendor (1977, U.S.A.) is the type of artist who revels in the use of different and differing media, mixing the visual effects in such a way that the viewer must decipher not only the subject of the work, but also the technique. All of Sendor’s works give the impression that they have been taken out of context, appearing as the imprint of a moment from the artist’s narrative. It is up to the viewer to then build up the story around these presented moments.

For 16 days in June 2016, Italy’s Lake Iseo will be reimagined. 70,000 square meters of shimmering yellow fabric, carried by a modular floating dock system of 200,000 high-density polyethylene cubes, will undulate with the movement of the waves as The Floating Piers rise just above the surface of the water.

Visiting an exhibition preview can impede an uninhibited view at the art at hand, but in the event of a large-scale installation that opens to the invitees at a specific time, it can also have a magical shine, as if you enter and explore a shrine together. However, this heightened sense of wonder can only partly explain why I was overwhelmed by a wave of goose flesh, even before I fully set foot in Kimsooja’s latest installation. That is the impact her art can have.

My personality and temperament are quite average, I think, but I am always aware of the unique world I can create.

In August 2015, North America’s most comprehensive international contemporary art fair - Art Basel - announced the appointment of Noah Horowitz to the new position of Director of The Americas. The news regarding the appointment of the Armory director to take over the leadership of Art Basel Miami, less than six months prior to its next edition, stirred up the already restless art scene. Noah Horowitz talks with Artdependence Magazine about his own preferences in art, the sources for his inspirations, and the art market’s adaptation to change.

The Fondation Carmignac presented last 18th November at the Saatchi Gallery a retrospective exhibition of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, showing for the first time a selection of the awarded projects since its creation in 2009. With the aim of bringing awareness to issues that may have been forgotten or underrepresented in mainstream news media, this award offers an artistic approach to photojournalism and a platform for it to be displayed both in an exhibition space and in a publication.

Jeju is a blackened island off the coast of Korea, an exotic upsurge of volcanic rock which in 2007 was named a World Heritage Site, thanks to its mysterious geology. It was here Greek/British artist Mikhail Karikis first heard the cry of the haenyeo. “I heard a very high-pitched sound coming from the sea. At first I thought it was a bird call or maybe seals,” he tells me via phone. “I asked my friend to stop the car and I saw a pod of black figures in the water.”

I’m mostly passionate and determined. I feel strong but not confident yet - I think it takes a while to get there. I’m also very demanding towards others and myself, and of course towards my work. I’m hardly ever satisfied, which is good on one hand and exhausting on the other.

Cristina Iglesias has said on many occasions that she defines her practice as building, rather than as sculpting. Her work has in fact an architectural approach, not only for the technical requirements of her sculptures, but also due to the ambitious challenges she achieves.

Samuel Saelemakers, Curator for Witte de With, is well aware of the careful balance that is required of curatorship - a balance between charging creativity and its controlled manifestation.

Apparently surreal and fantastic, Anj Smith’s paintings approach very realistic elements and current human matters. Her largest solo exhibition ‘Phosphor on the Palms’, currently on show at Hauser & Wirth London, is the culmination of three years of work and the expression of a new phase for the artist who, after twenty years painting, feels more brave and bolder than ever. Artdependence talked with Anj Smith about painting, art, languages and fashion in an interview at Hauser&Wirth London last October.

Zhanna Kadyrova, (1981, Ukraine) forms part of the new generation of Ukrainian artists, who have been deeply influenced by the difficult period of national self-determination during the Orange Revolution of 2004, and who have experienced the entire burden of rethinking of the controversies of the past, reformulating present dangers, and representing hopes for the future. "Hope" also happened to be the name of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, in which Zhanna participated for the second time.

Christie’s is honored to announce the sale of an extraordinary, seminal, museum-quality work by Roy Lichtenstein unseen on the market for 20 years.