David Hockney is arguably the world’s greatest living artist. Now 78-years-old, he’s suffered a stroke, and is almost completely deaf. But he’s still working, still creating – and still wowing with a mercurial originality that is inspiring. When many people think of Hockney and his art, they think of swimming pools, boys in showers...
When many of us think about Italian Renaissance art, we think about the usual trio: Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. All three were geniuses who seemed to be touched by the hand of God. Between them, they produced some of the finest art the world has ever seen. But few of us make that trio a quartet by including the name Caravaggio. To those in...
According to many of his contemporaries, Mark Rothko was a genius. He was an innovator who made giant canvases that absorbed the spectator, creating consummating experiences the artist said were meant to be spiritual and akin to religious ecstasy. But when the swinging sixties came along, Rothko and his deeply intellectual paintings were brushed...
Everyone has heard of Andy Warhol, and mostly everyone knows that he had associations with the Pop Art movement. Most of us are even aware that he painted the Campbell’s soup cans, as well as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Still more of us might be aware of the fact that a Warhol print sold last year for a staggering £50 million. But despite his...
Vincent Van Gogh is a treasured artist among art lovers, whilst the main things everyone else knows about him is that he painted twelve sunflowers in a vase, had a ginger beard and chopped off his own ear. But his painting The Starry Night is world-famous, and its intoxicating use of complementary colours to inject energy and tension into the...
It’s taken a long, long time for Sonia Delaunay to be granted her first retrospective in the UK, and indeed she died back in 1979. With that in mind, it’s something of a travesty that it wasn’t until 2015 when the Tate Modern, London, finally did what no one else had the guts to do, and created an ode to the great artists work. Perhaps one...
If New York-based artist Rebecca Morgan wasn’t from the country herself, her unflattering portraits of “country bumpkins” could be deemed offensive. Her Neanderthal subjects are buck-toothed, hairy, wild, grotesque, inhuman – and positively terrifying. But there is a candour here, a humour that is fresh and inspiring from a young...
Sigmar Polke was one Germany’s seminal 20th century painters until his death in 2010. Alongside Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, Polke was at the forefront of post-war art in Germany, and in 2007 he scooped the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen. Most famous for his paintings, Polke was also an accomplished photographer and was above all else...
Gregor Schneider is a German artist who, aside from forging a reputation for constructing horrific rooms, stirred controversy in 2008 when he was quoted as saying that he wanted to install a dying person in an art gallery, because “I want to show the beauty of death.” His quotes were blown-up by German newspapers, whose headlines read...
“A camera should be a little bit cold, a little bit harsh.” The words of Diane Arbus, sixties and seventies American photographer who became widely known for her photographs of marginalised people; dwarves, nudists, transgender people and giants. In short, she photographed “freaks”, and yet at the same time was scared that this would come...
Few female Surrealist painters were given the credit their talent warranted at the time, but Leonora Carrington was one whose art was recognised, and who also holds the honour of being one of the last surviving Surrealists. Born in the UK in 1917, Carrington spent much of her artistic life abroad, with much of her work painted during her time in...
