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...
“My aim is to investigate the power of a rewritten history.” So says American artist Titus Kaphar, who divides his time between New York and Connecticut. Kaphar is that rare artist at the moment, a man with a keen interest in art history, an interest that goes way further back than the start of the 20th century when Picasso changed art...
One of my issues with contemporary abstract art is that there is too much time devoted to young artists who are guilty of simply splashing their paintings with lashings of any exotic colour they can get their hands on, and not enough platitudes and praise offered to abstractionists who indulge us with their calculated ways of working. Whilst some...
Italian artist, Dusciana Bravura, combines a classic national art method – mosaic – with her own sense of wit and humor to create the sweetest, most fun and fresh menagerie of blinged out animals you’ll ever see. The process is probably painstaking – there are hundreds (thousands?) bits of tiny beads, glass, pearls, and gold on these...
Henry Jackson is a contemporary artist working out of San Francisco, California; he works primarily in the abstract but will often incorporate deconstructed human figures into his paintings to create a multi-layered and complicated composition that demands focused attention.His paintings are eerily beautiful – you’re initially drawn to the...
Susie Wong is an artist, art writer and curator living and working in Singapore, and it’s her recent 2014 exhibition, (after image) My Beautiful that caught my eye. At the centre of this exhibition were five heftily sized drawings of Susie Wong’s father, a man she drew from the front, sides, and back. Because of their near life-size scale...
Stumbling upon Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s eponymous Hirshhorn exhibition in 2004 remains one of the single most satisfying and genuinely surprising moments of my life. The exhibit was Gordon’s first North American solo show (and maybe the last? he’s remained relatively under-the-radar in the States compared to his notoriety and success...
If Rebecca Horn is not a cult artist, it’s hard to define what we mean by ‘cult artist’. But the truth is that Horn isn’t really viewed as a cult artist at all. From her distinctive looks, to her body of work that spans five decades and includes whispering Chinese voices in the dark, rattling hanging typewriters, Donald Sutherland dancing...
The collaborative relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michael Basquiat developed in the 1980s after they were introduced to each other by art dealer Bruno Bischofberger. This relationship – both personal and professional, the good and the bad – was detailed in The Andy Warhol Diaries. Beginning in 1976, Andy Warhol began calling his...
In the months leading up to his suicide, multi-media artist Jeremy Blake became notorious for being erratic and paranoid. He and his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, also an artist, were becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea that the Church of Scientology had created a vast and dangerous conspiracy against them. While their friends and family...
