Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

If you thought you knew everything there was to know about Andy Warhol, the undisputed high priest of Pop art, the exhibition “Warhol Underground” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz  might just change your mind.

“I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap dancer” and “I don't paint any more, I gave it up about a year ago and just do movies now” are just two of the many statements made by Warhol in the 1960s that signified his ambitions beyond the pictorial field.

An artist must realize he is truly prolific when his works start cropping up on tableware. Such is the case for Jeff Koons, the art-world pop star whose candy-color–steel balloon creatures have visited the Met’s roof, Versailles’s gardens, and the Whitney (at its old address).

A five-story, cast-iron building in New York's SoHo neighborhood was designed by Nicholas Whyte in 1870. Almost a century later, artist Donald Judd bought 101 Spring Street and the address has been associated with him, his family, and his oeuvre ever since. At the time, Judd used the ground floor as his personal gallery, pioneering the idea of “permanent installation” in contemporary art and turning his very living space into a sculpture. When the artist passed away in 1994, access to the building was limited. It wasn’t until Architecture Research Office restored the residence, even down to the patina and chipped paint, that the Judd Foundation opened the building as a public museum.

Tate Britain has hired the founder of Nottingham Contemporary to replace director Penelope Curtis, who presided over an often controversial five years at the organization.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, said Alex Farquharson had established Nottingham Contemporary “as one of the leading galleries in the UK”. It is one of a number of regional contemporary art galleries to have opened in the past 10 years. “He has created a programme that serves local and national audiences, working closely with artists and reflecting history as well as the present,” Serota said.

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery announces a new exhibition, Artist to Artist, featuring photographs of prominent twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists from the Albright-Knox’s Collection.

Taken by fellow artists, these portraits were created over a span of more than seventy years, and capture artistic figures that define the modern and contemporary art world. Artist to Artist blurs the boundaries between artist and subject while highlighting the museum’s long history as an artist-centric museum through active engagement with contemporary artists.

Gerhard Richter's catalogue raisonné continues to take shape as the artist's output from 1976 to 1994 has now been fully documented.

But what about the artist's early works? The painter has developed a reputation for rigorously editing his oeuvre, routinely striking works from catalogues, Tagesspiegel reports. He's also threatened to pull loaned works from museum collections.

Add the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a growing list of museums, including the Guggenheim and the Louvre, that are launching new satellites from the mother ship. Late last month, during 250th-anniversary celebrations of the Hermitage’s founding by Catherine the Great, the New York architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote Architecture signed a contract to design the Hermitage Modern Contemporary, an outpost in Moscow that will draw on the Hermitage’s rich 20th-century art collections and also display new work.

Germany's most important contemporary artist, Gerhard Richter, is the latest art star to criticize the German government's planned tightening of their cultural protection legislation.

Last Sunday, Georg Baselitz took radical action and withdrew all of his works on long-term or permanent loan from German museums to protest government plans, which would restrict artworks classified as “nationally significant cultural heritage" from being exported.

Contemporary art giant Bruce Nauman will be honored with a full-dress retrospective, organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Schaulager, in Basel. It's slated to open at the Schaulager in March 2018 and come to New York in September that year.

Co-curating the show are MoMA's associate director, Kathy Halbreich, Schaulager's senior curator Heidi Naef, and MoMA curatorial assistant Magnus Schaefer.

Coinciding with the release of a quasi-confession from Bill Cosby, whose art collection is on view until early 2016 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African art, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announced Tuesday the acquisition of new works by a dozen artists and artist groups from Iran, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the U.K., and the United States.