A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

No one walking along West 53rd Street on the way to MoMA this summer can miss Mickalene Thomas’s remarkable installation Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires in the window of The Modern restaurant. What may come as a surprise to many MoMA visitors though, are the direct links that exist between her installation [...]

I really don’t think I have ever met a more inspiring artist than Marina Abramović. She is only a few years older than me and I have followed her work like an awe-struck younger brother since I first became aware of her  work in the late 1970s. At every point in her career, from her [...]

Had I not stumbled upon performance art in the early 1970s, it is very possible that I would have dedicated my artistic efforts to abstract painting after the particular example of my compatriot Richard Smith (born 1931). When I was a young British art student there were very few artists for whom I had more [...]

Many readers of A Sky filled with Shooting Stars will know that Kiki Smith is an artist for whom I have enormous regard. Back in 2006 I named her Whitney retrospective “A Gathering” as ARTINFO’s joint-best New York museum show of the year (tying it with Sean Scully at the Met) and a few months [...]

When I predicted the top museum shows of 2009 for ARTINFO back in January, I remember being particularly excited about this one, Alias Man Ray: The Art of ReInvention that opens at the Jewish Museum on Sunday (and runs through next March). Now that I have had a chance to preview the show, I am [...]

If there’s a less polite exhibit than Paul McCarthy’s White Snow in New York presently, I certainly haven’t seen it.
Pretty much throughout his entire artistic career – certainly since I first saw him perform in England in 1983 – Mr McCarthy has trained his artistic focus on the more disgusting aspects of the human condition: [...]

Thomas Allen has been a favorite photographer of mine since I first saw his work at the Foley Gallery in 2004. He describes his work quite simply: “I work with vintage paperbacks, mainly 1950s pulp novels. I cut them with an Exacto knife and make pop-up books. Then I light them for very dramatic effect [...]

A weather front passes over low hills and a broken row of small houses; the sky darkens; and, just as the storm is about to break, a bizarre and terrifying sight unfolds before our eyes. A wild bear, one of the proudest and most feared creatures that comes into more or less regular contact with [...]

I’ve known Yigal Ozeri for something like four years now, and written about his work for ARTINFO on several occasions. He is a genuinely larger than life character, and one of the most voluble, most likeable characters on the New York art scene. Born in Israel in 1958, Mr Ozeri has been working here for [...]

One of the hottest tickets at this summer’s Venice Biennale is for the British Pavilion, where 1999’s Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen’s film Giardini is showing. Giardini is a remarkable alternative view of Venice, featuring the municipal gardens where many of the Bienniale’s pavilions stand, but filmed in February long after the circus has left [...]