A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

First, a personal note about this week’s dreadful events. Three days after I most recently returned west from New York City, the entire north east of the US was torn up by “superstorm” Sandy. For anyone like myself who regards New York City as their home, the large-scale destruction that the storm left in its [...]

Nowadays it’s difficult to imagine the modernist mood that existed among artists during the early 1970s. Back then I was still a surly Fine Art student at Leeds University in England and eager to stay one modernist jump ahead of my contemporaries: in my simple-minded perception of things (and I was by no means alone [...]

Excellent news for southern Californian admirers of sophisticated painting and sculptures: Shirazeh Houshiary opened a small show based around her spectacular sculpture String Quintet (2011) at LA Louver last week. Rather implausibly it’s actually her first show in Los Angeles. I have been intrigued by Ms Houshiary’s work since I first saw it back at London’s [...]

I was delighted to learn that Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work was included at the First Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art, that I visited this week. (We had hoped to meet up and have this conversation in Kiev, but when Mr Hancock decided against traveling to Ukraine – very sensibly as it turned out – [...]

Carolee Schneemann was one of the first artists I met when I arrived in the United States in 1979. I was 25 years old, and I am ashamed to admit I knew little about feminist art in those days, or about Ms Schneemann herself. As I have told her on many occasions since then however, [...]

It’s a real pleasure to begin the new season with this conversation with Cornelia Hediger, who is responsible for some of the richest, most engaging photographs I have seen in a long, long time. In her two most recent series, Doppelgänger and the brand new Doppelgänger II, Ms Hediger has emerged as a visual story-teller [...]

You can hardly miss Laurel Nakadate these days. Her ten-year retrospective Only the Lonely has been at MoMA P.S.1. since January (through August 8), she has a solo show 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears at Leslie Tonkonow Art Projects (through June 25), she was Modern Painters’ cover-girl for April, and published today – in [...]

James Siena is one of our best-known contemporary abstract artists, and one of the most successful too. His first New York show was at Pierogi back in 1996, and since 2005 he has been represented here by Pace, who are staging his latest show at their  510 West 25th Street space through this Saturday, April [...]

Will Ryman took a somewhat roundabout route to sculpture. For something like a dozen years he maintained a career as a playwright, and – as he explains here – he continues to draw many of his references from the world of theatre and cinema. It was so that he could better explore the personality of [...]

Most of us have a bit of a love-hate relationship with art fairs. One of the worst things about them is the travel: Basel is a lovely little town in Switzerland, for example. But to get there I have to fly through nine time zones to Zurich, get the train from there, and then spend [...]