DAILY NEWS, VIEWS, REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS
CRITICS' PICKS, OPENINGS, YOUR VIDEOS, YOUR BLOGS

'Ego Documents', Kathleen Bühler's first exhibition as lead curator at the Kunstmuseum, looks at current and recent autobiographical art in the age of what Richard Sennett called the "tyranny of intimacy".

This exhibition unites for the first time the collection of images the young Swiss artist Lukas Wassmann has made with his muse Eva Maria Küpfer. A question lingers over this show, whether it is the work of two extroverts or whether happenstance brought together two creative minds that together could make these pictures. But whatever the answer, when a woman in the frame gets a chance to be expressive, she can do it with attitude.
... read more...

Costumed figures on an urban crossing, a bull with runner and a very young baby are orchestrated scenes, if only short moments, that express immense potential in a new series of paintings by New York-based Ena Swansea.

Aoife Rosenmeyer reports on two films about artists shown at the recent Zurich Film Festival - Ich.Immendorff, a portrait of the German artist in his own words and those of friends and family, outlining the experiences and times that informed his art, and his determination to work as he lived in the knowledge that death was not far off; and The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins which follows Vanessa Beecroft's attempt to adopt twins from the Sudan.
To watch a clip from 'The Art Star and the Sudan... read more...

Aoife Rosenmeyer reports on an exhibition at Schaulager in which Andrea Zittel shows carpets, clothing, living capsules, illustrated diaries, billboard projects and video; and Monika Sosnowska presents new works playing with scale.

After the summer doldrums, Zürich's art scene gets back in action with renewed vigour. Though the city is relatively small it is the intersection of many cultural circuits, be they big money streams or philosophers' ways. Arnold Odermatt shows his photographs of Swiss traffic accidents; vibrant painterly carpets by Caro Niederer; a mini retrospective for Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor who died in 1990; installation and paintings by Indian artist T V Santhosh; and a chance to see the latest video ... read more...

Glarus is a small town set snugly in a densely forested valley, about an hour from the nearest city. It is not an environment where the phrase Mind the Gap seems relevant. But the phrase long ago left London and travelled the world on the tongues of former passengers, and its disembodied meaning is the catalyst for this exhibition.

This summer Bill Henson's work has been ruffling feathers in his native Australia, but the inclusion of his work in 'Teen City' hasn't provoked many viewers. It is probably because the first work they come across elicits a stronger reaction: Anoush Abrar's video '50 Cent Fan' follows a skinny girl in her early teens who takes up position in front of the camera before bumping and grinding her way through an American rap song, midriff exposed, hair twirling and holding intense eye contact.
... read more...

Aoife Rosenmeyer, a former curator with Artwise, discusses the process which led to Idris Khan's first public art commission at Howick Place in London's Victoria. The work recently opened to the public and is on permanent view in the pavement outside the old Post Office, the inspiration for the work.

David Claerbout's art considers how time changes events. Sometimes he pauses moments to elaborate and consider the actions they contain; other times he replays an action before a changing backdrop of light and hour to note the influence of locating that action then. In this exhibition the visitor walks into a football game, played in Algiers' on a small pitch between buildings. The projection appears on a screen, but also floods the room. Ambient sounds fit the image but do not specify a moment,... read more...

Aoife Rosenmeyer reports on the highlights of this year's Manifesta, including Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska's Polish amateur film archive; Graham Harwood, Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji's Tantalum Memorial, an archaic telephone exchange relaying contemporary calls which are a mournful reminder of the destructive mining of a finite metal used in mobile phones; Jörgen Svensson's films that parody the excesses of societies influenced by pop culture (below); Judi Werthein's investigat... read more...

Ugo Rondinone has had great success and visibility in recent years, but his work is still like quicksilver: one moment seemingly solid and quantifiable, then eliding one's grasp. So if you were expecting neon, think again. Nor are clowns to be found here.

Although Hito Steyerl had works at Manifesta 5 in 2004, at Documenta last year and other major exhibitions, her work remains better known in the field of film than in contemporary art. Her work is informed by film history, and she teaches film courses, but she uses the platform of art to put the structure of film-making itself under a magnifying lens.
To watch an interview with Hito Steyerl on Saatchi Online TV click here. ... read more...

A glimpse of Erica Eyres' work was on show at the recent Volta art fair in Basel, but Haas & Fischer's exhibition offered a more detailed look at two bodies of work by the Canadian artist: ball point pen portraits on paper and video works starring Eyres in every role.

Based in a former factory for the production of cisterns, the Alte Fabrik opened in 2000 as a centre for local arts organisations and artists. In 2006 its focus and ambitions were extended with the Kurator programme, which gives a curator the Alte Fabrik gallery as a blank canvas for a year's exhibition programme, after which they hand the reins to a successor. Christiane Rekade, the first person to fill the post, is realising a series of shows inspired by Bruno Taut's work 'Alpine Architecture'... read more...

It may be coincidence, but it fits neatly that an exhibition about expectations takes place under the banner of a gallery called waiting room. The Zürich-based curator Cynthia Krell has invited international artists to the gallery to examine this concept in different contexts, and in turn to query how this relates to looking at and appreciating art. More than just the expectations that arise as one waits nervously, these artists are looking at preconceived notions, suspicious objects, curious... read more...

The curators at Zürich's Kunsthalle have presented Tris Vonna-Michell and Mario Garcia Torres' work as two interwoven solo shows. Although their works vary enormously in form and content, they share a common seam of enquiry into how history is recorded, delivered and interpreted.

Having seen this exhibition, it's hard to shake the idea that Iceland is the home of determined hoydens whose relationship with their environment is visceral and passionate. Björk embodies this free spirit, and Gabríela Fridriksdóttir is a chip off the same block. Indeed the pair sometimes collaborates, Fridriksdóttir creating the album for Björk's 2002 greatest hits, while Björk was involved in Fridriksdóttir's film shown in the Icelandic pavilion in Venice in 2005. Since then, Fridrik... read more...

Aoife Rosenmeyer met the German artist Gregor Schneider at his new show in Switzerland to discuss his controversial career as an artist, which includes works such as 'Cube' (below), whose display in Venice was called off last year, and his latest plan to create an exhibition in which a real person will be displayed in the process of dying. ... read more...

This exhibition aims to set the story straight - Pop art was not a US invention. The narrative presented here is that due to World War II, the collaboration of western nations either side of the Atlantic and the cultural propaganda produced in America, the same mass-produced images became ubiquitous. These became the fodder of Pop artists, but the artists who started the trend were European. Which is a moot chicken and egg point. ... read more...

There could hardly be a better introduction to the works of Erwin Wurm than this extensive exhibition produced in collaboration with MUMOK in Vienna, the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and Lyon's Musée d'Art Contemporain. Ascending the staircase of the museum to its formal gallery, the visitor meets several of Wurm's 'Mind Bubbles', vast rotund blobs of Styrofoam sitting gravely on the landing, each snugly encased in a made-to-measure cotton cardigan. ... read more...

In her latest exhibition Angela Bulloch has a laugh at the expense of Dan Graham, cocks a snook at modernism, and yet celebrates the visual qualities of her materials; she doesn't need to be po-faced to create a work of value. Indeed, in the dim light that allows the luminous lines to be seen, the shadowy structure offers magical potential; here one waits with optimism. ... read more...

"It's conceptual art" explained the gallery assistant as he finished outlining the works to be seen in Stefan Brüggeman's solo exhibition; perhaps he feared I'd ask for my money back had I done a round of the gallery in 30 seconds. Conceptual, and spare, this show certainly is. The exhibition orbits the Black Box of the title, a labyrinthine space of darkness, flashes of light and recorded white noise which in its insistent being envelops and blocks out all other sensation, the opposite of a... read more...

The retrospective exhibition of Eija-Liisa Ahtila's works, co-produced by Jeu de Paume in Paris and K21 in Düssseldorf (where it shall be shown from 17 April this year), includes nearly all the artist's works in film, photography and sculpture over more than 15 years - this is not an exhibition to visit in a hurry.

Markus Schinwald's first solo show on a large scale consists of two major film works, a series of sculptures using limbs of furniture, two animated dummies, paintings and a cast of an elongated pregnant torso.

William Hunt made a big - forgive the pun - splash when he appeared at Art Unlimited, Basel last summer. His performance 'Put Your Foot Down', a song from inside a BMW filled to the brim with water (Hunt entered and exited via the sunroof), caught the attention of jaded fair visitors who didn't get to witness many death-defying feats as they prowled around the aisles. Although the artist only graduated from Goldsmith's College in 2005, curators have been keen to show his work across Europe at ... read more...

My cursory glance at the invitation to the German artist Volker März' exhibition at Römerapotheke led me to expect an artist akin to Stefan Balkenhol - after all, how much can one do with rough-hewn wood and a liberal application of paint? But this is an exhibition full of surprises - firstly, the scale of the works (their longest dimension rarely more than 20 cm), and secondly, the premise that Kafka was not consumed by tuberculosis in 1924, but made it from his bed to Palestine, taking his m... read more...