Bruce la Bruce is a legend in the satellite genres of gay porn, art, gonzo journalism, independent cinema, punk and academia. Here we have coffee a few blocks from the Berlin branch of the Peres Projects gallery to discuss the untitled zombie hardcore porn flick that BlaB is showing at Peres Projects LA until 2 June.
Continue reading "BRUCE LA BRUCE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Toby Christian's work probes into the taken-for-granted of art making and art display. Never departing from his sharp wit, Christian goes back to sculpture's fundamental issues: the relationship between matter and space, the link between material and intention, and the relevance of contemporary creation versus art history's overwhelming heritage.
Clayton James Cubitt creates arrestingly complex art juxtaposing extremes of purity and filth. The New Orleans-born and New York-based photographer cuts through superficial resolutions and contrived binary oppositions with his consistently crisp style.
Continue reading "CLAYTON CUBITT IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
The story of Count Panza, one of the world's leading collectors of contemporary art, started at a magnificent villa in Biumo, and the Count is quick to recall the first time he saw it: 'It was a great, green space suspended between heaven and earth,' he remembers, 'a magical place in which reality was transformed into the absolute beauty of the ideal.' The Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, which was opened to the public in 2002, hosts only 10 per cent of the collection that Count Panza has amassed over half a century: an impressive 2,500 works, ranging from Jean Fautrier and Franz Kline to James Rosenquist, James Turrell, Bruce Nauman and John McCracken, bought when nobody knew who they were, for little money and in large numbers. 
The work produced by the American artist Chris Larson examines the relationship between humans and machines - sometimes expressed through a moment of impact, sometimes through great toil and effort. In this interview, Larson discusses the ideas that contribute to the narrative of his films and sculptural installations. 
The survival of Carsten Holler's creation The Double Club is an art world success story with an up-to-date subtext. When the club opened in the innards of a Jack-the-Ripper-period warehouse behind the Angel subway station in London last November even drum-beaters were cautious. Yes, Holler's Slides had been both a critical and a popular success at Tate Modern, but that had been in 2006, the zenith of the boom, and this new elaborate project was opening in the teeth of a perfect storm. 
Continue reading "CARSTEN HOLLER DISCUSSES ART AS 'REAL POLITICS' WITH ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST" »
When Roger Ballen talks about his body of work, it is seldom in terms of social commentary. If the personal history of one of his sitters seems unavoidable, Ballen addresses the narrative only in the broadest possible way. To the artist, the images of small-town South Africa contain interplay of light and dark, painterly lines and the secrets that shadows obscure and reveal. For the rest of us, they're unforgettable. He talks here about his work, including a new book 'Boarding House', published by Phaidon.
Continue reading "ROGER BALLEN IN CONVERSATION WITH DOUG MCCLEMONT" »
To coincide with an exhibition at the newly relocated Hotel gallery in London, the German artist Michael Bauer talks here with fellow artist and writer Stefanie Popp about his paintings, which Rebecca Geldard in her recent review on Satachi Online described as: "tribal and vital, their compromised physicality appearing as if partially crafted out of the spare drips wiped from the edge of history's dipping pot. It's not really people that spring to mind when taking them in, rather the temporary stains and psychological debris they pollute places with."
Orly Genger's site-specific installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art appears ominous and intimidating despite its springy softness. Hand-knitted from thousands of feet of nylon climbing rope, "Whole" is painted black and stacked into imposing towers. The rope's black coating heightens the installation's imposing presence and adds a level of association which R.C Basker summed up in a Village Voice review of a similar installation by Genger at the Larissa Goldston Gallery: "Genger crochets her thick coils into floor-covering mats and topographical heaps that convey a sense of lava flows, or maybe a tire dump. Yet there is something engaging about climbing over this writhing mass, as if it is dumbly alive.'
Continue reading "ORLY GENGER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
In the tradition of usually secular people who practice the rituals of their faiths' high holy days, many apolitical Americans became avid, almost obsessive news junkies during Barack Obama's race to the White House. Along with highlighting Americans' fundamental desire to experience hope, purpose and faith in their political process, the just-past election raised profound questions about what it means to be a politically responsible citizen. Shortly after the election American artists Bradford Bailey and Rutherford Chang opened separate but complementary shows which addressed issues of politics, media, rhetoric and personal investment. 
Continue reading "BRADFORD BAILEY AND RUTHERFORD CHANG IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
For anyone needing to be reminded of art stardom at the apex of its assholeness, Brooklyn-based William Powhida is happy to provide a demonstration. As a spitfire art critic for the Brooklyn Rail, Powhida eloquently articulates his gripes, but in his own work he shows instead of tells. Over the past heady hedonistic years, Powhida masterfully crafted a fully formed douche-bag fame-sucking "art star" performance persona straight out of Bret Easton Ellis's oeuvre. Here, in the spirit of Easton Ellis, Powhida answers my questions in two guises: Bill - The artist and William - The Fictional Genius. 
Continue reading "WILLIAM POWHIDA IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
What is good about Cecily Brown is the combination of a more or less old-fashioned approach to painting and a sense of fun about being an art world star. One without the other is more expected. As a society we want achievers to be celebrities so we can tell that there really has been an achievement. Most of us are too distracted, uneducated, shallow or thick, or just too busy seeking fun, to have any other way of telling. 
Sara Rahbar confronts raw political concerns and cultural realities in her photography, video and striking textile sculptures that affect much of the world yet are rarely addressed by contemporary American artists. As an Iranian-American woman artist, it would be difficult for Rahbar's work to be viewed in a political vacuum even if she chose to be apolitical herself. But few artists with her background and ability are creating work that grapples more directly and confidently with Middle Eastern and American identity. 
Continue reading "SARA RAHBAR IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Frederic D first came to the attention of the Berlin gallery Nice and Fit (where his show is on until 20 December) through the artist's film 'Miss Baghdad', a critique of the consuming vapidity of high-gloss marketing which at the same time owes its own seduction to those very techniques (to watch a trailer for the film click here). In between making music videos Detjens was also creating photographic works, one of which was shown at PREVIEW Berlin and described by Berlin's Tagesspiegel as 'the Mona Lisa of the 21st century' (below). 
Continue reading "FREDERIC DETJENS IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
With work in 6 shows this autumn, plus a residency in New York, Conrad Shawcross is much in demand as an artist and inventor. Alix Rule talks to Shawcross about the way his work marries art with science, and about the influences on his work, from Buckminster Fuller to cosmological principles and conversations with astrophysicists. 
Continue reading "CONRAD SHAWCROSS IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
A blobby entity, a sea anemone of raw light, was pulsing moodily in a bell jar. I wondered just what I was looking at? "You're looking at a star really," said Paul Fryer, the artist behind this creation. "Effectively a star in a jar." 
Continue reading "PAUL FRYER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST" »
It's been just over a decade since Jeffar Khaldi, the Palestinian/Lebanese-born, American educated, Dubai-based painter, first arrived in the UAE and began work on giant coruscating canvases, whose strength and dazzling emotive power remains pretty much unequalled throughout the UAE. Ten years on, and Khaldi is following a hit show in New York earlier this year with an exhibition of new work at the John Martin Gallery in London. 
Continue reading "JEFFAR KHALDI IN CONVERSATION WITH ARSALAN MOHAMMAED" »
Gallery Koyanagi is one of Tokyo's top contemporary art galleries, representing major artists such as Sophie Calle, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Mariko Mori, Rika Noguchi, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tabaimo.
The gallery, a regular exhibitor at Art Basel, Frieze Art Fair, Art Fair Tokyo and CIGE, started out as a contemporary ceramics gallery in 1988 but its founder and director Atsuko Koyanagi reopened the space as a contemporary art gallery in 1995. She talks here to Ashley Rawlings, an art critic based in Tokyo, about the changes in contemporary art in Japan over the last 15 years. 
Continue reading "ATSUKO KOYANAGI IN CONVERSATION WITH ASHLEY RAWLINGS" »
Edward Durrell stone's 2 Columbus Circle, opened as Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art in 1964 and later housing the city's Cultural Affairs Department and several generations of pigeons, reopens September 27 as the Museum of Arts and Design. Art critic Jerry Saltz and architecture critic Justin Davidson toured the galleries, remade by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, then sat down to discuss the building, the institution, and their reactions. 
Good optical illusions, like those created by Devorah Sperber, create visual distortions which clarify the experience of seeing. For an ongoing series of works, Sperber recreates art-historical and pop-culture masterpieces using spools of thread. A deceptively random arrangement of 875 austere-colored spools of tread reveals itself to be a startling facsimile of the 'Mona Lisa' when viewed through a small sphere designed to replicate the workings of the human eye. Hung upside down, the threads only make sense when the optical instrument inverts them, just as the eye inverts imagery. Similar assortments of colored thread in near-by works reveal replicas of other iconic images from art history, such as Renoir's little flower girl (below) and Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein. 
Continue reading "DEVORAH SPERBER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
'You write what you know about, or you paint what you know about. I was looking at a lot of what other people paint and didn't really find I had much in common with it - I'm not into ironic abstraction or this anorak history painting, or confrontation of the digital or whatever. I just don't have anything to say about those things. Maybe I'm just simple; I like things that make me laugh, things I relate to. I don't think of them as ridicule... more a celebration of shortcomings, my own included.' Patricia Ellis talks here with fellow artist Saskia Wolde Olbers about her work which can be seen in an exhibition of new paintings on view until 14 September at Five Years gallery, London. 
Artists are often stereotyped as brooding misanthropes who equate anti-social behaviour with originality and integrity. And while being an artist can be lonely, art scenes are often perceived as cliquish and closed off to anyone but the initiated. But London-based twenty-six year old artist Matthew Stone is a real-deal artist of the highest order who creates art that is unique, challenging, wondrous and exciting because it is open and inclusive. With his salons and group projects, Stone undertakes the serious task of making playful art. 
Continue reading "MATTHEW STONE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Aaron Schuman interviews Broomberg and Chanarin about their photographic project Fig., inspired by the British Victorian mania for collecting. Broomberg and Chanarin will have a solo show in London this September in which they will exhibit the results of a trip to Afghanistan where they were embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province. 
Continue reading "ADAM BROOMBERG AND OLIVER CHANARIN IN CONVERSATION WITH AARON SCHUMAN" »
Argentinian artist Bruno Dubner first became interest in abstract photography when he started photographing the light penetrating his home at night. The entire place turned into a dark room where light revealed feelings and thoughts as well as creating situations he had never experienced before. He discovered they could only come clear to him when all the lights were turned off and the atmosphere was only punctured by the presence of rays penetrating the scene. 
Continue reading "MARIA CAROLINA BAULO INTERVIEWS BRUNO DUBNER ABOUT HIS VIGIL SERIES" »
Today, the virtues of veracity and creative uses of the truth are heatedly debated. And while many artists apply those concepts to dissecting America's identity, few of them address that subject with the genuine empathy, integrity and awareness of moral ambiguity that Dan Attoe demonstrates in his paintings, drawings and neon sculptures. 
Continue reading "DAN ATTOE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
A shipment of bronze astronauts has just arrived at Sheng Qi's hangar-like studio. There are ten half-scale and four life-size sculptures. They don't stick out all that much, surrounded by giant paintings of Lhasa, protesters, execution squads, busts of Mao, a drum set (hallmark of artistic coolness), and, at the center of the room, a low table with a miniature Tian'amen Gate surrounded by toy-like tanks, one or two of them overturned. Each bears Sheng's trademark four fingers - he cut off his little finger in 1989 in solidarity with the protesters massacred in Tian'anmen Square. 
Continue reading "AN INTERVIEW WITH SHENG QI BY WILLIAM CORWIN" »
In recent shows at London's Paradise Row and Dubai's The Third Line gallery, London-born and -based artist Shezad Dawood has swung a lasso around legendary Wild West iconography and pulled the image of the cowboy into the present day and our contemporary conflicts. In "If I should fall from grace with God," his first major London solo show, Dawood combined neon signs incorporating the Koran's concept of the "99 Names of God" with tumbleweeds, a symbol of the American Wild West. Around the glowing sculptures were expressionistic paintings of cowboys, slain wild-life and other images of rural American, all painted on black velvet and hung in vintage frames. 
Continue reading "SHEZAD DAWOOD IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
For her show at London's Victoria Miro gallery, up through August 2nd, Chantal Joffe presents a body of work painted from life. Invited behind the scenes at Paris Fashion Week, Joffe has updated Degas, who painted ballerinas as they prepped backstage at the Royal Ballet. While Degas was interested in depicting the dancers' stretching and preparing, Joffe captures glimpses of the girls as they are made ready for the runway. The 22 oil on canvas, board or cardboard magazine-sized paintings that Joffe created from snapshots she took backstage demonstrate that the 'girls' behind the stage are lovely and lucky girls, largely unknowable to others, and only sometimes known to themselves. 
Continue reading "CHANTAL JOFFE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Iranian-born, London-based Maria Kheirkhah uses performance, photography and video to explore issues of national identity, the media's promulgation of cultural stereotypes and the Western world's historically entrenched prejudices towards 'other'. She talks here about her fascination with Frankenstein which underpins her current exhibition at 198 Gallery in London until 15 August. 
Things being what they are these days (art world, money, cult of youth, Berlin), it's not uncommon to wind up at an opening and to feel surrounded by young adults who have just recently assumed the part of 'Artist' - or Curator or Gallerist or Critic or Whatever - and are playing it, maybe a little too ardently, just hoping not to get caught out. Such was the case with the crowd circulating through Brunnenstrasse's Curators Without Borders at last month's opening of the exhibition 'The Disappearance Gradient' - except they were in fact actors. All of them. The gallerist was played by a study-abroad student from North Carolina, Jerry, alias James Rafferty. One of his artists, erstwhile a fellow student in his acting class at the Freie Universitaet, was bullying him to kick out the riffraff and sell more art, faster. Another was inciting visitors to mess with his installation with the rally: "It's about the Process". 
Continue reading "DAVID LEVINE IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
In his art, Jay Batlle often references sophisticated New York City urbanite sources such as The New Yorker, the New York Times and the restaurant and foodie culture enjoyed by these publications' high-end readers. He has also created an extensive series of dog tags and surf boards adorned with 24k gold-plated handcuffs and cut-up credit cards to represent the debt incurred by living beyond one's means in a city like New York. But his work is less about the argot of an urban elite than it is an expression of his own knowledge about and admiration for good cooking, as well as his nuanced understanding of food's symbolic significance on all stratas of contemporary society. 
Continue reading "JAY BATLLE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Gather round and Tala Madani will paint you a tale. The Iranian-born artist, though she has spent most of her life away from her homeland, carries on a Persian penchant for storytelling. Narratives contained within each of her canvases are solemn, dark and humorous in equal measure. Madani explores the socio-religious based rituals of an imaginary world of Muslim men caught inside comic book panels of their own making. Having recently added painterly animations to her repertoire - violently hilarious films which prance and hiccup before our eyes - the artist continues her explorations of what it means to paint and be painted. 
Continue reading "TALA MADANI IN CONVERSATION WITH DOUG McCLEMONT" »
Loris Gréaud's work is more talked about than seen. His recent show 'Cellar Door', at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, represented the first time that the entire institution was given over to a single exhibition - and Gréaud is still under thirty. The Palais de Tokyo clocked 140,000 visitors to 'Cellar Door', breaking the institution's attendance record for any single previous exhibition. The exhibition, or a version of it, is now on at the ICA in London (until 22 June). Alix Rule asked the artist the following nine questions about his work. 
Continue reading "LORIS GREAUD IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
Nigel Cooke paints as if Clara Peeters or Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder had devoted themselves to depicting the backs of busted-up buildings. Manchester-born Cooke, who received an MA from the Royal College of Art and a PhD from Goldsmith's, depicts graffiti flowers (along with birds, sunsets and disembodied brains) drinking and smoking like hooligans. Yet while the flowers are not acting pretty, the paintings are gorgeous; and just as the graffiti inject beauty into his imaginary scenes, Cooke's ability as an artist renders ugly spaces and urban trash as poetically as the fruits and fading flowers painted by his Flemish master predecessors. 
Continue reading "NIGEL COOKE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Zhang Xiaogang no longer has to worry about being pressured into accommodating the market - he has a clause written into his contract with art dealers precluding any discussion of subject matter and style. He is very grounded for an artist who's work sells at auction for seven figures. He chain smokes like most Chinese men, dresses casual chic - sporting a Polo baseball cap. His work is everywhere; it hangs in the entrance hall of the Asia Society in Manhattan and his paintings are the only ones deemed worthy of a protective rope at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing. he talks here about the early influences on his work and what life is like now that he has reached Art Stardom. 
Continue reading "ZHANG XIAOGANG IN CONVERSATION WITH WILL CORWIN" »
Decay, mess and chaos are everywhere in the scenes Anne Hardy presents in her crisp yet uncanny imagery. At first glance, the unoccupied rooms that she photographs appear neglected but normal. In the spaces Hardy shows us, there are usually signs of rough repairs, but the furniture and settings simply appear beaten down and worn out by excessive, careless use. But in actuality, none of those objects have been manhandled or clumsily placed. In fact, no one but Hardy herself is responsible for their appearance and location. Because while her images seem to depict happenstance and irresponsible ownership, the objects were all built in her studio for the sole purpose of being photographed. 
Continue reading "ANNE HARDY IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
As the early creations of a pre-eminent critical figure in today's American art scene, the paintings that originally earned Artnet Editor Walter Robinson's place in the Manhattan art world of the 1980s are guaranteed to be of great interest. His "80's paintings" show at Chelsea's Metro Pictures (which also represents Cindy Sherman, Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley) is the first time that his "Romance Paintings" have been on view since the series was shown at Metro Pictures in the 1980s. 
Continue reading "WALTER ROBINSON IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
"For me, Ming Dynasty furniture is abstract art," Li Gang. Li Gang, who is having a solo exhibition this month at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, and will be featured in "P.O.P. Beijing/New York: Works on Paper" at the Pickled Art Centre in May, discusses the difficulties of making abstract art in China. 
Continue reading "LI GANG IN CONVERSATION WITH WILL CORWIN" »
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. 
Continue reading "GREGOR SCHNEIDER IN CONVERSATION WITHN AOIFE ROSENMEYER" »
'If you said to me a year ago you would be making a series of female nudes, I probably would have said: "You're having a laugh aren't you?' Martin Maloney discusses how he came to make his new series of work 'Actress Slash Model', which is on view in London until 17 May. 
Continue reading "MARTIN MALONEY IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Yearnings to be thin and searches for a "soul mate" fuel countless women's magazine editorials, internet empires and relentless self-loathing inner-monologues of women throughout the West. Yet as artists L.A. Raeven (identical Dutch twins Liesbeth and Angelique Raeven) demonstrate, women who desperately deny themselves food, and binge on self-help books, on-line dating sites and seminars about "compatibility" should be more thoughtful about what they wish for. 
Continue reading "LA RAEVEN IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
"This young generation in China has the greatest opportunities in the world right now," says Laurens Tan, a digital media artist and sculptor based in Beijing. Tan's appearance and demeanor are deceptively sleek, as is his artwork. Dressed in black, with spiky white hair and Corbusier glasses, he has the look of the classic aesthete. His recent creations - variations on the theme of the three-wheeled vehicle, or Sanlunche, that can be seen on almost any street in China - are for the most part on a toy scale. For Tan, the Sanlunche, whether in the form of a bicycle, motorized rickshaw, or minivan, is emblematic of the clever, scrappy and indigenous solutions to the congested life of Chinese streets, disappearing as quickly as those streets themselves. "The opposite of globalization is nostalgia," he quips. 
Continue reading "AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURENS TAN BY WILL CORWIN" »
Whether or not the work is commercial in intent or self-consciously counter-culture, part of art's allure emerges from the idea that the artist is a renegade figure whose vision is unique. Yet two of today's most thoughtful and thought-provoking artists produce work which is startlingly original because it calls into question clichés about individual creativity. For the past ten years, Eric Chan and Heather Schatz have been creating work together as ChanSchatz. Husband and wife, the two met in 1990 during a freshman figure drawing class at the University of California, Berkley. They allegedly finished each others' drawings and have been collaborating ever since. Their show at Albion in London is on until 25 April. 
Continue reading "ERIC AND HEATHER CHANSCHATZ IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
On a normal day, passers-by can peek into the ground floor windows of Monique Meloche Gallery and find a sparse, modest-sized space with a zealous sampling of contemporary art's most rapidly emerging names. Yet on this particular afternoon in Chicago, as Kendell Carter attended to last minute touch ups before his opening, the front room of the gallery experienced a spirited transformation. 
Continue reading "KENDELL CARTER IN CONVERSATION WITH SARAH PEARL" »
Sunday March 15th, a sunny afternoon in Beijing's art district, 798. Excavation for a sewage system is currently underway in the neigborhood's dirt roads, so everywhere is piled high with clods of earth and mounds of dirt. Laborers stand around armed with shovels, chain-smoking and bemusedly eyeing sunglassed art tourists decked out in Prada, Fendi and the ubiquitous Beijing dust coat. Xiao Xiong, the creator of the innocently titled "Bumped Into Installation, 2008", currently on view, is available for an interview in 15 minutes. "You can't even see my piece!" he jokes on the phone. 
Continue reading "XIAO XIONG IN CONVERSATION WITH WILL CORWIN" »
Colin de Land (below), the subject of a new book from Powerhouse, was one of those excessively rare art dealers who didn't merely earn himself a niche in art history but operated with such a distinctive touch that he seemed to exist within the art world as much as an artist - a Conceptual artist in de Land's case - as a gallerist. Anthony Haden-Guest talks here with the filmmaker John Waters who was also one of de Land's artists: 'Collectors loved Colin. He looked dead! But dead and sexy. And so everybody was always a little bit scared of him. And there's nothing better in the art world than to be very appealing and slightly scary.' 
Continue reading "JOHN WATERS IN CONVERSATION WITH ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST" »
In his videos and series of land art explosions the multi-disciplinary French artist Cyprien Gaillard questions a romantic view of vandalism and how we justify the various traces we leave on the landscape. Gaillard discusses his work with Alix Rule, including a new commission for the Berlin Biennale which will be unveiled on 4 April. 
Continue reading "CYPRIEN GAILLARD IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
Ana Finel Honigman talks to the young 'gallerista', Sara Tecchia (below) who opened her gallery in New York two years ago. She represents an unusually diverse roster of artists and runs the gallery with an openness uncommon amongst most dealers. 'I get artists' submissions every day and I respond to everybody. I always respond. It is my set rule: My office door is always open to artists.' 
In his sumptuously decadent and delightfully witty work on view at the Dicksmith Gallery until March 22nd, Edward Kay alludes to, references and directly appropriates important historical paintings. On an immediate level, his paintings are contemporary answers to important images of the Rococo period and other 18th and 19th century schools. But imitation is not the highest compliment he pays to his predecessors. Kay's real gift to the images he fondly re-formulates is the invigorating injection of humor that he uses to reawaken the pleasure of looking at what he describes as "manky old paintings." 
Continue reading "EDWARD KAY IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Lisa Ruyter's paintings may appear to have a distinctive paint-by-number quality. But they are very specific to Ruyter's experiences and offer unique personal observations. Ruyter takes her own snapshots and transcribes them onto canvases, outlining the forms with a bold border and then filling in the shapes with her signature palette of mint green, tangerine, dusty lavender and teal. The idiosyncratic color selection and the succinctness of her imagery create a spell that elf-earred downtown New York critic and character Reverend Jen summed up as, "looking at Lisa's paintings is like being drunk." Her show at the Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo is on until 22 March.
Continue reading "LISA RUYTER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Andy Warhol began the magazine Andy Warhol's INTERVIEW in 1969 and, typically, Warhol claimed that he started it as a way to get invited to movie screenings and opening parties, but it soon developed into a remarkable publication. After Warhol's death in 1987 Interview was acquired by Brant Publications, the publishing house owned by the industrialist and art collector Peter Brant. Brant has now taken over complete control of Brant Publications, Ingrid Sischy, the editor for many years, has departed and Glenn O'Brien has taken over as editor, a position he occupied between 1971 and 1974. He discusses his plans with Anthony Haden-Guest. 
Corentin Hamel interviews collector Marcel Brient and gallery owner Catherine Thieck on the occasion of the sale of four major works by Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun at Sotheby's Contemporary Evening sale in London on 27 February. 
'Matters of Opinion' is a new series of interviews we're going to be publishing in which Anthony Haden-Guest talks to key figures in the art world about topical issues. To launch the series he talks to Dave Hickey (below), one of the most highly regarded critics in the world, about the extraordinary expansion of art world, the astonishing prices artists are now fetching, and whether the boom is here to stay. 
Continue reading "ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST INTERVIEWS THE CRITIC AND CURATOR DAVE HICKEY" »
The American artist Mark Bradford discusses his work with Eungie Joo, formerly gallery director and curator at REDCAT in Los Angeles and now Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs at The New Museum in New York. Mark Bradford's work is featured in 'Collage', the second part of The New Museum's four-part exhibition, 'Unmonumental'. 
'John Richardson's multi-chambered apartment at the Greenwich Village end of Fifth Avenue is kind of a time machine. One moment you are at the high end of the Ecole de Paris - drawings, print, bits and pieces by Braque, Leger and Picasso, including loads of tauromachia - then you are whooshed right into the louche giddiness of Andy Warhol's Manhattan.' The indefatigable biographer of Picasso discusses the third volume which takes the story up to 1932, some twenty years before Richardson (below), now 84, first met the artist. 
Gaia is a street artist born in New York City. His distinct black and white linoleum images of the faces of small children and animals, such as roaring bears, can be seen all over Manhattan. He talks here to Eddie Alfaro. 
The embattled collective Artists Anonymous returned to their hometown Berlin this fall, following what looked like either a vacation or an exile depending on your perspective. After messy break-ups with their gallerists (New Yorkers Goff and Rosenthal ended the relationship with a lawsuit) and a successful interlude in London, AA opened their own space in Berlin near the new Haunch of Venison outpost. On the night of the new gallery strip's corporate vernissage, they held an open bar and all night-party - a snide joke on the part of a group of ex-addicts who don't themselves drink. Alix Rule talks to the collective about addiction, the influence of Joseph Beuys, why they feel the need 'to continue threatening the art world' with their existence, and their show 'Virus', which opens today at Haunch of Venison in Zurich. 
Continue reading "ARTISTS ANONYMOUS IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
Ranking, rating and list-making is as part of the holiday season as goodies and good will. Bright and friendly 'The Best Of' lists are standard fare in fashion magazines and fluffy holiday supplements. But thanks to 'The Rebel', London's newest fledgling art magazine, there is a dash of spice to cut the season's sugary sentimentality - the magazine's first issue takes on the issue of class, with features such as '23 Artists Tell Us About Their Social Class', and comes up with its own end of the year list - 'The Art World's 50 Least Important People.' 
Continue reading "REBEL MAGAZINE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Joshua Powell (below), one half of Dilettante Films, discusses their contribution to "And, who are you? Artists from Saatchi Online," an exhibition of artists from Saatchi Online which is on at the Sara Tecchia Roma New York Gallery in New York until 26 January. "Just Blow", a slick commercial for organic, free-trade cocaine, brilliantly mocks the sophisticate mores and selective ethics of self-styled urbane hedonists. You can view Dilettante Films' 'Saving Yossi' here 
Continue reading "JOSH POWELL IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Alison Jackson's recently released monograph 'Confidential' offers a photograph of Paris Hilton pampered and petted by attentive and adoring, burly prison Mamas in orange uniforms and greasy matted hair. In a short series of shots, Prince Harry wears his infamous SS uniform while getting down (to hardcore ganstra
rap, one imagines) with a blissful minstrel in black face and a figure in full KKK garb,
and then fondles a girl dressed in garters and a Hitler moustache. The series climaxes as a pretty, polished young lady removes the KKK hood and Prince William's mischievous grin is unveiled. 
Continue reading "ALISON JACKSON IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
A native of Missouri, Lisa Sanditz has trawled the American Midwest, painting scenes of bucolic oddities from a chapel made of car parts to spelunking caves. In 2006 she made her first trip to China, an experience that has set her on a new path of work examining the relationship between the Chinese and American commercial landscape. 
Continue reading "LISA SANDITZ IN CONVERSATION WITH STEVE PULIMOOD" »
For the past month, London's arts and culture columnists haven't been able to get enough of the drum set at Hauser and Wirth, on which you can record your attempts to play along to a single by the art world's darling native sons, Glasgow four-piece Franz Ferdinand. Even better, the song hasn't been released yet, and the best of the amateur attempts will be issued on a CD that precedes the album. The artist behind the project, Anri Sala, discusses his latest show, which closes 22 December. 
Continue reading "ANRI SALA IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
Savvy viewers know to mistrust their own eyes when looking at photography, in large part, because photographers' subversive uses of the medium have trained them to be skeptical. But Airyka Rockefeller's diverse photographic series go beyond highlighting aesthetic or conceptual manipulation. Her images raise unsettling existential questions about the broader nature of being present in one's environment, whether or not a camera is sharing the space. 
Continue reading "AIRYKA ROCKEFELLER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
When reading about a famous forgery case, who among us hasn't thought, for at least a second or two, that it would be nice to get our hands on a really good replica of a coveted painting regardless of whose hand really put the paint down on the canvas? For years, Eric Doeringer has been establishing himself as a New York art lover's Fairy Godmother by granting poor gallery goers' wishes for affordable little canvases of images made by their favorite art stars. Doeringer sells his 'Bootlegs' series outside hot Chelsea galleries, inside international art fairs and at glitzy exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial. 
Continue reading "ERIC DOERINGER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
David Lynch has famously declared that, "I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted." Scott Hunt acknowledges that his work is heavily inspired by Lynch, along with over noirish neo-gothic post-modern masters such as Edward Hopper, Charles Addams, Gabriel García Márquez, Andy Warhol, Andrea Mantegna and Joyce Carol Oates. "Death and the Maiden," his show this summer at Goff + Rosenthal's Berlin space, was one of the most disquieting and unforgettable solo shows of the year. 
Continue reading "SCOTT HUNT IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Charm is an often undervalued adjective and yet it overwhelmingly applies to Ellen Berkenblit's work. It's not an easy, run of the mill charm - it's charm interlaced with intrigue, nostalgia, and soft honesty. There's a palpable affection in Berkenblit's work if not slightly barbed... something that is carefree although slightly unhinged. For a self-confessed color-holic, it's remarkable to see a body of work containing so much black. 
Continue reading "ELLEN BERKENBLIT IN CONVERSATION WITH ADAM E MENDELSOHN" »
Anyone who was a child who made her Barbie dolls screw with Ken, or each other (and that's every child) can enjoy Nathalie Djurberg's claymation videos, but only adults can fully grasp the psychological, political and philosophical undertones of the 29-year old Swedish artist's joyfully depraved and brilliantly produced art. Djurberg will be participating at Performa, New York's biennial festival of performance art, which starts on 27 October. 
Continue reading "NATHALIE DJURBERG IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Captured in three Tokyo parks in the early seventies, Kohei Yoshiyuki's 'The Park' series features some of the most intriguing photographic works of art ever. Shot at night using flash and infrared film, the photographs show hetero- and homosexuals gathering for furtive sexual encounters in the Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks. The sixty photographs are published this month by Hatje Cantz and are also on view until 20 October at the Yossi Milo Gallery, New York. 
When Suse Bauer's textured abstract drawings are introduced to the London art public on Wednesday, October 10 with "Enter the Path," curator Emma Dexter's first exhibition as the director of exhibitions at the Timothy Taylor gallery, she will be one of three artists who will help to catapult one of London's top galleries into a new era. The twenty-eight-year-old Hamburg-based artist's delicate geometrical drawings and art-deco inspired installations have a vivid, compelling quality. As Dexter writes: "In a series of small drawings and collages, Bauer's rocks, stones and crystalline structures strive for perfection, they speak of desire, longing and supreme effort." 
Continue reading "SUSE BAUER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
After following her undergraduate studies with stints at the Slade, Florence Academy, and Paris's L'ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Natalie Frank continued on to a Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University. Yet while her representational tableaux are well rooted in an academic art tradition, her work stands in opposition to recent art school trends. The twenty-seven- year-old Texas-born artist merges the key concerns of late 20th-century art theory - gender, identity, the clash between personal and public - with a classically cultivated technique. Her first solo show with the Mitchell-Innes & Nash is on view in Manhattan through October 13.
Continue reading "NATALIE FRANK IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Manhattan-based artist Aurel Schmidt creates drawings with the care of a Victorian horticulturist. Using pencils, acrylics, burn marks, food stains, blood and archival paper, Schmidt details the interrelationship between our human excess and the debris we create with nature's beauty and natural decay. Because of the exactitude with which she represents every detail of her subject matter - from the vile textured paper of cigarette butts to the scales on a reptile or the petals of a flower - her images have been critically compared to Renaissance drawings. This month she will be showing a series of new drawings at Gallery @ Adventure Ecology in London. 
Continue reading "AUREL SCHMIDT IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
'When Welsh-born David Perry first left art college he and a couple of friends loaded the back of a Ford escort and drove to Frankfurt to show their work to Martin Kippenberger in the hopes of studying under him. Over the course of what transpires like a movie script, Perry ended up selling some of his paintings to Julian Schnabel who he's been working with for the last couple of years whilst making work of his own for his current solo show at James Fuentes LLC. I went out to the spectacular Schnabel estate on a perfect summer's day in the Hamptons to talk to him about his recent work.' 
Continue reading "DAVE PERRY IN CONVERSATION WITH ADAM E MENDELSOHN" »
While academics, scientists and copy-editors are honored for their single-minded obsessiveness; devoted fans, meticulous hobbyists and encyclopedically knowledgeable nerds who work in independent video and comic-book stores are usually scorned as eccentric, and slightly pathetic. But since his days as a graduate student with Royal College of Art, the Leicester-born twenty-nine-year-old has painstakingly recreated highly specialized outsider expertise. Tonight London's Haunch of Vension launches its Berlin space with performances by Jamie Shovlin; Lustfaust, his "legendary" conceptual experimental-noise band; and the Berlin-based group Schneider TM. The performance will be followed by 'Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1796-1981', a retrospective archive of Shovlin's 2003-2006 conceptual art project. 
Continue reading "JAMIE SHOVLIN IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Will Cotton's sumptuous oil paintings are in the soft focus, soft-core tradition of 18th-century masters Broc, Gerard, Franque and Fragonard. Like his predecessors, Cotton paints beautiful, creamy skinned nudes amidst luscious surroundings. But while Cotton's paintings recall the sensuality and delight of his forefathers, he is far from a mere copyist. Instead of painting high on the sugar of that decadent lost age in art, Cotton updates his opulent source material by replacing pastoral love scenes with mountains of sweets and erotic treats. 
Continue reading "WILL COTTON IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Paula Rego and Keith Coventry have already spotted the talents of Ulyana Gumeniuk, a Ukrainian artist whose paintings take on big issues of modern life - the neuroses of the family and marriage, conservative rituals and 'corrupt' regimes. Her work, inspired by Francis Bacon and Velazquez, is in two exhibitions this month, in Bath, UK, and Abele/Watou, Belgium. 
Continue reading "ULYANA GUMENIUK IN CONVERSATION WITH LAURA K JONES" »
Sergio Roger's projects have included a felt garden that can be worn as a skirt, stuffed hunting trophies, oversized cartoon-like headgear, and a backwards date - yet between them exists a strange and mature integrity. The young Berlin-based artist's work combines photographic, sculptural and performative elements. "For me, there's no real limit between them," Roger explains. It's all wrapped up in his working method - which warrants showing as well as telling. Alix Rule visited him in his Kreuzberg studio. 
Continue reading "SERGIO ROGER IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE AT HIS BERLIN STUDIO" »
Richard duPont makes hyper-accurate sculptures of his own body that are dramatically distorted. Although classical connotations abound in the work, duPont uses cutting edge technology and mathematics to present work that is both spiritual and (suprisingly) firmly anchored to 60's and 70's performance art. Adam E Mendelsohn caught up with duPont in his busy SoHo studio on a hot and sweaty Manhattan afternoon to catch a glimpse of the artist's preparations for his show this November at Tracy Williams in New York. 
At 95 Louise Bourgeois is soon to have one of her largest exhibitions to date in London. In anticipation of this show, which will feature several key works never shown int he UK before, Louise Bourgeois spoke to Doug McClemont about her relationship with her father, a new sculptural commission to commemorate those people who were burned as witches in Norway in the 16th century, her views on Marcel Duchamp, and the Sunday salons that Bourgeois still holds for young artists. 
Continue reading "LOUISE BOURGEOIS IN CONVERSATION WITH DOUG MCCLEMONT" »
Josephine Meckseper talks here with Simone Schimpf, the curator of the artist's comprehensive survey show - and her first solo exhibition at a museum - which is on view at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart until 28 October. Over 150 works are on display including a number of new works created specially for the exhibition. 
Turner Prizewinner Jeremy Deller has chosen a German allotment on the outskirts of Munster as the site for his latest project, 'Speak to the Earth and it will tell you', part of Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 which is on view through 30 September. 
Continue reading "JEREMY DELLER IN CONVERSATION WITH MATT PRICE" »
Ironically, Stella Vine is almost as (in)famous by now as the celebrities she paints. Her life-story, the on-going questioning of her talent, and critical controversy over her admission into the 'High Art' arena may be unknown to most HEAT readers. Now Vine has been given her first museum show in the UK, at Modern Art Oxford, which presents over 100 of her works including the now legendary Diana painting as well as many other depictions of celebrities and media stars. 
Continue reading "STELLA VINE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Henry Bond photographs evidence of haunted scenes. The images he presents in his fourth solo show opening on 11 July at the Emily Tsingou gallery in London are unnervingly still and disquieting, even though they overtly depict nothing more unsettling than anachronistic-seeming ordinary objects that are often in disarray. The mess in many of these photographs is banal, yet it does not appear entirely benign. And the reality is that it isn't. 
Continue reading "HENRY BOND IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Thomas Zipp deals fast and loose with the bygones of art history - a facet of his work much hailed by critics, who understandably get off on it. But you don't need to get all the jokes to appreciate his fine substitutions (a flattened kitchen stool flies through the sky as a convincing stand-in for a constellation'; holes are cut in the appropriate spots in a skeleton's anatomy). As a painter, Zipp is evidently conscious of the mysticism of his medium. Visiting the 'World Fair' one likewise suspects that for the artist the most fascinating wierdness out there may just be representation itself. 
Continue reading "THOMAS ZIPP IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
Lucky DeBellevue, like the best artists, is an alchemist. He elevates his humble materials into sculptural creations and explorations of form and space that become endowed with almost magical abilities. They defy gravity. They change color and evoke moods. They're solids constructed of holes. 
Continue reading "LUCKY DEBELLEVUE IN CONVERSATION WITH DOUG MCCLEMONT" »
Today is the last chance to see a series of new paintings and drawings by British artist Rachel Howard at the Bohen Foundation in New York. The new works incorporate dark shapes of hanging female figures that appear to have been poured onto the canvas, all previous brushstrokes dissolved into a perfectly smooth expanse of paint. Embedded in the saturated colours and glossy surfaces that characterize Rachel Howards work, the dire figures set up an uneasy tension between the subject matter and the vibrant physicality of colour, surface and layered depth. The New York-based critic Adam Mendelsohn talks here with Rachel Howard about this series of works and the new direction her work appears to be taking. 
Continue reading "LAST CHANCE: RACHEL HOWARD AT THE BOHEN FOUNDATION, NEW YORK" »
This June witnessed the inaugural run of LuminaTO, a heavily funded new arts festival that seeks to enshrine the city of Toronto as North America's newest cultural capital. The festival featured world premieres in theatre, dance, music, and the visual arts. It was also the setting for a new collaborative work between Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan and Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman. David Markus spoke to Atom Egoyan the mornign after LuminaTO's closing events. 
Continue reading "ATOM EGOYAN IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID MARKUS" »
On the 0100101110101101.org homepage, Eva and Franco Mattes, the Italian artist team who go by the number sequence on their eponymous website, declare themselves to be 'restless European con-artists' whose goal is to 'obtain the largest visibility with the minimum effort'. Their projects have included a Nike guerilla marketing campaign in Berlin, 'Life Sharing', a reality-internet piece offering free and unlimited access to the banal details of their daily computer activity, a series of reenactments of historical art performances which can be accessed via synthetic worlds such as Second Life, and 'United We Stand', a large-scale project involving up to 50 people and an international advertisement campaign for a fake Hollywood blockbuster movie. 
Continue reading "0100101110101101.ORG IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Christian Jankowski is an multimedia artist who has become known for involving himself with unlikely collaborators and letting the camera roll. In 2001 he got an American televangelist to hold his live service on the topic of contemporary art - the artist lay face down on the floor throughout most of it, more as a prop than a participant - and in 2003 he collaborated with an Asian production company to produce 'The Day We Met' - a series of background videos for karaoke in which the he appears as the stock romantic protagonist. His most recent project isn't a video piece but bronze casts of the human sculptures that pose motionless in costume for tourists outside art museums the world over. 
Continue reading "CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI IN CONVERSATION WITH ALIX RULE" »
Sadly for artists, being an art star rarely compares to real rock stardom. Solitary studio time and cottage-industry art fame doesn't often rise to the swagger and glamour of being seen and adored on a stage. Unless you are Guy Richards Smit. 
Continue reading "GUY RICHARDS SMIT IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
In her current solo show at London's Fred Gallery, Cathy de Monchaux has gone from making dark and sensual work celebrating aggressive sexuality to an all-white show protesting violent politics. 
Continue reading "CATHY DE MONCHAUX IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
According to Gandhi, 'those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares.' The nightmarish scenes set in saccharine-colored styrofoam and polyurethane plastic in Dutch artist Folkert de Jong's life-sized figurative sculpture installations illustrate the truth in Gandhi's statement. Inspired by the German Expressionist painters, De Jong arranges a hodgepodge of characters from serial killers, monsters and significant historical personages in horrifically decaying sets with the aim of skewering social stereotypes and revealing the ridiculousness of people in positions of power. 
Continue reading "FOLKERT DE JONG IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Artists Ernesto Caivano (top) and Zak Smith (bottom) first met in the late 1990s at the Cooper Union in New York when they were undergraduates. Since then both of them have concentrated their work around drawing, both embarking on ambitious projects - for Caivano an ongoing series of drawings which he describes as 'a fairytale for adults', and for Smith a drawing for every page of Thomas Pynchon's novel 'Gravity's Rainbow'. They met up again for Your Gallery magazine to discuss their work and the last decade (almost) since they first met as undergrads starting out. 
Heterosexuals often gush about how internet dating simplifies the sticky, tricky process of flirting with a stranger: after looking at someone's profile, preliminary introductions become much more efficient. But lists of preferences and tastes are far more reticent and archaic than the direct color code system gay men designed decades ago for streamlined cruising. The "world's most comprehensive hanky code," a pamphlet designed by the Santa Monica-based "Pleasure Chest Ltd," can be used by viewers to decode the significance of Dean Sameshima's dot paintings, inspired by its color-coded system. 
Continue reading "DEAN SAMESHIMA TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
As Gang of Four sang on the soundtrack to Sophia Coppola's movie, Marie Antoinette, "the problem with leisure/ is what to do for pleasure". Twenty-eight-year-old California-born artist Michael Bilsborough provides some elegantly, decadent possibilities. Bilsborough, who received his BA at Columbia University and his MFA at New York's School of Visual Arts, uses sinewy, slinky, lines reminiscent of Jean Cocteau's lines drawings and Andy Warhol's homoerotic illustrations to serve them up. 
Continue reading "MICHAEL BILSBOROUGH TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
As feminist scholars, child psychologists and literature professors have demonstrated, the trials and adventures of fluffy creatures who populate children's stories are serious stuff. In this tradition, Los Angeles-based artist and musician Marine Weber's mythological characters are powerfully empathetic because they are humanly flawed, reconnecting viewers with the awestruck personal identification they felt as children with the cursed and blessed characters in fairytales. An exhibition of Weber's work opens in London on 19 April. 
Continue reading "MARNIE WEBER TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
The metamorphosing men in 29-year-old New York-based artist John Kleckner's painstakingly meticulous ink and watercolor drawings harken back to Brecht's cynical assertion that, 'People are too durable, that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves, they last too long.' The
minute lines, magnificent detail and portentous symbolism of Kleckner's drawings evoke etchings by 15-century masters such as Albrecht Dürer.
Continue reading "JOHN KLECKNER TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
One of the art world's vital functions is to serve as a microcosm of the world at large. Personal dramas and social politics that play out within it are no different from those in any subculture, and galleries are increasingly like mini-corporations taking their cottage industries global as they expand across continents. But more significantly, when artists make broad, wide and (hopefully) deep statements about ideas and society, they can express their world-view within the space of a gallery. Few artists do this as effectively as Tracey Snelling, whose strikingly crafted first solo show is on view at London's Wedel Fine Art Gallery until 21 April. Snelling's installations juxtapose documentary photographs that she takes of signs, stores and homes in ethnically identifiable neighborhoods with dioramas she makes of those area's signature sights. 
Continue reading "TRACEY SNELLING TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
At a time when superficial versions of surrealism too often pass as interesting art, Marcel Dzama creates convincing evidence of Jean Cocteau's claim that "real art is a marriage of the conscious and unconscious." Populated by a reoccurring cast of characters, Dzama's surrealist imagery has the uneasy charm of a dream whose content is compellingly beautiful but whose illogic is subtly ominous.
At his third solo show with the Timothy Taylor Gallery, on view until 13 April, Dzama presents drawings, painted mannequins covered in fur and fabric, animal costumes dressed in suits, skull-sized replicas of hand-puppets, and a 30-minute original surrealist film 'The Lotus Eaters,' a morality play set to the score of Orson Welles' 1949 film 'The Third Man'. 
Continue reading "MARCEL DZAMA TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Karen Kilimnik's current Serpentine Gallery
exhibition (until 9 April) presents fifty or so pictures of very different kinds that allude to the painting of Old Masters such as Ruysdael, Stubbs and Raeburn. The portraits are often of actors, models or dancers embodying historical or literary figures - Paris Hilton as Marie Antoinette, Leonardo di Caprio as Prince Desire and Nureyev (below) as the Snow Prince. Karen Kilimnik spoke to Laura K Jones about the show and her long-term ambition to choreograph, design and cast a ballet which has finally come to fruition. 
If there were an affirmative action program within the art-world to admit the best representative of every kind of artistic practice, then Richard Kern would be the designated dirty old man. While there have always been, and undoubtedly always will be, lascivious older men using "art" as a lure for lovely young girls, Kern is one of the few to have garnered wide audiences in art, fashion and pornography by building a decades-long career photographing an endless array of cuties in compromising positions. 
Continue reading "RICHARD KERN TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Far and away the most spectacular group show in Berlin right now is at Max Hetzler's temporary gallery in a former warehouse in Wedding. "Kommando Friedrich Holderlin" brings together two formidable groups of German artists - Hetzler's own stable of established artists, including Thomas Struth, Albert Oehlen, Werner Buttner, Gunther Forg, and the most hardcore young German talent, including Thomas Zipp, Erwin Kneisl, Bjoern Dahlem, Thomas Selg, Andreas Hofer, Thilo Heinzmann and Andre Butzer, who has also curated the exhibition. Alix Rule attempted to interview Butzer for this magazine but the 33-year-old painter declined for "personal reasons". Instead he agreed to answer a "questionnaire" about his show, aimed somewhere between a school exam and a quiz from the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine. 
Organised as a theatrical installation of individual works that have been staged as ethnographic artefacts, the set-up in Juergensen's London solo debut exhibition presents a collection of costumes, sculptures and posters variously making oblique - but seamlessly, fluidly merged - references to Russian Constructivism, esoterica and contemporary youth culture. And the mysticals of the title?
Since the 1970s graffiti writers, a predominantly male subculture, have asserted an anti-establishment identity by building an evidentiary record of where they've been as they established their personas by tagging public spaces. For the last year, twenty-one year Belarus-born artist and professional high-fashion model Elle Muliarchyk has pioneered a girly graffiti - what she calls 'guerilla fashion photography' - which she stages in dressing rooms of high-end boutiques. 
Continue reading "ELLE MULIARCHYK TALKS TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Using an X-acto knife, Amie Dicke performs a vivisection on fashion. She slices off the flesh and features of slinky models from bus stop posters and fashion spreads that she tears out of glossy magazines, and carves the models‚ limbs, clothes and famous faces into sinewy designs. Javier Peres, the director of Peres Projects, the tastemaker gallery in LA and Berlin that represents Dicke, says of her work: 'She for sure uses fashion and related imagery. I've never felt that she comes to it from a place of not liking fashion, or even being critical of it, it is simply there and she uses it... the same way a junkie uses smack.' Dicke's work will be included in 'Fun de Siecle? Symbolism and Contemporary Art' which opens in April at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal. 
Muntean & Rosenblum assemble their pomo-pop-pastiche paintings from disparate source material including photographs, fashion editorials, mass-market ads and Old Master paintings. Though their artificially constructed figures are beautiful stylishly disaffected kids occupying urban idyll settings, the Frankenstein nature of their creation causes a disquieting sense of disconnection to creep through the artists' superficially cool imagery. Their work is are currently on view at TEAM in New York, and in May they will have an exhibition at Maureen Paley in London. 
Continue reading "MUNTEAN AND ROSENBLUM TALK TO ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
'For the past two years, Ryan McGinley has traveled throughout the US, UK, France and Mexico attending Morrissey concerts and photographing every conceivable aspect and angle of the performances. We walked through McGinley's exhibition 'Irregular Regulars' at New York's TEAM gallery and discussed the individual stories behind each of the 20 images he culled from the thousands he took.' 
An exclusive q & a with the artist, whose intriguing new works in collaboration with Enrico Serotti explore what they term 'very advanced services' and will be unveiled in Milan on Tuesday.
James Putnam is the man behind a series of gutsy exhibitions at the Freud Museum in London - he brought Sarah Lucas there in 2004 (she dressed up the psychoanalyst's chairs in underwear and united them with neon tubes for 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'), and in 2006 Tim Noble and Sue Webster were invited along with their bawdy 'Polymorphous Perverse' exhibition. Putnam discusses with Laura K Jones his most recent project, a Naples-London exchange between artists Wolfe Lenkiewicz and Maddalena Ambrosio. 
Sarah Hobbs constructs and then photographs uninhabited domestic spaces whose aberrations and excesses illustrate psychological pathologies. In her series entitled "Small Problems in Living," benign familiar settings become overwhelming and threatening as they might be perceived by a person suffering from paranoia, obsessive compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, or the type of generalized post-modern neurosis embodied by Woody Allen's comic manifesto, "I can't express anger. I just grow a tumor instead." 
Continue reading "SARAH HOBBS IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
High fashion may be the ultimate symbol of civilization at its furthest from nature, but Turkish-born and New York-based photographer Pinar Yolacan demonstrates that fashion can also illustrate our most anti-social desires and our fundamental fear of the fallibility of our flesh. She spoke to Ana Finel Honigman about her work and her forthcoming show at Istanbul's Yapi Kredi Cultural Arts Center. 
Continue reading "ANA FINEL HONIGMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH PINAR YOLACAN" »
Julian Stallabrass (below) is an art critic and a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute. In 1996, his sharply critical book on Young Brisith Art, High Art Lite, made him a notorious figure in the UK's contemporary art scene. Since then Stallbrass, whose criticism is tightly connected to his radical politics and Marxist theory, has published on internet art and on the globalization of the art world. He talks here with Alix Rule about activism, the internet and what's good and bad about Banksy. 
She was called the "most important artist today" on HBO's 'Six Feet Under'. She was the first woman on the moon, back in 1999 (well, not the real moon, but a fair facsimile of it on a beach in Holland), and for her latest project she is carving love stories into a thousand Spanish trees. Laura K Jones talks to Aleksandra Mir about the projects she is currently working on and her recent move from New York to Sicily. 
Continue reading "ARTIST ALEKSANDRA MIR IN CONVERSATION WITH LAURA K JONES" »
Clare Strand's crisp and chilling photographs confront us with evidence of our fears, loneliness, decay, frailty and death. She photographs what philosopher Julia Kristeva refers to as "the abject," or "what we permanently thrust aside in order to live." Strand's work is featured in the recently published Vitamin Ph, Phaidon's international survey of the best of contemporary photography. 
Continue reading "CLARE STRAND IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
For those of you who feel you missed on some of the greatest art shows last year because of geography, the Mobile Studios are here to rescue you. About as fluid as an art organisation can be, the studios are self-described as 'an internationally networked pilot project of a mobile, autonomous production laboratory for young artists, musicians, performers and cultural programmers', and they certainly deliver the goods they promise - sort of like a non-profit wandering and ever-evolving art fair. Lupe Nunez-Fernandez chats with Ela Kagel on the past and future of the project.
'I take photographs out of necessity. That just happens. That part of it is not difficult or especially a big effort. The most difficult and important part in the process is the editing.' Engström, on his new series documenting a space that lingered in his memory from childhood - an exclusive interview by Lupe Nunez-Fernandez.
Morgan Falconer met the New York-based artist Jonathan Podwil to discuss his forthcoming exhibition of paintings based on footage of an encounter between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussain in 1983, a meeting that the current administration in the Whitehouse would rather forget. 
Continue reading "JONATHAN PODWIL AT PLANE SPACE, NEW YORK" »
Mixing spooky surrealistic image juxtapositions with an entirely psychodelic kaleidoscope whirl of motion, Kudrjavcev-DeMilner's retro-tinged found photo animations point towards an investigation not only of the idea of constant re-creation of images as thought up by others. They also knowingly show a unique and infectious childlike fascination with the simple, magical power of manipulating time. Lupe Nunez-Fernandez interviews the artist on the eve of the opening of her solo show at Central in Berlin.
In 2006, the Village Voice critic, Jerry Saltz, wrote an article chiding Manhattan for its under-representation of women artists. Becky Smith confronted Saltz by pointing out that during 2006 she had staged seven solo shows by women, none of which he had reviewed, prompting him to write a follow-up article considering the under-representation of women in his own archives. Smith, whose Chelsea gallery is named after 'a sheep that leads the flock, usually bearing a bell,' talks to Ana Finel Honigman about her roster of rising starts, including Ellen Altfest and Adam Cvijanovic, and about the current abundance of 'dude art'. 
Continue reading "ANA FINEL HONIGMAN TALKS TO BECKY SMITH, OWNER OF BELLWETHER GALLERY, NEW YORK" »
The British, New York-based artist talks about why failure means more to her as an artist than success, and about the advantages of working both inside and outside of the gallery world - the pieces she made for her 'New York Beautification Project' - small landscapes in oils - were painted illegally over New York graffiti sites, throwing into question whether it was the graffiti act, the graffiti aesthetic or the graffiti writers themselves that the city, and particularly Mayor Giuliani, found offensive. 
Continue reading "ELLEN HARVEY IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
A critic for the New York Times, reviewing the 31 year-old New York-based artist's work in a 2005 group show, commended Gilmore on her 'pluck' before praising her 'unadulterated, raw and real' videos as 'the purest manifestation of true emerging talent.' You can see Kate Gilmore's performance-based videos at the Mary Boone gallery in New York until 16 December. 
Continue reading "KATE GILMORE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, McGinley shoots intimate portraits of friends far on the margins of social acceptability. But the humanity and poetry of his predecessors' work came from the pathos, pain and gallows-humour in their images, whereas the grittiness in McGinley's photographs glows with the exuberant bliss of being young, hot and acting out. Ryan McGinley talks to Ana Finel Honigman about shooting people naked, free love and his upcoming show at Manhattan's TEAM gallery - 20 pictures selected from the multitude that McGinley has taken during three years at roughly 100 Morrissey concerts. 
Continue reading "RYAN MCGINLEY IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
With insightfully tender awareness of the dynamic between child and thing, Jon Pylypchuk makes morose, moving and unsettling sculptures and collage paintings that resemble children's crafts and toys. His work summons up the ability of children to animate and empathize with objects, from a marketed, pre-packaged animal character to the random scrap of cloth that a lonely child invests with emotions and a secret psychological life. 
Continue reading "JON PYLYPCHUK IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Museum 52 is fast building a reputation as one of the most exciting young galleries in London. Co-directed by Chris Taylor and Matthew Dipple, the gallery is in the heart of London's East End and can be easily located thanks to its innovative artist-designed sign. Currently on view are photographs by Nick Waplington, and in 2007 the gallery will present for the first time in London the American artists Valerie Hegarty and Kon Trubkovich. 
Continue reading "JANE NEAL MEETS THE DIRECTORS OF MUSEUM 52, LONDON" »
Andree Sfeir-Semler left Beirut in 1975 to live with her German husband in Hamburg, where she founded a blue-chip minimal and conceptual art gallery. More than two decades later, she returned to her native city, where she opened a 1,000-square-metre sister-space last year. Weeks later, prime minister Rafik Harini was assassinated, Israel began to bomb the city and the gallery shut with the statement 'Lebanon is at War. The gallery is temporarily closed' posted on its website. Ana Finel Honigman met her shortly after the reopening of the gallery. 
Continue reading "ANDREE SFEIR-SEMLER IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
'I do get a lot of money for just painting an object white and putting it in a glass virtine! Ha, ha, ha. And I love money more than anything, so all the hurt emotions go away thanks to the collector. I just bought a £5,000 Azzedine Alaia white monkey fur coat yesterday [below]. I have no complaints about the art market. I don't see what the problem is.' Terence Koh airs his views on the art market, why gay artists make better 'dick art' than straight artists, and reveals his plans to create the Guernica of China in Beijing. 
Continue reading "TERENCE KOH IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
'Anyone even moderately self-aware would need to acknowledge the possibility that his or her intellectual passions, hobbies and even scholarly or professional pursuits are motivated at least in part by sexual interests ranging from curiosity to full fetish. Arousal is one incentive that compels London-based artist Danny Treacy to visit empty parking lots, cemeteries, parks or other isolated areas and scavenge for garments abandoned by strangers in circumstances he'll never know but can readily imagine...' 
Continue reading "DANNY TREACY IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
'In WWII, the British made this insane - and they thought brilliant - calculation that they could kill naught-point-two Germans per ton of bombs,' says Adam McEwen, himself a Brit, incredulously. 'Isn't it a surreal act to actually work that out?' Bombing, and death in general, are particular preoccupations of the forty-one-year-old artist whose work can be seen until 14 October at Nicole Klagsbrun in New York. Doug McClemont spoke to the artist about his obsession with death and asked him why he chose to write a series of obituaries for living celebrities. 
Continue reading "ADAM MCEWEN AT NICOLE KLAGSBRUN, NEW YORK" »
The art world is full of nerds who've reinvented themselves, but few are so bold as to turn their trauma into treasure. Yet scalding shame, awkward good intentions, raw vulnerability and almost constant anxiety are the subjects of Gerald Davis‚ pale, raw, cartoon-quality large-scale drawings and paintings. 
Continue reading "GERALD DAVIS IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Thomas Jefferson famously instructed, 'In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.' Yet for New York-based painter Ellen Altfest, style has been a manner of principle and her refusal to flow with fashion has made her rock-hard style into a virtue. While the New York scene was lauding grungy, neo-fauvist, slap-dash painting techniques and far-out-fantasy imagery as cool, Altfest was devoting months and months to meticulously rendering the objects she painted from life in her studio.
Continue reading "ELLEN ALTFEST IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »
Mary Heilman: Why do you do dirty feet?
Marilyn Minter: Because if you're dancing in a disco all night your feet get dirty, even if you have the most expensive shoes on.
'I've not thought of myself as a public artist, but I've always used the public in my work. So far I've always done it on the cheap - now I've been given money to do it.' Bob and Roberta Smith discuss a new public art project, 'Art U Need: An Outdoor Revolution', which will take place in and around the Thames Gateway. 
Tim Marlow, one of the judges for the forthcoming 'Your Gallery @ theguardian' exhibition, discusses White Cube's new West End gallery, which opens on 28 September with new work by Gabriel Orozco, and the gallery's determination to work with more emerging artists, such as the young American painter Ellen Altfest, a recent addition to its stellar list of artists.
Explore the possibilty of sound in this guided tour of the artist's work, whose most recent work can be seen in London starting today and in New York in October.
Continue reading "INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN VITIELLO, SHOWING AT MUSEUM 52, LONDON)" »
Inka Essenhigh discusses the progression from the hyper-slick expressionistic paintings she was making in the 1990s to her current work which, in a reflection of our times, is much more concerned with content than surface. 
'The art world was never interested in graff. They were only interested in the minstrel show; to be able to see posers acting out the parts of blue collar criminals in the cozy privacy of their salons... Basquiat was a fake COBRA artist, Scharf a circus pyrotechnician and Haring a shower curtain designer...' So say two key figures in the New York graffiti art community. We'd like to know what you think. Do you rate Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat? Is the whole point of graffiti destroyed when it's taken off the streets and displayed in a gallery environment? Let us have your views. 
"It's Thursday evening, the 'Miniature World' Show is about to open, and Tessa Farmer, one of the participating artists, is discussing the exquisite little creatures she calls 'my fairies'. I ask Farmer whether the fairies are straight out of hell. 'I'm not sure. I mean maybe they are. Ooh, I hope they're not from my mind. I just know they're evil and they keep getting more evil..."
The artist, whose work can currently be seen at Gloucester Road Underground Station, discusses her interest in nature, cities, animation, and wandering near Karl Marx's grave, in this exclusive interview.
Luis Gispert talks about making ghetto-fabulous art for the art ghetto. 
Ana Finel Honigman talks to Mathew Cerletty about honesty, efficiency and the good American values in his art. 
Dan Colen has a unique talent for combining grime with the sublime. Ana Finel Honigman talks here with Colen about the inebriating cocktail of personal, cultural and art historical references that find their way into his work. You can also put your questions to Dan Colen on Monday 17 July between 6pm and 7pm in the Your Gallery chatroom. 
Ralph Rugoff today revealed to Your Gallery daily magazine that Antony Gormley's next major exhibition will be hosted by the Hayward Gallery, a major coup for the new director. 
The Californian photographer, who helped to popularise large-format colour photography throughout the 1970s and 1980s, discuss what turned him on to photography in the first place, and his most recent book Chronologies. 
LNF 15 SEPT- 21 OCT...
Shortly before the opening today of his show at London's Serpentine Gallery, Thomas Demand spoke to the German film director and cultural critic about his work, revealing the conceptual ideas behind the central piece in the Serpentine show and the extraordinary Herculean task it has been to create it.
Copyright 2003-2008 © The Saatchi Gallery :
London Contemporary Art Gallery
:
Site map
)
)
)