Special Report
The third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale opened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital. In Interludes and Transitions, the theme chosen by the Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, considers the world as a multitude of processions, taking as its point of departure the movements, migrations, and transformations that have long connected the Arab region with the world.
Having witnessed the killings two weeks apart by the US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents in the Twin Cities of our two decent and productive fellow American citizens Renee Nicole Good, a writer and poet of three children, on January 7th and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse for the United States Department of Veteran Affairs, on January 24th, both were 37 years of age (b. 1988)
This winter, at Almine Rech in Paris, Emily Mason: Other Rooms (Works from 1969-2017), is a six-decade survey of the artist's prodigious oeuvre, five years after her passing.
In the summer of 2020, a global wave of protests erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd, which occurred in my hometown, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
As I write from Minneapolis, surveillance helicopters circle over my neighborhood. They’ve been here since December of last year.
A city, any city, is the sum of its representations. If I say the word Naples, no discussion of its municipal budgets, housing scarcity, and overtourism can displace the folklore, urban legends, lies, scabrous historical half-truths, and fictions that gather in the word.
On 1/17/26 I was documenting the rally of a white supremacist agitator in downtown Minneapolis, where this individual was about to be dragged out by the local residents.
Throughout the years, my art has analyzed cultural societal views focused on the distinct bicultural, bilingual social norms.
The 2020 Report Project started as a way of witnessing the pandemic experience, a way of processing that world. The ICE occupation brought about a different set of concerns for me.
In ordinary times, I would write with great specificity, being careful to credit where credit is due, but in our current circumstances I am going to write in more general terms to avoid retribution against those who are doing the good work here.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy (1872), clearly asserts that there is a conflict between art and science. The issue was explicitly remarked by the Nietzsche translator and commentator, Walter Kaufman, in a footnote to his edition of The Gay Science,(Book Two, footnote 57). This later book, written between 1882 and 1886, prompts Kaufman to forthrightly make the claim: “it was there that he (Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy) first raised the problem of the relationship of art to science.” A commentator today might feel some surprise at learning of this. The current record of philosophical thought since 1872 has hardly acknowledged that an epistemological schism has taken place. Such has been the effacement of aesthetic thinking in modern culture.
When I first moved to New York after art school in 1977 I was often asked who my favorite artists were. I said, “June Leaf and Lee Lozano.”
As the Centre Pompidou prepares to close its doors for five years of renovation, it entrusts its final exhibition to Wolfgang Tillmans—an artist whose work has consistently redefined how images can be made, seen, and shared.
In the summer of 1928, while vacationing in the Breton seaside town of Dinard with his wife Olga Khoklova and their young son, Picasso painted a series of beach scenes featuring surrealistic bathers and shadowy cabanas. These works are often interpreted through the lens of his clandestine affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he had lodged nearby in a pension de jeunes filles.
The gaze is a missing object. The gaze is a movement of the soul, an ontological movement—a gaze towards the object, towards the work of art, towards the Other too. It's not a Bergsonian movement of time, it's a movement in space, without moving, and this lends itself very much to architecture. In particular, we were talking about time and how, in the end, looking is not just an ocular action, but also a bodily action: the body looks into a museum.
We often imagine that museum curators, exhibition curators and collectors collect works of art and everyday objects. But if we move away from this somewhat phantasmagorical vision of accumulation, from a logic of bringing back the missing object, of metaphorically bringing back the phantom limb, we can open up another perspective. We are merely passing through, while the objects remain. It's the objects that watch us go by.
Kader Attia experienced his artistic epiphany at the Louvre. Alongside with Elizabeth Peyton, he has been offered the status of “Hôte du Louvre” by the museum, acting as a fellow-traveller to the museum and holding a studio at the Pavillon de Flore. Amongst the many activities he has developed, including the Artist’s Lessons program, with a final sequence on September 25th, he conceived as seminar entitled What is Missing in the Object. This seminar was held at the museum’s research center, the Centre Dominique Vivant Denon, and brought together members of the curatorial team as well as leading figures from the contemporary world. The questions raised stemmed from both his work and the thinking inherent to the Louvre: how does the lack of an object, the lack in an object, the lack around an object, enable us to extend and clarify our perception of art, of the museum, and of our humanity?
Picasso created Woman with Vase in 1933, a monumental plaster sculpture of a female figure with her bent right arm extended to hold forth a vessel.
Well before the Banksy game of the disappearing auction piece, Charles Simonds has been playing with art’s relation to permanence, immediacy, memory, and ownership.
This article draws from a chapter of my new book on Pablo Picasso, which endeavors to offer a fresh perspective on the artist’s oeuvre. I trace the emergence and continuous recurrence of a theme—the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth as a metaphor for creation in artistic, spiritual, and other contexts—throughout the entire body of work, including his most iconic paintings.
Myriad terms hint at the pugilistic arena of references and realities that Deborah Kass was wrestling with when, between 1989 and 1992, she conceived and created her series “The Art History Paintings.”
After premiering A Year without Summer, Florentina Holzinger’s trajectory is as assured as her seven-syllable name, echoing the alliteration and assonance of the equally divisive Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Dangling from a quince tree at Sean Scully’s studio, a bald-faced hornets’ nest buzzes like a chainsaw. We’ve stepped through the back door into the garden for an impromptu pruning of things that the artist has planted in Tappan, New York over the past decade. This garden is a project of divine reclamation, a practice that runs through Sean Scully’s life and work, from the construction in 1978 of his studio at 110 Duane Street in New York, to the paintings he made on Long Island during a transformative residency in the summer of 1982.
The Albertina, one of Austria’s premiere cultural institutions, has appointed Ralph Gleis as its new director, succeeding Klaus Albrecht Schröder. Previously the head of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Gleis conveyed his vision for the Albertina, the Albertina Modern, and the Albertina Klosterneuburg to the Rail’s Editor-at-Large Steven Pollock.
The installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude elicit a powerful, emotionally bewildering and at the same time exhilarating effect on the people experiencing them. Documentation exhibitions of their works were on display at The Shed in New York (Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates) and Surrounded Islands at the NSU/Ft. Lauderdale Museum.