News & Stories
He produces portraits of himself as a cowboy and recreated industrial objects using clay. Jon Smith studied at the Institute of Contemporary and Interdisciplinary Art in the English city of Bath and now lives as an independent artist in the Netherlands. Nina Reetzke met him for a chat.
News & Stories
by Mathias Remmele
The exhibition "Building the Revolution" at Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau presents a range of Soviet art and architecture from the period 1915-35. The geometric idiom typical of these works lends the art an architectural feel as expressed in names such as "Painterly architecture".
News & Stories
by Nina Reetzke
It seems to be a regular sculptor's chisel. It just happens to have a strangely short blade. Frankfurt-based artist Jürgen Krause needed two and a half years to grind the originally more than ten centimeters long blade down by hand – the chisel has thus become proof of the grinding process.
News & Stories
His works seem familiar and strange at once. Martin Brüger makes simple additions to everyday objects. Sometimes the proportions change, then the color effect alters, or a kind of frame is created. Nina Reetzke spoke to the Darmstadt artist about his views on the things that surround us.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Joerg Bader
It would seem that the topic of the “nation” has by no means been exhausted – and this is true of the Venice Biennial, too. Nationality continues to play a major role in answering the questions of who is allowed membership and who is condemned to remain on the move. Examples from the Roma Pavilion and the disturbing photographic oeuvre of Hsieh Chun-Te from Taiwan show this most clearly.
News & Stories
by Anne Kaestner
The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (MMK), is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a major exhibition, which is being held not only in museum itself.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Barbara Basting
At previous biennials, you could have safely passed up visiting the Egyptian pavilion, as all they staged were pro-regime shows that did not seem to fit in an artistic context. However, following the unrest in the Middle East, a revolution is also taking place in the Arab art world – as Ahmed Basiony's videos demonstrate.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Annette Tietenberg
Already ahead of the show, the decision by Biennial Director Bice Curiger to incorporate a 16th-century Venetian artist into her exhibition concept sparked controversy. The news that three paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto would be on display in the Giardini alongside the latest productions from the studios and galleries in Berlin, London, New York, Sydney and Shanghai gave rise to amazement, admiration and indignation. And now the time has come: Contemporary art is no longer alone in the Padiglione Centrale. Is this bridging of several centuries a clever move by the curator? Or an embarrassing genuflection to the superiority of history?
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Thomas Wagner
Outside the US pavilion the tank tracks rattle. No worries. Venice hasn’t been occupied by the US Army. Rather, outside and inside the pavilion artist duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla explore the interrelationship of body, politics and power.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Annette Tietenberg
Markus Schinwald imagines being the forger of images that never existed. The portraits in prim living-room size on display in the Austrian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennial all come from the 19th century. And he simply added what they lacked in order to offer a contemporary image of man, that prosthetic God. Using retouched strings, fabric, rings and chains, the bodies are readied for the salon. Just as in Schinwald's videos, subsequent corrections and smoothly incorporated adjustments do not prevent the human figures strangely floating through time and space, bereft of bonds.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Thomas Wagner
The 54th Art Biennial will open on June 4 in Venice. Even today, with artistic horizons having expanded on a huge scale and the Biennial taking the form of spectacle and event, it is still an important source of inspiration – not primarily, but also for design. Which is why we will be reporting in the coming weeks on the Biennial's main exhibitions and country pavilions.
News & Stories
by Peter Raue
This year's Art Basel would seem to be an indication that the financial crisis has been overcome, as gallery owners were pleasantly surprised by the visitors' unexpected spending spree.
News & Stories
by Mathias Remmele
Once again, with his "Innen Stadt Außen" (Inner City Outside) exhibition Olafur Eliasson proves that he is able to achieve great effects with relatively modest means.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
"Fare Mondi - Welten machen" was the title Daniel Birnbaum chose for his major Biennale show at the Arsenale and in the Biennial Pavilion.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
Our era tends to be more backward-looking than future-led. Nonetheless Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's technofacist, imaginative awakening haunts Giardini. Only Tamara Grcic's life rafts help with this.
News & Stories
by Georg-Christof Bertsch
It would not let me go. I had to go back there two, three, four times. Back to this work from the glisteningly bright City of Water: "Orbite Rosse", a double video projection in Venice's pitch black Arsenale hall.
News & Stories
by Georg-Christof Bertsch
Architectural models usually depict buildings which have not yet been built, in a smaller form. In the Turkish pavilion it is a different story. Here, Ahmet Ögüt displays a model city of houses which no longer exist.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
An Italian bar is at times often more than simply a bar. Sometimes those who enter it get quite drunk without having drunk anything, as Tobias Rehberger demonstrates impressively.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
Not only those who wander through Venice always return to the point where they started from. Art likewise stage endless loops and thus irritates our customary ways of seeing. Roman Ondák shows how in the Czech and Slovak Pavilion.
News & Stories
A Questionnaire answered by Johanna Grawunder.
News & Stories
by Claudia Beckmann
Don't let anyone tell you there is no point investigating UFOs. On the contrary. The exhibition "U.F.O - Grenzgänge zwischen Design und Kunst" (U.F.O. - Design and Art) has opened in the NRW Forum in Düsseldorf.
News & Stories
What do you find unsettling about design? Three questions to Richard Prince.
News & Stories
Hussein Chalayan
"Afterwords"
News & Stories
Mona Hatoum
"Paravent"
News & Stories
David Adjaye
"Monoforms, Type IV"
News & Stories
Arik Levy
"Rock mirror"
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
Thomas Demand has clad the historical Metzler Hall in Frankfurt's Städel-Museum with a curtain that is no curtain but is rather a picture of one. The artwork is called "Hall" and would not have been possible without the assistance of Danish textile makers Kvadrat.
News & Stories
by Annette Tietenberg
While NASA – following Atlantis' return to Earth – bids a weepy farewell to manned space flight, an exhibition by Slovakian artist Roman Ondák at Kunsthaus Zürich revives that atmosphere of euphoria once associated with man's exploration of outer space. What, asks Roman Ondák, has become of the Soviet Union's Sputnik, which in 1957 became the first satellite to be launched? Did it really burn up when re-entering Earth's atmosphere? Or is it still out there, orbiting the planet?
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Thomas Wagner
In several of the pavilions and works of the 54th Venice Art Biennial we can see a return from the image to the space and thus to the incompressible here-and-now.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Joerg Bader
In no less than three country pavilions, artists use opera and song as a means of discussing and criticizing the state of the world. In the Icelandic pavilion this takes the form of a criticism of European immigration policies, in the Hungarian pavilion music represents a metaphor for the crisis in post-communist Hungary, while in the Dutch pavilion opera acts as a model for teamwork in the nation.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Joerg Bader
Mike Nelson has assembled a labyrinth in the British pavilion. It could be the product of our fantasy or equally exist in Istanbul – and it certainly undermines our notions of time, place and action.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Joerg Bader
In the Belgian pavilion Angel Vergara takes on electronic media and the newstreams they produce. As a painter, employing a range of painting styles, he seeks to defend himself against the flood of moving images.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Barbara Basting
Seldom was there are clearer art divide at the Venice Biennial than that this year between the advocates and the opponents of Christoph Schlingensief’s German pavilion, on which the chiseled “Germania” has been painted over with the words “Egomania”, alluding to a Schlingensief film of 1986.
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Barbara Basting
“Crystal of Resistance” is the title artist Thomas Hirschhorn has given to his work for the Swiss pavilion at the Biennial. But what exactly is the deal with this crystal and resistance?
News & Stories | 54th Venice Art Biennale – presented by Ligne Roset
by Thomas Wagner
Clattering tank tracks, any number of pigeons and a church for a dead artist: the Venice art biennial is once again a spectacular show. But this time much is far too sensitive, dripping in pathos and, despite there being several good pieces, essentially too harmless. Which begs the question: where is the international art world heading?
News & Stories
by Jochen Stöckmann
An arrangement by Gerwald Rockenschaub of just under 400 motifs upon a 70-meter-long wall is currently on show at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Is this a large, colorful picture, an advertising war or a semiological tsunami?
News & Stories
by Peter-Philipp Schmitt
U.S. American artist Mike Bouchet is showing a dismantled prefabricated house, model "Sir Walter Scott" in Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle. The sculptural exhibit was developed from the installation "Watershed" that Mike Bouchet erected in the harbor of the Arsenale in Venice as part of the Biennial.
News & Stories
by Andreas Bee
At this year's Light+Building fair Stylepark has presented itself in the new Hall 11 of Messe Frankfurt.
News & Stories
by Georg-Christof Bertsch
How would we build if we could build how we liked? What would our cities look like, would our submerged dreams come true? Marjetica Potrč offers us answers - in a light and playful way in the Arsenale, Venice.
News & Stories
by Georg-Christof Bertsch
Can art be instrumental in eluding the vicious circle of violence? Not being an officially recognized state, Palestine does not have an official pavilion. Nonetheless, the show "Palestine c/o Venice", demonstrates how diversely and vividly a subtenant can operate.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
In the giardini the spectacle is in full swing. People everywhere and art everywhere. Everything is important and everything clamors for attention. But in the film "Giardini" by Steve McQueen in the Great Britain pavilion, visitors are confronted with a surprisingly different image of the gardens of the Venetian Biennial and of art.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
A house full of art that's up for sale, and a Modernist bungalow in whose noble seats young men pose slurping their vodka-&-tonics. In the form of "The Collectors", Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have created not only a psychogram of art collectors today.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
What are we to believe: Is the German Pavilion once again a disappointment? Or has Liam Gillick delivered exactly what was to be expected of him?
News & Stories
A Questionnaire answered by Rolf Sachs.
News & Stories
A Questionnaire answered by Nynke Tynagel and Job Smeets.
News & Stories
Three questions to Tom Price.
News & Stories
by Claudia Beckmann
The "U.F.O. - Art and Design" exhibition at NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft in Düsseldorf concerns itself with the increasing indeterminacy and hybrid qualities of objects.
News & Stories
Konstantin Grcic
"Missing Object"
News & Stories
Richard Prince
"Nurse Hat Chair"
News & Stories
Ron Arad
"Box in Four Movements"
News & Stories
Martino Gamper
"A 100 Chairs in 100 Days"
|
