An autumnal offering of Artemisia Gentileschi, Dorothea Tanning, Henri Matisse, and Guston galore, among much, much else.
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter’s Slippery Mystique
Richter is undoubtedly an impressive painter, one who exhibits a mastery of practice but confusion of tone. His latest retrospective, Painting After All, doesn’t quite connect the dots.
How Painting Survives in the Digital Era
In her new book, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, critic Isabelle Graw ruminates on how painting remains omnipresent within the contemporary capitalist system and digital economy.
Updating Ruskin’s Sublime Landscape in the Age of the Anthropocene
New York University’s Grey Gallery takes on the concept of the sublime in contemporary landscape art.
Hints of the Real World in Art Basel’s Elitist Bubble
BASEL, Switzerland — How many works by Alexander Calder are out there?
Anselm Kiefer’s Heady and Heavy-Handed Behemoths
PARIS — Anselm Kiefer’s swashbuckling, material-laden, paint-encrusted canvases and “alchemical” vitrines supposedly transport us into thick intellectual zones of passion for German history and land.
Pop Irony’s Enduring Influence in the Art Institute of Chicago’s New Contemporary Collection
CHICAGO — The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, which opened in 2009, has reinstated its contemporary collection after giving over most of the space in 2015 to a much-lauded retrospective of the American sculptor Charles Ray.
Divisions of Labor: ‘Capitalist Realism’ at Artists Space
From Baudelaire’s 1859 dismissal of photography on down, the image-culture of the petit bourgeois “mob” has long served as a provocation to artistic thought, a relationship that reached its most literal apogee in the West with the Pop Art of the 20th century.
Organizing the World
This brief essay will focus on something that I think is important to Tumblr — the need to negotiate with media already in circulation. It is a desire that has been expressed variously throughout the 20th century by other artists and writers who negotiated, or thought about how to negotiate, with a world overflowing with images. Already in the 1980s you have media theorist Vilém Flusser describing a “telematic society of image producers and image collectors.” Before that Susan Sontag had already discussed how just about everything had already been photographed. Today, Hito Steyerl emphasizes that “postproduction has come to take over production wholesale.”
The Man Behind the Squeegee
Corinna Belz’s new documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting (playing at Manhattan’s Film Forum from now until March 27), offers a rare glimpse into the life and work of the celebrated and self-proclaimed “secretive” German artist. For a little more than 90 minutes, we watch Richter labor over two new paintings, as well as devise upcoming gallery shows and attend large-scale exhibitions of his own work. Although the reasoning behind Richter’s artistic choices may remain largely mysterious, a sympathetic rendering of the artist emerges.
Gerhard Richter Movie Opens in NYC Next Week
Next Wednesday, March 14, Gerhard Richter Painting will open at Film Forum in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The feature length film is the follow up to a 2007 short by filmmaker Corinna Belz called Gerhard Richter’s Window.
Required Reading
This week, architectural drama, Voina arrests, Gerhard Richter at the Tate Modern, image search tools that will change your life, plagiarism and cartoonists and a chromatic typewriter.