The studio is a place of self-mirroring, self-haunting, a space where the artist plays out the day-to-day reality of the fantasy of being an artist.
Whitechapel Gallery
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A Flawed Retrospective for a Surrealist Rebel
There is so much information handed to us in the exhibition, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy that we risk forgetting what we might think if we came fresh to a painting.
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Exposing Ghosts of the Past, Michael Rakowitz Pulls Back the Curtain
Throughout his career, Rakowitz has been making artful reconstructions of lost heritage.
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How the Cosmos Has Inspired a Photographer’s Vision
Thomas Ruff’s photographs question history, art making, and the medium itself.
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Guerrilla Girls Find — Surprise! — that European Museum Collections Are Heavily White and Male
The Whitechapel Gallery has recently commissioned the feminist collective to create a new artwork that resurrects the 1986 Guerrilla Girls campaign “It’s Even Worse in Europe.”
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The Sculptural, Musical Paintings of Mary Heilmann
LONDON — When I first walked into the Whitechapel Gallery, I thought I was looking at a Barnett Newman zip painting on the far wall.
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An Anthology of Queer Art Theory Puts Artists First
Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press recently published Queer, the latest addition to Documents of Contemporary Art, a popular series of anthologies on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
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A Series Showcases Mathematics-Based Sound Visualizations
LONDON — It is almost impossible not to notice the recent flourishing of sound installations in the British art world.
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What Is an Object?
Before even opening The Object, Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press’s latest installment in the Documents of Contemporary Art series, the book’s title stares back, interpolates itself, asking questions: What is an object? Which object?
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Artist as Monk, Manga, and Pilgrim
BRIGHTON, UK — While laid up in Freud’s final consulting room, artist David Blandy was moved to recall a childhood trauma: “I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side.” A hypnotherapist encouraged him to continue: “Yo, dwelling in the past, flashbacks when I was young. Who ever thought that I would have a baby girl and three sons?” Astute observers will recognise those experiences as rap lyrics, so why was a floppy-haired English artist channelling Raekwon and Ghostface Killah? And, although beside the point, just what would the grandfather of psychoanalysis have made of life on the mean streets of Staten Island?