Tag Archives: Art Basel

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (March 8, 2024): To coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March, the South London Gallery is opening the exhibition Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest.

Activism and photography have long gone hand in hand but this collaborative exhibition, organised with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), attempts to capture a new chapter in this distinguished history, with a particular focus on feminism across the world. We talk to Sarah Allen, the head of programme at the South London Gallery, and Fiona Rogers, the V&A’s Parasol Foundation curator of women in photography, about the show. The financier, philanthropist, collector and leader of cultural organisations Jacob Rothschild died last week at the age of 87.

We talk to Anna Somers Cocks, the founder of The Art Newspaper, who interviewed Lord Rothschild on numerous occasions, about his impact on the visual arts and heritage. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Adelphi, made in 1967 by Robert Ryman. It is one of around 50 pieces by Ryman in the exhibition The Act of Looking, which opened this week at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Guillaume Fabius, the co-curator of the show, joins us to discuss the painting.

Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest, South London Gallery, London, 8 March-9 June.

Robert Ryman: The Act of Looking, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, until 1 July.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (December 8, 2023): This week: the final big art market event of the year, Art Basel in Miami Beach. The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to our acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, in Miami about the fair, as tensions rise ahead of the pivotal 2024 US election.

In Athens, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, or EMST, is next week opening a months-long programme which will end up with the entire museum filled with women artists. We talk to EMST’s director, Katerina Gregos, about the programme, called What if Women Ruled the World? And this episode’s Work of the Week is two objects: the 15th-century Florentine artist Francesco Pesellino’s panels telling the story of David and Goliath, made for a luxurious cassone or chest for the Medici family.

The panels belong to the National Gallery in London and have just been restored for a new exhibition there, Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed. We talk to Jill Dunkerton, who did the restoration, about these extraordinary paintings.

Art Basel in Miami Beach, Miami Beach Convention Center, until Sunday, 10 December.

What if Women Ruled the World? begins at EMST, Athens, on 14 December.Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed, National Gallery, London, until 10 March 2024.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (October 27, 2023): This week: the first Kyiv Biennial since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year is taking place in various locations across the wartorn country as well as a host of neighbouring European states.

We talk to the co-curator, Georg Schöllhammer, about this year’s event. As refugees and displaced people continue to dominate the news, a global sound art project, Migration Sounds, aims to explore and reimagine the sounds of human migration and settlement.

We speak to Stuart Fowkes, the founder of Cities and Memory, who has conceived the project with the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (Compas). And this episode’s Work of the Week is Rebirth of a Nation, a mural made for Brixton Underground Station in London by the Ethiopian-Italian artist Jem Perucchini, which is unveiled next week. Jessica Vaughan, the senior curator of Art on the Underground, tells us about the commission.

The Kyiv Biennial continues to unfold into 2024, visit 2023.kyivbiennial.org

Cities and Memory’s Migration Sounds project, citiesandmemory.com/migration; compas.ox.ac.uk

Jem Perucchini: Rebirth of a Nation, Brixton Underground Station, London, from 2 November.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (October 20, 2023): This week: it’s the second year of Paris +, the event that has taken over from Fiac as the leading French art fair. How is Art Basel’s French flagship faring amid geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty, and is Paris still on the rise as a cultural hub?

We speak to Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, and Kabir Jhala, our deputy art market editor, who are in Paris, to find out. The largest ever exhibition of the work of the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto opened last week at the Hayward Gallery in London, before travelling to Beijing and Sydney next year. We talk to its co-curator Thomas Sutton.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is La femme-cheval or the Horse-Woman, a painting made in 1918 by the French artist Marie Laurencin. She is the subject of a major survey, called Sapphic Paris, opening this week at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in the US. Cindy Kang, who co-curated the exhibition, tells us more about this landmark work in Laurencin’s life.

Paris +, 20-22 October.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Hayward Gallery, London, until 7 January 2023; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 23 March-23 June 2024; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 2 August-27 October 2024.

Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, US, 22 October-21 January.

Art Gallery Exhibitions: ‘Art Basel 2023’ Preview

VernissageTV (June 13, 2023) = The 2023 edition of Art Basel in Basel features 284 of the world’s leading galleries from across the globe. At Art Basel, the galleries present modern and contemporary art across all media including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital artworks. The art fair runs from June 15-18, 2023.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

April 6, 2023: This week: Ben Luke talks to Melanie Gerlis about the recent turbulence in the banking sector, as US banks go under, an ailing Credit Suisse is acquired by UBS and Deutsche Bank shares fall at one point by 14%.

What are the implications for the art world? Melanie also explains the figures in the latest Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. The Baltimore Museum of Art in the US this week opens the exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.

We speak to Asma Naeem, the director of the BMA and co-curator of the show, about what she’s called “the second pop art movement”. And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Calling of Saint Matthew by the 17th-century Afro-Hispanic artist Juan de Pareja. He is best known as the subject of one of the greatest ever portraits, by Diego Velázquez, the artist who enslaved Pareja for two decades before his manumission in Rome in 1650.

David Pullins and Vanessa K. Valdés, the curators of a new exhibition about Juan de Pareja at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, tell us about the painting.The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, until 16 July; St Louis Art Museum, 26 August-1 January 2024.Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 July. 

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

As Art Basel returns to Florida for the 20th anniversary of its Miami Beach art fair, Aimee Dawson, the acting digital editor at The Art Newspaper, talks to Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor, about the sales, news and talking points at the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess.

December 2, 2022: Meanwhile, after Arts Council England announced its funding allocation in November, arts organisations across the country, and especially in London, are reeling. Ben Luke talks to Jenni Lomax, the former director of the Camden Art Centre—the north London non-profit gallery whose funding has been cut by more than 30%. They discuss the effect of the cuts, and why the response from the visual arts community is relatively quiet compared to the uproar in the worlds of theatre and opera.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Oleksandr Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws (1927), a work from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. The painting is among a host of works moved from the war-torn country to the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid for the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. Katia Denysova, the co-curator of the show, tells us about the picture, and the extraordinary journey it took from Kyiv to the Spanish capital.Art Basel in Miami Beach until 3 December.In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, until 30 April 2023. 

Top New Art Exhibitions: ‘PARIS+ Par Art Basel 2022’

Paris+, par Art Basel is the fourth event of its kind in the portfolio of Art Basel, the world’s biggest art fair. Other, related editions are regularly held in Hong Kong, Miami Beach, and the Swiss city of Basel, where its tentpole fair is held. Expect big sales and even bigger crowds, as has long been the case with Art Basel’s other editions.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week: why is Tate rejecting an archive of material relating to Francis Bacon, 18 years after acquiring it?

Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his recent scoop that Tate is returning a thousand documents and sketches said to have come from the studio of Francis Bacon to Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, who donated them to Tate in 2004. We then discuss the material with Martin Harrison, the pre-eminent Bacon scholar and editor of the catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon’s work published in 2016, and to Sophie Pretorius, the archivist at the Estate of Francis Bacon, who went through the Barry Joule archive item by item. Victoria Munro, the director of the Alice Austen House Museum in New York, discusses this still too-little-known photographer, and her documentation of immigration to the United States and the lives of queer women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Weißes Bild (1994), a painting by the late Luxembourg-born artist Michel Majerus, now on view at Art Basel—Aimee Dawson, acting digital editor, is at the fair and talks to Giovanni Carmine, curator of the Unlimited section, in which the painting appears.

Sophie Pretorius’s essay Work on the Barry Joule Archive is in the book Francis Bacon: Shadows published by the Estate of Francis Bacon and Thames and Hudson. 

For more on the Alice Austen House Museum, visit aliceausten.org. The podcast My Dear Alice is out in the autumn.

Art Basel, until 19 June.