Feb 02 2025
A skylight, a fire escape, votive candles, flowers, the glow of a city after dark, or the fleeting reflection of light on an ordinary surface could become something mysterious in the hands of Loren MacIver. She did not need monumental subjects to make memorable paintings. Instead, she looked carefully at the small experiences most people …
Jan 30 2025
Patrick Heron believed color could do more than decorate a painting. Color could create space, generate movement, alter the apparent size of a shape, and even change the way a viewer experienced the world beyond the canvas. Across a career that moved from recognizable interiors and harbor views to stripes, floating forms, irregular discs, luminous …
Jan 28 2025
Marcel Broodthaers spent years trying to make a life through poetry. Then, at the age of forty, he took copies of one of his unsold poetry books, embedded them in plaster, and transformed the failure to sell literature into the beginning of an art career. It was an appropriately paradoxical entrance for an artist who …
Jan 24 2025
Robert Motherwell could make a painting feel monumental with remarkably little. A few enormous black forms against white might evoke mourning, imprisonment, architecture, bodies, or a procession moving across the canvas. A torn piece of cigarette packaging could become the center of a collage. A charcoal rectangle floating inside a field of ochre could open …
Jan 23 2025
Belkis Ayón filled enormous sheets of paper with figures who stare directly at us but cannot speak. Their eyes are wide and penetrating, their mouths absent, their bodies surrounded by scales, fish, serpents, crosses, plants, ritual objects, and dense surfaces of black, white, and gray. The images can feel ancient and startlingly contemporary at the …
Jan 21 2025
Jean-Paul Vroom never seemed interested in remaining inside one artistic category. He engraved books in Paris, painted and made prints, designed typography, photographed people and landscapes, experimented with film, worked as an art director for cinema, and created sets and costumes for some of the most enduring ballets of Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen. Even …
Jan 15 2025
Lee Bontecou made sculptures that seem to stare back. From a wall of patched canvas and welded steel, a black opening pushes toward the viewer. It might be the mouth of a machine, the lens of a camera, the barrel of a weapon, an eye, a wound, a cave, or a hole leading somewhere beyond …
Jan 14 2025
Cecil Beaton could make a room look more glamorous than it really was, turn a movie costume into fashion history, transform a royal portrait into modern mythology, and photograph a bomb-injured child with a directness almost impossible to reconcile with the extravagant society pictures that first made him famous. Few creative careers contain such dramatic …
Jan 04 2025
André Masson wanted to make art before conscious thought had time to interfere. He drew rapidly, allowing the pen to wander across paper until figures unexpectedly emerged from tangles of lines. He poured glue onto canvas, threw sand across the wet surface, brushed away what did not stick, and then followed the accidental forms that …
Nov 26 2023
A lone figure stands beneath an enormous sky. A road disappears toward nowhere. A building looks familiar until something about its proportions begins to feel wrong. A man confronts an absurd situation with no obvious explanation. Somewhere between melancholy and comedy, an ordinary landscape quietly slips into another reality. That uncertain territory belonged to Norbert …
