To criticize Araki’s photos—naked women pissing into umbrellas at a live sex show, women with flowers stuck into their vaginas, women in schoolgirl uniforms suspended in bondage, and so on—for being pornographic, vulgar, or obscene, is rather to miss the point.
A major exhibition at the Tate illustrates the competing and overlapping streams of painterly obsession in London in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows us how, in their different ways, painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, and Paula Rego redefined realism.
Throughout the 1920s in Paris, the painter Tsuguharu Foujita cut an arresting figure: a Japanese modernist as willing to trade on his own foreignness as he was to blend into his Parisian surroundings
A new exhibition at the Ashmolean gives an education in the work produced by the precisionist artists of the 1920s through the 1940s, who used sharp, well-defined lines and striking applications of pigment to master the anxieties and ambivalences associated with modern life.
The show at the Drawing Center, ably curated by Claire Gilman, restrained though it is by the modest size of the space, is a robust sampling of the last thirty-five years of Winters’s career.
An exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum gives a sprawling overview of twenty-five intensely productive years in Latin American feminist art, gathering the work of 123 artists from fifteen countries who ranged across video, photography, installation and performance art, painting, film, sculpture, and dance.
The masks of the Yup’ik, an indigenous people related to the Inuit, seem to float off the dark blue walls where they hang. The connection between the Surrealists’ productions and the Yup’ik artefacts in the installation is never direct: they seem, rather, to have drifted together naturally.
The Syrian teacher Marwan Hisham met the artist Molly Crabapple on Twitter while he was in Raqqa and she was in New York. He would send her photographs taken with a smartphone begged from a friend, which she would transform into paintings and drawings. It was, as he puts it, an 'art crime' for which he would probably have been executed had he been discovered.
Together, the sunlit and vache paintings present one of the most enduring mysteries—and the greatest curatorial challenge—of a career devoted to intellectual puzzles, visual gags, and what Magritte described as his “systematic search for disturbing poetic effects.”
With Bawden’s formal brilliance goes a tender, amused feeling for the value of all life—from the seaside tourists of the 1920s to the war-time soldiers, from the creepy-crawlies of Snails for All, drawn for his children in 1945, to the snarling Tyger! Tyger! of 1974. After seeing all these, who can say that Edward Bawden, this serious if unclassifiable artist, is merely a purveyor of charm?
June brings us retrospectives of Luchino Visconti and Jane Fonda; documentaries by directors best known for their fiction filmmaking; cinema from Putin's Russia; and part one of a long-awaited survey of Hammer horror.
If you haven’t stood face to face with a cephalophore recently, then you may need a trip to the Morgan Library’s “Medieval Monsters” exhibition, open until September 23. Artisans of the Middle Ages explored the human condition through disruptions and distortions that were at once terrifying, alien, and wondrous.
Gathered together in the second room of The Hepworth Wakefield’s excellent new show “Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain,” in West Yorkshire, is a selection of candid snaps both Miller and Man Ray took during their Cornish adventure. This endlessly fascinating exhibition reveals that Miller was a woman who saw things differently.