“If I’d opened a gallery here in the beginning, no one would have come,” says Joana Grevers, sitting in the sun-dappled courtyard of her old family estate in Cetate, a small village on the Danube in southwest Romania.
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A streak of light stealing through a crack beneath a closed door. Tadpole-like raindrops wriggling down four window panes. Lois Dodd’s paintings capture the ordinary in an extraordinary way.
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When she was about eight years old, Cindy Sherman began compiling a family photo album. She called it ‘A Cindy Book’, drew a circle around herself if she was pictured alongside others and added a pithy caption below each of the 26 images: ‘That’s me’.
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There’s a ghostly quality to Helene Schjerfbeck’s paintings. Her interiors and landscapes are devoid of people, while her intimate portraits capture people in moments of quiet introspection.
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It’s easy to identify Elizabeth Macneal’s house in east London: the windowsill is lined with succulents sprouting from an assortment of striped and spotted pots. She started with one evening class a week. “I produced many deformed and far from watertight pots,” she tells me, “and then I gradually got better.”
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Cross the threshold into the exhibition of works by Madge Gill and you’ll find yourself in a silken web. All four walls of the small space are filled with the self-taught spiritualist artist’s feverishly detailed drawings, embroideries and textiles.
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How do you compete in a landscape where small and midsize galleries falter while big names flourish? This is the kind of question the next generation of art and design specialists are asking themselves.
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Its image of straitlaced country folk has the ability to intrigue and unsettle. What’s the subtext of “American Gothic” and what does it tell us about the American people?
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Of all the Russian avant-garde artists of the 20th century, Goncharova was the most experimental. She absorbed the artistic styles around her, from religious icons to the latest trends in modernism.
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The acclaimed American author’s writing is whip-smart and bleakly funny. In conversation with Monocle’s Chloë Ashby she talks about her third novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, New York in the early 2000s, and why she writes.
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The Second Shelf may be small but it has a mighty ambition: to rediscover works by and about women, to generate excitement around rare books and to foster gender equality in the literary canon.
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At times, the artwork of the Chicago Imagists verges on the gross: that big green bogey dangling from the nostril of Officer E Doodit, a beady-eyed policeman with a bulging neck in Jim Nutt’s painting of 1968, is just the beginning.
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My brother and I knew it, simply, as “the shop”. The meeting point at which we’d gather after school. The place we’d visit for private fittings on Sundays, when the lights were dimmed and the doors were locked.
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David Salle creates sequences of forms that chime, clang and clash. In the 1970s, he emerged as part of the Pictures Generation – a group of American artists who challenged ideas of authenticity and appropriation.
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The geometric drawings by the Swiss spiritualist and artist Emma Kunz (1892–1963) are like kaleidoscopes: patterns appear to tremble and pulsate as you pass by.
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A shake-up in the selection procedure and fresh thinking at Tefaf Maastricht has seen a number of newcomers to this venerable fair.
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Geta Brătescu sits at her desk clutching a chunky black marker pen in her heavily wrinkled hand. “Let’s see what I’m doing now,” she says, the square nib traversing the paper in one long continuous line.
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“The thing that makes me want to paint is paint,” says Flora Yukhnovich, who, when we meet ahead of her first solo show at Parafin gallery, is dressed in clothes appropriately splattered from top to toe.
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Four collectors share their thoughts on their latest art-fair acquisitions, revealing what it was that persuaded them to buy the pieces and where they see the market at the moment.
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Planning a summertime sojourn in Athens? You’re bound to be warned about the heat. But don’t despair; it can be an inspiring time to visit (just don’t forget your swimsuit).
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