In his seminal 1980 work “Camera Lucida,” the philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that “every photograph is a certificate of presence.” The French artist Christian Boltanski has spent the last 60 years probing the limits of such an idea.
Category Archive: Art
Huysmans bemoaned the academic mediocrity of the Salons’ most celebrated regulars; never one to mince his words, he wrote that Pierre Lecontre Du Noüy “made the wrong choice of career,” that Henri Gervex “no longer knows how to paint,” and that William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s “The Birth of Venus” is “so bad that there isn’t even a word for it.”
In his depictions of clutter-less rooms and streets emptied of people, the hustle and bustle of daily life is swept aside and time appears suspended. This timeless quality might help explain his enduring appeal today, but the enigma surrounding Hammershøi, his life and his work, no doubt plays an equally important role.
While her belief in the triumphant power of art anchors Hepworth in an ideology that, for some, fell out of fashion or became untenable after the atrocities of World War II, Hepworth maintained a lifelong optimism about what sculpture could do.
“I don’t think any of these artists are claiming to have the answers to the future of photography, but they’re starting to sow the seeds for what future practice will be.”
The use of artificial intelligence in Dorsen’s practice draws out an ontological ambiguity that is already embedded in theater, thus revisiting some of the most fundamental questions that have preoccupied the genre since its origins.
Looking at Freud’s paintings, one can sense this intuitively; plants are not charged with doing or saying something, they are just there, in all their quiddity.
An interview with the Mexican artist on the eve of his new show “ECHO” at Galerie Perrotin.
Full article in Modern Painters (October-November 2019).
The British novelist Will Self and the legendary illustrator Quentin Blake have teamed up on a new book — a dreamy rumination on travelling by the light of the moon.