Photographer Rinko Kawauchi discusses her interest in the small mysteries of everyday life, which she explores in her series Utatane (2001). She explains why she was drawn to the sublime beauty of the controlled burning of grasslands in Japan for her series Ametsuchi (2012–13), and reflects on how her photography comes from a state between dreams and waking.
Art News
An array of optical illusions, trompe l’oeil, and hyperrealism are on display in Chicago Works: Mika Horibuchi, now at the MCA Chicago. Horibuchi’s work plays with the nature of reality, upending viewers expectations. One of her pieces references an ambiguous 19th Century duck/rabbit illustration; her deceptively simple painting could be either a bunny or a duckling in repose, depending on the viewer's perception.
Follow V&A Conservators as they treat an elaborately decorated Japanese palanquin in our collection. Known as a ‘norimono’ in Japanese, meaning ‘thing to ride’, this box-like enclosed chair would have carried a bride of high social-rank to the groom’s home after their wedding. Conservation work included stabilising areas of lifting laquer on the surface decoration, which had been beautifully created using the ‘maki-e’ technique, meaning ‘sprinkled picture’.
Alejo Benedetti and Steven Zucker discuss Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola [3] (1962, casein on canvas, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts) at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
In this episode of Anatomy of an Artwork, immerse yourself in the history and details of Rembrandt’s monumental painting 'The Night Watch’. Perhaps the most celebrated painting of the Dutch Golden Age, 'The Night Watch’ is also a triumph of painting on a grand scale and a masterful example of tenebrism, the dramatic use of light and shadow. Over the four centuries since its creation, the work has been reduced in size, slashed by a school teacher and even sprayed with acid and yet it still endures as a testament to the majestic genius of Rembrandt.
Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough were Georgian art superstars and friendly rivals. The Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition was the perfect setting for them to go head to head, as curator Mark Hallett, Director of Studies at Paul Mellon Centre, explains. See their paintings, and many other spectacular works from 250 years of the Summer Exhibition, until 19 August 2018.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, sprawls across the Fifth Avenue location’s Medieval, Byzantine, and Lehman galleries and its Anna Wintour Costume Center, as well as the Met Cloisters further uptown.
An American who has lived in South Africa for the past thirty years, Ballen began his career as a geologist. He is now one of the most important and influential photographic artists of the 21st century. Renowned for his striking extremely visceral black and white photographs, he has a style he himself describes as ‘documentary fiction’, blending stark reality and set design.
Currently at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, Juventino Aranda’s Pocket Full of Posies explores how everyday objects become symbols of identity and social strata. Aranda grew up in Walla Walla, Washington, the child of Mexican immigrant workers, and was the first in his family to get a University degree. His work reflects the mixed cultural heritage of immigrants in the US. As an activist and artist, Aranda uses his installations to draw attention to socioeconomic, political and cultural issues.
The Art Institute of Chicago has brought together a stunning collection of works by one of America’s greatest portraitists. The recently opened John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age includes over 100 objects, both borrowed and from the museum’s collection, highlighting the connections the painter had with the city of Chicago. Though Sargent is best known for his portraits, his artistic practice was wide-ranging, and this exhibition covers all of his output, including the en plein air landscapes of his late career, sketches, and watercolors.
