Art News

In the dynamic world of mid-18th-century Europe, people, ideas and artistic styles crossed national boundaries.

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.

What is sure to be a high point of a week of auctions in London, Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale set several records on July 5. The top selling lot was Ludovico Carracci’s Portrait of Carlo Alberto Rati Opizzoni in armour, three-quarter-length, wearing the Order of the Knights of Malta, the city of Bologna beyond, which sold for $6.7 million, becoming the second highest price for the artist at auction.

In this 60-Second Gallery, discover the elegant ways in which sculptors capture female icons from history and mythology. Extraordinary pieces from artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, Orazio Andreoni and Sarah Bernhardt recall captivating female figures frozen in time. These works and more will be offered in Sotheby’s sale of 19th and 20th Sculpture (11 July | 2018).

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opened its new Watershed to the public on July 4, expanding artistic and educational programming on both sides of Boston Harbor—the Seaport and East Boston—and connecting two historically isolated neighborhoods. Admission to the Watershed will be free. Access to the Watershed is available by boat, public transportation, and taxi service.

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. 

An innovative photography exhibition at New York’s Waterhouse & Dodds Gallery, Kim Keever: Water Colors showcases the artist’s first series of completely abstract explorations of color in motion. Keever’s earlier photographs involved intricately constructed miniature landscapes that he photographed submerged in a 200-gallon water tank. Lit with colored lights and using dispersed pigment for cloud effects, Keever created dramatic foreign landscapes. Intrigued by the dispersal patterns, Keever began focusing solely on photographing the colors moving through water.

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.

Photographer Catherine Opie traces her personal and artistic development in San Francisco. She describes how she captured the invented “personas” of the city’s queer community during the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s.