‘Pervery and pleasure in a sea of custard’ is how one critic described Sarah Lucas’s 2015 Venice Biennale exhibition. Possibly an exaggeration, but not necessarily inaccurate, Lucas particularly considers themes of sex, gender, and the body. The ‘sea of custard’ points to her critical humor and edible mediums embedded in sculptures, photographs, and installations. Lucas and the YBAs Lucas, one of the infamous Young British Artists (YBA), established herself through exhibitions with her fellow YBAs. She was part of the iconic 1988 group Freeze exhibition, organized by Damien Hirst, which includ ..read more

Five tubular metal slides spiralling from the upper floors of Tate Modern to the ground level Turbine Hall, on the surface Carsten Holler’s 2006 installation Test Site looks like a crude play on the waterslides children hurtle down at swimming pools. Yet, like most work of the contemporary period, such conclusion ignores the rich criticism that rests beneath its playful exterior. A powerful commentary on the spectacle and sensation of sliding, Holler’s Test Site offers an investigation into the unification of art and play and poses important questions concerning the spectacularization of art i ..read more

Cold War Steve (CWS), also known as Christopher Spencer, is a British collage artist and satirist who uses the medium of photomontage to highlight and comment on current politics. Having grown up in the midlands town of Birmingham and worked as a probation officer, he turned to creating art montages on his phone on the bus to work each day. He takes his unusual nom de plume one can guess partly as a reference to the political nature of his work, as well as from British actor Steve McFadden, who plays Phil Mitchell on the popular soap opera Eastenders, which often features in his ..read more

My Latest Discovery: I am excited to share a vital resource for online art history research called The Art Story.  This resource is a growing compendium for art lovers, artists, curators, writers, educators, students and the curious looking for concise and expansive art histories.  They have accumulated the largest online encyclopedia of art in the world, with over 1000 topic pages. The Art Story has specialized pages to address your interests, whether you are looking up an artist (Picasso, Michelangelo, or Kara Walker), an art movement (Impressionism, Performance, or Baroque), or an ..read more

Earlier this year, on a visit to Oslo, I came across an exhibition in the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, “Claude Monet and Bærum, 125 Years Anniversary”. Intrigued by the paintings, I wanted to know why Monet chose to leave his home in Giverny, midwinter, for Oslo at the coldest, darkest time of year… Claude Monet’s motivation to visit Norway in 1895 was ostensibly twofold. Firstly, he went to visit his stepson Jacques who had married a Norwegian. As patriarch of the family, Monet wanted to spend time with him to find out if he would ever return to Giverny, a question which was causing Jacques’ mot ..read more

The first academy of art was established in Florence in 1563 and focused on the three “arts of design”: painting, sculpture, and architecture.  This designation has come to dominate our modern interpretation of what constitutes “art”.  However, before the late-sixteenth century, notions of art were more expansive. Prior to, and during the Renaissance, art was more than an aesthetic entity viewed for its own sake.  In fact, art had a purpose.  It came in diverse forms and had diverse functions.  During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, art was closely linked to the ..read more

20th-century American art exemplifies the repercussions of politics and propaganda which can be read into many art works. From Dorothea Lange’s social criticism in the form of intimate portraits, to Jackson Pollock’s paint splatters becoming symbols of American freedom, to Martha Rosler’s collages literally ‘bringing the war home’, these artists’ works all came to carry the heavy weight of political messages, regardless of whether or not that was their original intention.   Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936 https://commons.wikimedia.or ..read more

Isamu Noguchi was a prolific American-Japanese sculptor/designer of the early- and mid-20th century. Challenging conventional distinctions between art and life, positive and negative spaces, sculpture and urban design, geometric and organic forms, he was a revolutionary whose interdisciplinary approach eased the strict binaries of Western art. In the context of this article, though, Noguchi was an artist whose inherent activism and utopic definitions of play-as-art were seemingly lost to the hostile regulations of the modern era. More Images In 1934, sculptor Isamu Noguchi approached the New Y ..read more

A pioneer of contemporary art since the 1960s, Chris Burden is one of the most acclaimed and outrageous artists in art history. Mostly known for his Performance Art, he dedicated his life to the exploration of the body’s limits to suffering. Although he was mostly drawn into producing art concerned with pain, Burden also explored other matters, including the value of art and the role of the institution that sustains it. Following other like-minded artists, these ideas generated a movement of Institutional Critique, in which artists still widely engage.  Institutional Critique ex ..read more

Robert Rauschenberg’s Modern Inferno Opinions are divided as to whether lockdown conditions stimulate or inhibit creativity. We have been here before. In 1348, shortly after Dante Alighieri wrote his epic masterpiece the Commedia, the Black Death swept across Europe and killed half the population of Florence. Fear and uncertainty caused by that pandemic seemed to galvanize visual artists with a sense of greater purpose to illustrate Dante’s Commedia.  Dante’s three-part epic poem portrays the journey souls take after death. Essentially a socio-economic commen ..read more