Art

Buying property in any metropolitan city comes with a steep price tag, but how about one with an original Banksy mural? A Bristol building is about to hit the auction block bearing one of the elusive street artist's early imprints of a bear throwing a molotov cocktail at the police. Entitled Mild Mild West, Banksy was inspired to paint the mural back in 1999, after a warehouse party was raided by the cops. The building was vacant when first bought in 2000 for a modest $71,000 USD. Today, it houses four bedrooms and a barber shop on the ground floor, which is expected to garner roughly a million dollars when it hits the market with the following blurb: “Bristol’s home-grown and anonymous graffiti artist Banksy is known all across the world for his satirical, anti-establishment, and thought-...

In Austria, the Vienna Secession and Seoul’s Art Sonje Center are presenting an interplay of light and darkness. Curated by Sunjung Kim, Forms of the Shadow is a group exhibition that brings forth a constellation of sculptures, paintings, embroideries and performances that explores humanity’s enduring journey through adversity and hope.The show features the work of 17 artists, each inviting viewers to reflect upon interconnectedness amidst turbulent times. Ramiro Wong’s melty suitcases and Jin-me Yoon’s multi-channel video work echo the outsider experience, probing historical tension between the East and West. Elsewhere, Janie Jin Kaison’s lush scenes and Kyungah Ham’s embroidered chandelier disrupt funerary scenes with moments of unexpected beauty. With an air of melancholic hope, the wor...

At the dawn of the 20th century, a new cultural scene emerged in East Sussex. Composed of a circle of writers, artists and philosophers, the Bloomsbury Group marked a new sense of modern thinking in England. While they first came together in the then burgeoning art hub of Bloomsbury, the bunch carved out a home at Charleston, artist Vanessa Bell’s countryside farmhouse.Nearly one century later, Sotheby’s has just announced a new private selling and loan exhibition in collaboration with Charleston, spotlighting the works of the influential intellectual club at the estate-turned-museum. Curated by the ex-Fendi, Dior menswear director Kim Jones, Radical Modernity: From Bloomsbury to Charleston honors the experimental and progressive spirit of the Bloomsbury Group.The exhibition features a stu...

As the curtain falls on Frieze London, Ojiri Gallery lifts the veil on an exciting new group exhibition. Titled Not Invited!, the show journeys through a surreal and vibrant pursuit of authenticity, featuring the work of Baldur Helgason, Izumi Kato, Nigel Howlett, Dustin Emory, Max Rumbol and Kila Cheung.The faces of Not Invited! bear the likes of nostalgic cartoon and video game characters, evoking a sense of childlike wonder and playful rebellion. In a cast of hybrid figures and distorted forms, the exhibition teeters between comfort and confinement with an uncanny ambiguity that only draws you in closer.The exhibition becomes a space for exploring the raw and often contradictory nature of being human. Ranging from the sleek, poreless robot in Howlett’s “Neither Revealed Nor Hidden” to H...

Hauser & Wirth is showcasing a love letter to the City of Angels in a new group exhibition at its newly minted West Hollywood location. Named after Steve Martin's 1991 romantic comedy, L.A. Story presents sculptures, paintings and installations from an expansive list of contemporary artists who comment on the surreal idiosyncrasies that LA is known for through their respective practices. Perhaps more than any major city, including New York, London and Paris, most understand LA primarily through entertainment. Sun-kissed palm trees, celebrity sightings, drives along PCH, the perfectly trimmed hedges of Beverly Hills — there is a romanticism that tourists come to the city expecting, which is inevitably countered by the reality of navigating LA's sprawling streets without a well-designed...

The Sigg Art Foundation has just announced the winner of its inaugural Art Prize. Founded in 2020 by collector Pierre Sigg, the foundation aims to redefine the boundaries of contemporary art through the integration of AI and technology. However, the competition's embrace of technology goes beyond the artwork itself, placing an AI judge amidst its jury of curators, writers and collectors.Selected from over 300 applicants hailing from 70 countries, the 2024 Art Prize goes to Paris-based German artist Dana-Fiona Armour for her interactive video installation, Alvinella Ophis. In light of this year’s Future Desert theme, the work bears life to a hybrid snake creature in a dry, dystopian landscape, incorporating infrared sensors to mirror the animal's heat-sensitive capabilities. Armour’s work a...

Jake Vanden Berge is an emerging Los Angeles-based artist who paints striking juxtapositions exploring the hazy threshold between memory and nostalgia. Born in Whittier and entirely self-trained, Vanden Berge's oil compositions are diluted to appear like snapshots racing through the mind, spanning the real to the imagined, from burning suburban houses to images of a doberman pinscher contrasted with a field of chromatic tulips. There is a cinematic quality to the images that Vanden Berge culls. He purposefully stacks opposing themes as a way to spark dialogues with disparate subject matter and spotlight the beauty in the everyday. His latest Untitled print features a field of pink tulips split between a cropped image of a women's lips. The impermanence of beauty, emblematic of the use of...

In the hum of Frieze London, Almine Rech presents a new exhibition curated by 16Arlington's creative director Marco Capaldo. For Capaldo’s first curatorial foray, Memories of the Future summons a tender suite of artworks at No.9 Cork Street, each echoing the surreal nature of time.The exhibition is an ode to memory, anchored by an anachronistic sensibility. Bringing a fresh perspective to what is both old and new, the show shines a light on how memory doesn't just belong to the past, but acts as an ever-evolving agent in our future.A rising star himself, Capaldo spotlights a new era of British artists, drawing together a cast of fresh faces and seminal figures in contemporary art. Spanning across various mediums, the exhibition features an installation of John Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem,” paint...

The Studio Museum in Harlem has just announced plans for the grand opening of its new 125th Street home. After closing in 2018 to embark on the multimillion-dollar expansion project, the building will welcome visitors next fall. The first exhibition will feature the work of late artist and activist Tom Lloyd, whose sculptures appeared in the museum’s inaugural show in 1968, staged at a rented Fifth Avenue loft.Designed by British architect David Adjaye, the 82,000-square-foot building will more than double the institution’s previous exhibition and public space across five stories. The structure features a theater, an education center, a studio for its artists in residence and a café, while the offices will make their way to the National Urban League’s new headquarters just across the stree...

Cadogan Gallery has a new home and to celebrate, the London-based gallery has unveiled one of its largest group exhibitions to date. Eponymously titled Cadogan Gallery: A Group Exhibition, the show presents 21 artists spanning sculpture, painting and textiles, each telling a story of the gallery, from past, present to future.Christopher Burness started Cadogan Gallery in 1980 in a small building he lived in on Pont Street, which doubled as the office for his book publishing business. After convincing his friend Rafael Valls to lend him some paintings, he began exhibiting work on the ground floor, opening the door to leagues of artists to do the same since.Christopher's kids, Freddie and Katie Burness, have upheld this legacy over 40 years later, with a continued focus on contemporary abstr...