All posts tagged: Art

A restored Singapore shophouse filled with art, design and memory

A restored Singapore shophouse filled with art, design and memory

Published by Sam Flores

Lena Koh was born in Singapore, but life has taken her across the world. “I have lived in seven cities,” said Koh, who opened the stained glass-panelled pintu pagar of her Mount Sophia shophouse one morning. The home bears traces of those globetrotting influences, from her curated art collection and Chinese artefacts to her Danish furniture and lighting pieces – all reflecting her eye for proportion, colour and composition. Earlier in her career, Koh worked in public relations, advertising, events and business development around the region. She spent much of the past few decades in Beijing, where she raised her children while pursuing various creative projects. “My interest in art started in 2013 as a point of connection with my three children, who are in the arts field,” said Koh, who later attended a docent-training programme with Singapore Art Museum in 2014 and became a guide for contemporary art. She also visits biennales around the world with friends “to expand our horizon”. Source link

All Your Favorite Celebrities Are Artists Now. Are Any of Them Good?

All Your Favorite Celebrities Are Artists Now. Are Any of Them Good?

Published by Sam Flores

PAINTERS ON THE RADIO Bob Dylan Look, I just think Dylan’s artwork is fantastic, I loved the Gagosian shows, they’re weird and funny and deeply strange, like Dylan. Larry Gagosian talks about how he convinced Dylan to do the show, and even got him to show up to the opening, which is pretty insane considering Dylan doesn’t really show up to anything. He’s got a studio he works out of in Santa Monica, or maybe it’s Malibu, he keeps things shrouded in mystery, that guy. Also, Richard Prince did not make this artwork. Kim Gordon Gordon maybe shouldn’t even be on this list, as she’s been an artist longer than she was in a band—she went to Otis College of Art and Design, and even worked as one of Larry Gagosian’s first employees. And she’s exhibited widely the entire time, first showing with Reena Spaulings and for the last few years staging a number of solo shows at 303 Gallery—founder Lisa Spellman and Gordon met in the ’80s, they were part of the same East …

David Hockney Taught Me to Love Color

David Hockney Taught Me to Love Color

Published by Jenni Sidey

In September 2007, about a week into my freshman year of college, I received a magazine in the mail that changed my brain chemistry in that way that’s only possible when you’re not yet 17 and enough of a sensitive knucklehead to consider 500 Days of Summer the height of cinematic achievement. (For the record: I still do.) It was GQ’s 50th anniversary issue, about as beefy as a phone book and built around a landmark list of the 50 most stylish men of the past 50 years. (There were 10 different cover stars; I lucked out and received the best one: Michael Jordan.) I still think about the style advice doled out in that print package all the time—like the decree to buy your leather jackets “a size smaller than you normally would” to mimic the Ramones—but there was one page in particular that I remember stopping me in my tracks. It was the entry for David Hockney, the transformative British painter who died on Thursday at age 88. The photograph they’d chosen of …

David Hockney obituary: ‘The loss to the art world is immense’ | UK | News

David Hockney obituary: ‘The loss to the art world is immense’ | UK | News

Published by Sam Flores

David Hockney was Britain’s most famous artist (Image: Getty) David Hockney, who has died aged 88, was Britain’s best-loved and most famous artist by a country mile. Instantly recognisable for his round spectacles, oversized suits and trademark flat caps, plus his peroxide blonde hair, he was a genius who created bold and unorthodox prints. Hockney, who died peacefully at home on Thursday, was best known for his swimming pool paintings that defined Californian’s carefree existence but also for his portraits, American landscapes and, later, for scenery of his native Yorkshire. In 2018, one of his swimming pool paintings sold at auction for nearly £70 million – at the time, a record for a living artist. Prime Minister Keir Starmer led tributes to Hockney, describing him as “one of Britain’s most celebrated artists”. A spokesman for Number 10 said: “His vivid, instantly recognisable work influenced generations of artists, and the Prime Minister’s thoughts are with his friends and family.” Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, where a major Hockney exhibition is due to open in October …

Crypto Guys Bought the Answer to the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture

Crypto Guys Bought the Answer to the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture

Published by skeptic

On a blustery March day, the artist Jim Sanborn received visitors at his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The visitors sat him down in front of a laptop, and he typed in a secret message. They compressed the message using a unique hash function, sent that to the cloud, and wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn hoped that this action would set him free. But did it? That’s the latest twist in the story of Kryptos, the famous Sanborn sculpture that’s been sitting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The artwork is a copper S-curve that stands 9 feet, 11 inches tall, into which Sanborn had punched four panels of encrypted text. Professional and amateur cryptanalysts alike have been trying to crack the code ever since. Within a decade, three of the panels were solved—but not the 97-character fourth panel, known as K4. For decades, Sanborn has been fielding solutions, every one of them wrong. On the one hand, the mystery of his message was a brilliant reflection of the …

Cleveland Museum of Art Plans 0 M. Fundraising Campaign

Cleveland Museum of Art Plans $600 M. Fundraising Campaign

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) announced Friday that it has a $600 million fundraising campaign in the works. The goal is to support the institution’s long-term health—and it is nearly 80 percent of the way there. As it approaches the final stretch of the campaign, the museum is announcing the public phase of the campaign, which it is calling “For the Benefit of All the People.” It is the largest fundraising campaign in the museum’s history and, according to the museum, the largest by a cultural organization in Ohio. Related Articles In an emailed interview, CMA director William M. Griswold said the campaign “emerged from our recognition that institutions must continually invest in their future,” adding that the museum’s ambitions and growing audience made it “increasingly important for us to create permanent funding streams for key strategic priorities, as well as for professional expertise.” Griswold also pointed to broader trends affecting the museum world as a factor in the campaign’s creation. “Operating costs continue to rise, audience expectations are evolving rapidly, and revenue growth …

David Hockney, Art Icon, Dies at 88

David Hockney, Art Icon, Dies at 88

Published by Sam Flores

David Hockney’s canary yellow hair went white years ago, his hearing was failing for decades, and he suffered a stroke in 2012. But the man considered by many to be the world’s greatest living painter had, year after year, decade after decade, steadfastly remained his boyish, familiar self: gabby, opinionated, workaholic, mischievous, chain-smoking, ever the bespectacled dandy surrounded by a reliable retinue of friends. It was as if Hockney transcended time. He was, after all, one of the few artists—along with Picasso, Dalí, Warhol, and Kahlo—who could be said to be iconic in the real, literal sense: instantly recognizable, indelibly familiar, culturally omnipresent. Hockney, put plainly, was the most famous artist in the world. He had been in the public eye for so long, and held dear by so many, that the announcement of his death, at the age of 88, not only triggers something of a global shock but also marks a turning point in the history of art. His is the most impactful passing of an artist since Warhol’s in 1987. A cause …

Is This the First Good Eco Art Survey?

Is This the First Good Eco Art Survey?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Biennials, triennials, and their ilk perennially ask: What does it mean to make art today? A new triennial in Medina, a rural village in Western New York, tackles the hard question: What does it mean to make art in an age of waning material comfort for all but the world’s richest? While the baby boomer generation rode waves of economic growth, particularly in the United States, everyone else must now grapple with decline as the economy and environment continue their downward spiral. This reality affects nearly every artist working today, but for those in “All That Sustains Us,” it’s not the background but the subject of their work. Related Articles Yet this inaugural edition is less a show of doom and gloom than it is one of resourcefulness: Set in a post-industrial town, artists in the show attend to the sorts of systems that are easy to take for granted when they are working well, like supply chains, food supply, and ecosystems. Mierle Laderman Ukeles is the show’s oldest living artist, and her video both …

A First Look at the Big-Ticket Artworks that Galleries Are Bringing to Art Basel 2026

A First Look at the Big-Ticket Artworks that Galleries Are Bringing to Art Basel 2026

Published by Jenni Sidey

It’s been a whirlwind 2026 already. The year kicked off with a bang at Art Basel Qatar and barrelled forward into a spring marked by a much-talked-about Venice Biennale, a jam-packed week of fairs in New York, and a blockbuster series of sales at the auction houses. For the indefatigable collectors, dealers, and—yes—journalists that constitute the art world, there’s one more marquee event before summer takes hold: Art Basel’s flagship fair in the otherwise tranquil Swiss canton of Basel. The Swiss edition of Art Basel still carries a reputation for presenting the most museum-quality work, even if that reputation has waned somewhat as fairs in Paris, and now the the Gulf, take hold. This year, the fair introduced Basel Exclusive, a new opt-in program in which exhibitors agree to withhold at least one top work from the pre-fair PDFs and previews, in the hopes of generating some you-had-to-be-there-to-see-it buzz. Of the 240 exhibitors in the main galleries section, 193 have opted in to the initiative, according to the fair. Thus, there are bound to be …