A children’s book on agriculture in Le Cateau brings together drawings by students from three classes at three different schools in the region to partner with Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, located in rural northern France. At the invitation of Carrie Pilto, director of the museum, artist Harrell Fletcher joined by Nolan Calisch and Molly Sherman proposed instructions for children to illustrate a text on the agricultural history of the region. This book traces the first meeting between these artists and the inhabitants of Le Cateau and its environs, beginning a series of participatory projects initiated by Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis.

A Disagreeable Object brings together 20 artists who employ and borrow from the methods and artistic practices that the Surrealists developed in the first half of the century. This is not an exhaustive survey, nor an attempt to re-consider our understanding of Surrealism as an historical movement. Rather, the exhibition offers a view of contemporary sculpture identifying influences and attitudes that have filtered through decades of cultural production. The works in A Disagreeable Object respond to a decidedly contemporary context…

Do you know that canvas you see in every permanent collection in every art museum around the world that has been slashed by an artist called Fontana? There are many of them, each a slightly different size, with a different length slash. When encountering them I peer through the slash to the dark shadow, ‘concetto spaziale,’ adjusting my eyes to the light that reaches the gallery wall. I wonder how many canvasses Fontana slashed, and how they would look displayed from the longest to the shortest? The book aligns and extends these voids from page 1 to page 150. A selection ...

The work cannot be grasped in one glance, it escapes the gaze and looks like the result of an explosion that has left the space, walls, floor and ceiling covered in fragments and motifs. Florentine Lamarche and Alexandre Ovize’s creations are totally heterogeneous. Rarely have so many materials and gestures been used to confront oppositions of textures, forms and colours. Their works cannot be read. They are visual shocks that create irrational, madcap territories in the actual space of the exhibition. They borrow from painting and sculpture, yet foil the aesthetic codes of their representation to engage them more in ...

Agnes Martin: Life & Work explores the life, origins, and art of one of the most internationally celebrated painters to emerge from this country. It reveals how Martin gained renown in the male-dominated art world of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a pivotal figure between two of the era’s dominant movements: Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Delving into Martin’s signature style composed of tranquil grids and stripes, the book investigates the origin of Martin’s method, which she perfected over the better part of four decades, following her belief in the transformative power of art. “I would like [my pictures] to represent beauty, ...

For the past five years the paintings of Vittorio Brodmann have relied on a commitment to small-scale canvases and surrealistic animated figuration. In his first major institutional solo, Water Under the Bridge, Brodmann keeps the latter while adding monumentality to the scale of his artistic ambitions. It’s an invigorating and generous slam dunk, breaking open new and exciting avenues for his work.

On the edge of the Catholic cemetery at Portbou, Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan (b. 1930) was commissioned to create a memorial to Walter Benjamin on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in the town on September 26, 1940. Inaugurated on May 15, 1994, the monument is entitled Passages. A rusted steel pathway leads to a hooded entrance, which opens onto a precipitous staircase cut directly into the cliff. The staircase appears to open directly onto the sea crashing on the rocks below. The viewer is, however, protected from falling into the sea by a massive wall of glass placed at ...

Between December 2006 and January 2007, Sillman and Bordowitz recorded approximately 10 hours of conversation on topics ranging from art and philosophy to their personal histories and friendship. The resulting publication follows the chronology of their discussions from beginning to end. The transcript starts where they consider the beliefs underlying their respective endeavors, what art can and cannot accomplish. This e-book contains a new postscript created by Sillman and Bordowitz in the summer of 2014.

I perceive Jagna Ciuchta’s work as a dynamic system full of instabilities: she is an artist – painter, photographer, installation artist – but also a curator, sometimes a choreographer, at other times a watchful host. Her individual artworks – whether classic large-scale paintings, or more or less experimental photographs, or even the dense installations she arranges – individually fail to capture the nature of her work. Ciuchta seems to be looking for flows and resonances between them, and her strategy seems to be not to settle into any medium, language, or artistic identity: a constant self-occlusion. However, this is not ...

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted his famous Red Square painting, more properly called Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (1915). I think about how incendiary it must have been at the time, how arresting. How it prefigured the general collapse of figuration, of representation, into a single, glowing screen, an ultimate abstraction of life and death that is later taken up by PredPol, a predictive policing software company. How the Red Square is not even a square, but a slightly angled parallelogram. Particularly exciting is the way it, along with its sibling Black Square (1915), references Russian ...

In this edited extract from her new book The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, Ina Blom examines the memory and history of early analog video, and investigates how the medium, heralding new forms of technological and social life, prehended the forms and forces of painting.