De Kooning was the last to die from the legendary post-war generation, now known under the heading of Action Painters or Abstract Expressionists. He spawned together with this generation, an internationally recognizable American art. Because of this achievement, I am surprised to recall that De Kooning is actually European in origin. Willem de Kooning was…

Whether criticism functions as a creative activity or a technical component of artistic creation, it always refers to an object that needs to be evaluated. Criticism is always a concrete response or a mediation that leads us to what is possible in a work of art. I’d like to point out first a, perhaps, a…

Sans Soleil is an amazing visual experience, as simple as it is complex, a large canvas where tracks seem to be launched in all directions: reflections, multiple bridges between themes, places and times. Everything, though, seems to turn in a concentric circle around a central message. It is a beautiful, fascinating enigma that quickly puts…

“Journalism is my vocation,” Gabriel Garcia Márquez has explained in countless interviews. In the great literary works of the Nobel Prize winner of 1982 one often feels the tightrope walk between hard-researched facts and the slightly exotic poetry of Latin America, which results in the so-called “magical realism”. How extensive the journalistic oeuvre of today’s…

All of them came to the event of the season, Georg Baselitz’ exhibition at the Haus der Kunst – the politicians, the chic people, the renowned critics and the simple art enthusiasts. Large-format paintings from important phases of his fifty-year work now fill the representative ground floor rooms, with the so-called “Black Paintings” and the…

Romare Bearden (1912–1988), Empress of the Blues, 1974, acrylic and pencil on paper and printed paper, 36 x 48 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase in part through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment The relationship between music and art has been a very intimate one since the Romantic period. The early…

Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf23 September 2012 – 13 January 2013 While photography paved the way for the emancipation of painting from its traditional image function about 100 years ago, photography in the digital media age seems to be able to emancipate itself from merely reproducing what it has seen by way of reportage. Andreas Gursky is…

Constantin Brancusi, born in Romania in 1876, in a village in the foothills of the Carpathians, had left his homeland in 1904 and had come to Paris via Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Zurich. He was a gifted sculptor, even before he arrived in the artists’ colony on Montparnasse. Auguste Rodin became aware of him and…

Under the motto: “Burning Down The House”, the 10th Gwangju Biennale manages the balancing act between memory and the future Men and women in white dresses and black blindfolds are crossing a public square. They carry dark-veiled boxes with the bones of their relatives. Silently they deposit the mortal remains in two rusty steel containers…

About Mark Fisher’s essay collection “Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures “This is nowhere, and it’s forever.” The sentence quoted by British cultural journalist and theorist Mark Fisher on the first pages of his essay collection Ghosts of my Life from a BBC science fiction series describes the perspective of…