Utagawa Kuniyoshi “Fishermen at Teppozu”, early 1830s. When you look at works of art that are very foreign to your experience, you naturally seek connection across the divide. Among modern civilisations, Japan provides an extreme example of this gap. Between the 17th century and the 1860s, it pursued a policy of almost complete isolation. Its [...]

This year’s exhibition at Schaulager, ‘Holbein to Tillmans’, assembles approximately 200 paintings and sculptures, created between 1500 and the present, from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel. They are joined by several works from private collections and roughly thirty works from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, which is associated with the Kunstmuseum. With this exhibition, Schaulager, [...]

A man looks at Joan Miró’s “Jeune fille s’evadant”, 1967 at Bancaja Foundation. The Bancaja Cultural Center presents Joan Miró. Evoking the Female Image, on view through June 21, 2009. The exhibition was organized together with the Joan and Pilar Miro Foundation. Women as a theme run through all Miró’s work. It was an early [...]

The splendid new exhibition at the Royal Academy of 19th-century woodblock prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi is dominated by scenes of heroic samurai warriors, fighting to the death, teeth bared and eyes bulging as they grapple with tigers and strange monsters or fend off the flying arrows or slashing swords of their enemies. The show is [...]

Marcel Duchamp’s proclamation “For Arp, art is Arp” serves as the title for one of the most comprehensive retrospectives on Hans Arp ever undertaken. The Arp Museum Bahnof Rolandseck is showing the exhibition “Art is Arp” with over 100 drawings, collages, sculptures, and reliefs as well as ca. 80 texts, photographs, and documents through June [...]

Andy Warhol, The Last Supper © 2009 Andy Warhol Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009.Foundation for the visuals arts inc. / Adagp, Paris, 2009. In 1962, Andy Warhol painted the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and her rival Liz Taylor, reinterpreted the Mona Lisa and Elvis Presley. From 1967 until his death [...]

From February 17 through May 31 2009, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present the most important retrospective to date of the work of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (b. Tokyo, 1962), one of the most celebrated contemporary artists to have emerged from Asia in the last century. Japanese artist Takashi Murakami exhibits until March 31 [...]