The Cv/VAR archive, established in 1995, features over 150 analytic essays on significant Western art pieces, including works by Masaccio, Vermeer, and contemporary artists like Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol. The latest issue, Cv/VAR 155, includes a review by James Cahill of Francesco Clemente's exhibition, highlighting the artist's unique blend of Italian Renaissance and Eastern philosophies. Clemente's work reflects his dual life in New York and India, offering insights into the cultural connections that inform his artistic development.
Focusing on Damien Hirst's innovative contributions to contemporary art, this volume delves into his Biopsy and Fact paintings, votive pieces, and installations, including notable works like Saint Sebastian and the diamond-studded skull showcased in the 'Beyond Belief' exhibition. Additionally, it reviews Hirst's year-long takeover of the Gagosian Gallery, featuring a dynamic selection of previously unseen works from his studio, highlighting the evolution of his artistic vision and his impact on the art world.
The essays delve into the Pre-Raphaelite movement's emergence in the mid-19th century, highlighting its significant impact on British art. Edward Lucie-Smith examines the Brotherhood's formation, its artists' connections, and their influence on various art movements, including Symbolism and Surrealism. James Cahill, with a focus on key figures like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, critiques a major exhibition at Tate Britain showcasing 180 works, providing insights into the movement's lasting legacy and cultural significance.
Exploring the creative journey of Robert Rauschenberg, this monograph delves into his 'Jammers' series, inspired by his time at a textile factory in India in 1975. The works reflect his innovative approach to fabric and movement, reminiscent of sailing crafts. Rauschenberg's background, including his studies under Josef Albers and his collaborations with contemporaries like Jasper Johns, is highlighted. The book features an essay by James Cahill and an interview with David White, offering insights into Rauschenberg's artistic philosophy and legacy.
Cv/VAR 104 reviews 'David Hockney RAL A Bigger Picture', exhibited at The Royal Academy January to April 2012. The project of creating monumental landscape paintings was based on a small area near the artist's home at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. The project developed with time-framed films, i-pad works, drawings, sketchbooks, oils
Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media-- painting, sculpture, film, and installation art-- his work is rooted in the transformation of outward reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres that capture the contemporary mood.This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone' s work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a lightbulb . winter at the Sø rlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light . summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath, Vienna.
Longlisted for the Authors' Club First Novel Award 'Divine . . . the smart, sexy read you need' Evening Standard 'Startlingly impressive' Daily Mail 'Exhilarating' Vogue.com 'An electric new novel' Guardian AN EXQUISITE DEBUT NOVEL. A MID-LIFE COMING-OF-AGE STORY CHARTING ONE MAN'S SEXUAL AWAKENING AND HIS SPECTACULAR FALL FROM GRACE IN 1990S LONDON. FOR FANS OF ALAN HOLLINGHURST AND EDWARD ST AUBYN. Exiled from his university position for an inexcusable blunder, art historian Don Lamb flees to London, a city alive with sex and creativity. There, over the course of a long, hot summer, as he is immersed in the anarchic art and gay scenes of the mid-90s, Don sees his carefully curated life irrevocably changed. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light. Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don's turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life. 'Wildly enjoyable . . . A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling' Financial Times 'Dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told' Reverend Richard Coles, Daily Mail
David Hockney is the most famous living British artist. And he is arguably one of the more famous American artists as well. Emerging from the north of England in the 1960s, he made quite a splash in Swinging London as a portaitist, and went on to make a even bigger splash in Los Angeles when he moved there in the 1970s. His figurative paintings of the 1970s and 1980s captured the zeitgeist of West Coast living, while he also explored new avenues by constructing mosaics out of polaroids. By the beginning of the millennium, he returned to his Yorkshire roots, embarking on a new period of painting. This came to an end with the death by misadventure in his home of a young studio assistant in 2013. He went 'home' to LA and has in the intervening years begun a new period of contemplative portraiture.
