Nico Kos Earle 

One of the highlights of Frieze week is the exceptional – institutional-level – exhibition Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London at the newly opened Offer Waterman and Francis Outred Gallery in Mayfair. The ideal counterpoint to the stunning gem of an exhibition at the Courtauld, Somerset House, ‘Monet and London, Views of the Thames’ painted from a room in...

The global art community descended on London last week for Frieze, which opened on Wednesday in leafy Regent’s Park. There was a cacophony of openings across all commercial, institutional, non-profit, and pop-up spaces, as this is the week to discover and be discovered. Frieze Week is a circus; it was a buyer’s market this year...

The four artists shortlisted for the 40th edition of the Turner Prize 2024, Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine le Bas, are a motley crew. Looking back to the genesis of this prize, in 1984, the Tate Gallery showed a fraction of the contemporary art it exhibits today...

Lake Como, a beauty so sublime, our first encounter is simultaneously tinged with the fear of its vanishing – and our own. Enshrined by sentinels of mountains that guard this gentle pool of water with their lives, it offers itself in totality to the heavens, coruscating with skylight. Along its enchanted coast, there is almost no flat land. Steep banks, cascading with...

Perhaps the most exuberant, celebratory, and uplifting of the Giardini pavilions at this year’s Venice Biennial was by Jeffrey Gibson – a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Cherokee descent, at the American Pavilion.

Born in 1972, Gibson grew up in major urban centres in the United States, Germany, and Korea. Being from everywhere and nowhere, Gibson would deploy these myriad influences as a form of resistance in his art – hence his show’s title ‘The Space in Which to Place Me’.His practice unravels how stereotypes of Indigenous...

In March 1849, Théophile Thoré-Bürger founded Le Journal de la vraie République, which Cavaignac (head of the French Second Republic) banned. Forced into exile, this once-political journalist turned his attention to the forgotten Dutch masters of the Golden Age under the pseudonym W. Burger. In addition to his ‘re-discovery’ of Johannes Vermeer...

En route to the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens, a black and white taxi blurs past me, drawing my gaze along Exhibition Road. I glimpse the words YOU, ME, YOU in bold capitals – two of them are crossed out with a green X. These words trigger a random set of emotions: love, regret, yearning and something I cannot name. I recognise that bold, imperative Futura type...

Since 2020, Nicholas Cullinan has overseen an acclaimed £41.3m renovation, which reopened on time and on budget, no mean feat. A sensational new entrance and thrilling rehang of new commissions and historical acquisitions sets the scene for a dynamic and timely exhibitions programme that re-examines what it means to be British...

The first time Mark Rothko’s paintings were exhibited in Paris, their reception was frosty. Organized by MoMA in 1962, 44 works made between 1945 – 1961 travelled to the Musee d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris and were presented in a poorly maintained basement. Three important curatorial elements had been overlooked..

Let’s be honest, Paris – the city of lights – is just so pretty the last thing you want to do is spend all day inside an exhibition hall. Luckily, the fair directors of Art Basel Paris have understood the draw of a well-curated public program to animate its many emblematic locations. Presenting works in the Jardin des Tuileries

As London opened its doors to the international art world for Frieze Week, a host of exhibitions and collateral events across the capital were set to showcase this city’s capacity for inclusion and dialogue – yet once again, real-world events took over the conversation, leaving many of us asking: what difference does any of this make?

To get into Happy Gas, Sarah Lucas’ new solo show at Tate Britain, you have to walk through a gift shop; floating on the sugary peach wallpaper is the repeating photographic image of cigarette orbs (tits) crafted from unsmoked Marlborough lights. Her original Tits in Space wallpaper (on a black background) was first used as the backdrop...

In 1973, Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 10 at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Sitting at a table with twenty knives and two tape recorders, left hand splayed, right hand holding a knife, the artist played an old Slavic drinking game. The knife is jabbed between the fingers with increasing speed, in a rhythm that traditionally expresses the player’s bravado. “Every time you miss

The first time I saw the sculptor, Bridget McCrum, she was holding a blow torch in her left hand, which followed her right, as she painted chloride mixture onto the crescent-shaped breast of a large bronze. The space was vast, the light flat, and the sound deafening. By contrast, her movement around the work, Crescent Birds, was fluid and light-footed. Her figure was obscured behind goggles with tempered lenses, gloves and a protective apron. I had no idea she was 85 years old...

There is always something to learn at the Tate, but this was a lesson I never expected. When Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life was announced, I was both excited and perplexed at what seemed a strange pairing. Hopefully, through this dialogue, the curators would share new entry points for...

When Garry Fabian Miller was 19 years old, he stepped out onto the balcony of his flat in Clevedon and looked across the Severn Estuary towards the coastline of Wales. Exposed to the elements, his line of sight free from any human constructs, he was alone with the limits of his perception. On the distant horizon, sunbeams pierced the clouds and bounced off the water like a giant processor...

A pea green fishing boat drifts mysteriously on a moonlit sea. Along its length stand ghostly figures looking out to port, many carrying instruments highlighted in warm, golden tones. Beneath the hull, the water is constellated with phosphorescence; a bloom of pale lemon illuminates the distant horizon under a lavender sky...

For this rolling feature Nico Kos-Earle has chosen 15 international artists working in various mediums to look out for in 2023.

At the entrance to Every Tangle of Thread and Rope is a vast black-and-white photographic transfer of Magdalena Abakanowicz (20 June 1930 – 20 April 2017) emerging from sinewy curtains of wool, sisal and rope. Holding a frayed loop, she is staring at us. On the adjacent wall, bronzed, shirtless men are marching across white sand in pairs, carrying giant, monochrome pelts draped over poles...

‘I first came to notice this painting [Kerze, 1983] in 1988 when it was used on the album cover of Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth. It seemed to extend the mood of the music and got lodged in my subconscious; now, more than 30 years later, this feeling of pathos has started to reappear in my work.’...

‘A Moveable Feast’  is a presentation of small sculpture and digital prints by the artist Emma Witter. The exhibition takes place on the first floor of a handsome listed Georgian townhouse on The Portman Estate in Marylebone, London, open by appointment until the 3rd of January. Elegant cornices frame the walls, painted a soft egg shell teal; giant shafts of light spill across the room...

(Photo Credit: Gaetan Bernede)

They say that in Paris, the story finds you. With the first edition of Paris + Art Basel opening after Frieze London, the city of lights has re-emerged as the leading capital of culture. Whilst the fair was sensationally vast but perceptually challenging, rammed with ‘wealth’ tourists posing as art aficionados, the arrondissements Le Marais, St Germain. Matingnon and Belleville (thank you, @parisgallerymap) were positively buzzing with openings...

Sometimes I wonder if the art fair is a symptom of the internet and our contemporaneous assumption that everything is instantly available at the click of a button. However, instead of individual surfing, at a fair, you are browsing at the same time as everyone you have ever met in the art world, jammed into an endless..

At Bruce Nauman’s first MoMA retrospective in 1995, the art critic Robert Hughes said “no show was ever noisier…” but concluded that Nauman was “beyond much dispute, the most influential artist of his generation.” Numerous retrospectives followed...

Just as the places we inhabit influence the way we think, the structures we imagine can transform our relationship with the world. Arriving in darkness, my first glimpse of Santander was by morning light. Built on an incline, my walk through the city centre, from the Coliseum Hotel to the Cantabrian Sea, was defined by an irresistible feeling of movement towards an opening – a vista, a story, a mouth – like a river flowing out to sea.