interviews

Ali Cherri Gatekeeper
by alexia|31 October 2024|ART
Paris-based Lebanese artist Ali Cherri created a powerful, theatrical atmosphere on the lower ground floor of the Parisian gallery Imane Fares for his show A Monument to Subtle Rot. Illuminated in a pitch-black room, a bronze Egyptian mask is frozen...
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Roberto Gil de Montes The Light Out There
by alexia|12 January 2024|ART
The warmth and sunshine of a paradise envelops Roberto Gil de Montes’s painting Farewell on display at Kurimanzutto Gallery in New York City. Standing in front of it, the Mexican artist’s eyes range quietly over the three male figures he...
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Jean-Marie Appriou A Dream that Escapes
by alexia|02 November 2022|ART
Three standing mirrors with layers of organic aquatic lushness instead of glass and silver reflect Jean-Marie Appriou’s high-ceilinged studio in Paris. Not far away, a crescent shaped river boat with a cyclopic figurehead has found a safe refuge near a...
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Francesco Vezzoli Icons
by alexia|05 February 2022|ART
In Brescia’s busy train station, the giant poster of a faceless winged figure lures me to the heart of Brixia, the ancient city. There in front of the Capitolium (73 AD) I find the pictured sculpture atop a pink and...
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Ali Banisadr When the Simorgh Paints
by alexia|15 January 2021|ART
At the Benaki Museum’s top floor gallery with its walls of a muted shade of aquamarine, Iranian born American artist Ali Banisadr pairs his paintings with some of the museum’s celebrated Chinese porcelains for a show entitled Ultramarinus – Beyond the...
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Marina Karella From Time to Time
by alexia|23 October 2020|ART
We all have a place we love to go. For the artist Marina Karella it is a studio in the Northern Dodecanese in Chora, a hillside village on the island of Patmos built around the fortified monastery of St. John the Theologian. From...
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Erwin Wurm Shedding Light on the Absurd
by admin|20 October 2020|ART
Currently covered by the sleeve of his winter jacket, the tattoo on Erwin Wurm’s arm, “One minute forever,” evokes the series of action-based performative sculptures he conceived 21 years ago.  For a One Minute Sculpture Wurm offers a handwritten instruction and/or a suggestive...
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Adel Abdessemed Dans une usine de rêves qui pensent
by alexia|20 October 2020|ART
Two full-scale cast-steel pigeons, each with strips of dynamite and a Blackberry phone tied to its back, sit quietly in Adel Abdessemed’s Parisian studio. Dressed in his trademark blue pants, a black shirt and a matching jacket, the forty-nine-year-old Franco...
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David Shrigley Thumbs Up
by alexia|20 October 2020|ART
British visual artist David Shrigley attempts to rock climb on the Greek island of Hydra and within minutes he draws an appreciative crowd. While he may be improvising for a photo shoot, performing isn’t new to him. Shrigley was an...
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Jacques Grange Paris from my Window
by alexia|20 October 2020|ART
Colette’s sparkling prose made her an international sensation. Although her fictional plots and characters are often scandalous, her famous journal Paris from my Window is more subtle with its observations of nature and descriptions of the loyal tenants of the...
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Harold Koda The Curator
by alexia|20 October 2020|ART
He wears a perfectly tailored suit, round glasses and polished shoes. With neither pride nor pretension, he stands next to three dress forms and smiles with modest assurance. He is showing three examples of design suffused with Asian references: an...
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Mary Katrantzou The Outsider
by alexia|20 October 2020|ART
Walking into Mary Katrantzou’s London office, I encounter a happy Cyclops, a figure with a wide-open eye and long voluptuous hair wearing a dress from her 2009 collection inspired by perfume bottles. The portrait by artist/illustrator Craig Redman, who uses...
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Christian Louboutin Wildflowers
by alexia|17 October 2020|ART
In 1873 Impressionist painter Claude Monet in Coquelicots painted a vibrant splash of red poppies across the lush green fields of the French countryside. French shoe designer Christian Louboutin has created a similar effect in today’s fashion landscape. Did the...
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Kiki Smith Where the Sea Meets the Sky
by alexia|13 October 2020|ART
It all started with a drawing that American artist Kiki Smith made seven years ago of the long and wandering Hydra, the sea serpent in the sky, and its adjoining constellations Corvus (crow), Noctua (owl), Crater (chalice), Sextans (sextant) and...
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Nina Yashar Celestial Map
by alexia|13 October 2020|ART
Enter Nina Yashar’s home and you enter Nina Yashar’s eclectic universe where Italian Grazia Toderi’s aerial photo of the myriad twinkling lights of London’s night sky is the centrepiece of her collection. In the photograph, the brightest city lights trace...
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Imran Qureshi That Kind of Sensibility
by alexia|12 October 2020|ART
Morning And Night Sang A Duet Together For A Long Moment in the historic Al Jahili Fort in Al Ain United Arab Emirates or at least they will have done when Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi unveils his site-specific installation for...
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Cecilia Alemani Breathing Public Art
by alexia|12 October 2020|ART
It’s 10 am on the High Line in New York City, and two women in red cocktail dresses walk down the old railway turned greenway one after the other, each holding a book to her chest. Curator and director of...
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Tony Cragg Master of Materials
by alexia|12 October 2020|ART
Tony Cragg likes order. He likes to classify his sculptures, group them into families and think in terms of the relationships between those families. “I am very skeptical about throwing things at the wall and doing chance things, but art...
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Urs Fischer Natural Order
by alexia|11 October 2020|ART
In the luminous studio, nude women recline gracefully on couches. One of them, gleaming in the sun that streams through the skylight, looks as if she has been dipped in liquid gold like the woman in Goldfinger. Another, partly veiled...
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Ron Arad A Straight Line Is Also a Curve
by alexia|11 October 2020|ART
Ron Arad’s iPhone screen displays the image of an elongated male figure painted in earth-toned colors reminiscent of a Modigliani. It is the portrait of his father at 23 by his mother when she was 21, younger than Arad’s youngest...
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