Journalist Alastair Sooke sets out to discover just how much artists like Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali have influenced our modern lives, and explains why their art is considered so great.
Rachel Whiteread’s cast of a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End was hailed as one of the greatest public sculptures by an English artist in the twentieth century. Completed in autumn of 1993 and demolished in January 1994, House attracted tens of thousands of visitors and generated impassioned debate, in the local streets, the national press and in the House of Commons.
The Tender Skin, a struggling writer-turned-bartender grapples with longing and regret when a chance encounter reignites buried feelings at an art gallery.
remembering/modifying/developing is a musical belief-making system. It consists of three parts; a series of repeated and changing performances that are live and broadcasted as video afterwards; a sculptural installation that shifts its appearance every time I perform; and lastly, the sounds produced in each performance added to the sound from the previous time, creating denser and denser musical belief. I re-inhabit the physical and psychological patterns of this performance over and over again.
Irén, the museum hall guard, is happy to work amongst the great works of classical paintings. But one day, she finds herself confronted with a new, abstract painting. The incomprehensible work has a profound effect on her and will not let her rest. The next workday, she makes an unexpected move.
Essentieel (1964) is a short experimental film made by Belgian abstract painter Jef Verheyen in collaboration with poet Paul De Vree. A cinematic equivalent of Verheyen’s attempts in representing the warmth and vibrations of light in his monochrome or ‘essentialist’ paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s, the film plays on the tensions between abstract color surfaces and natural elements.
A short film shot on 16mm about memory, grieving, and siblinghood.
Through a collage of spaces and times, the interventions and interferences of nature and human beings in the south of Brazil reveals themselves... or try to hide.
“A Two Hearted Tale” is a heartfelt look at the history of the iconic trout label adorning Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, the Michigan-born beer that is the most popular IPA beer in America, and the label’s eccentric artist, Ladislav Hanka.
Arthur “Art” Prince finds escape from his otherwise unremarkable life by dominating the “Sting-Pong" scene at a local underground club. However, when a mysterious challenger suddenly appears, Art is forced to confront his self-destructive tendencies.
A film about and with Max Ernst.
This is a compilation of Assume Vivid Astro Focus' video work. Born anytime between the 20th and 21st century in various parts of the world, nomads, AVAF is the combined name for the New York based Brazilian artist Eli Sudbrack and his ongoing 21st century aesthetic research project. AVAF is splashing in the interstices between art and entertainment, converting these gaps into mental pools of sensorial joy and/or sensorial pools of mental joy.
This narrative restraint appears perhaps most clearly in Wangechi Mutu’s video Cutting, in which the artist enters the frame and proceeds to rhythmically hack away at a log in an expansive desert landscape before finally laying down her machete and leaving the frame.
Draped in an electric blue fabric, the artist acts as a conduit between the tangile and the spiritual, blurring the boundaries between human form and natural elements.
A painter, a naked woman, and a camera. In this triple constellation we explore the power of the gaze and the roles it imposes on us. An artist's studio turns into the setting for questions about how we look at and perceive women. The naked skin of the model becomes the canvas for an audiovisual exploration of the ways in which seeing and being seen anchors us in our body. And how this body shapes our experience of the world and our role in it.