Artist

Roman Opalka – Composing with time

Artists who devote their entire lives to a single project are rare. Roman OPALKA will go down in art history as one of the most ascetic and most coherent of them all.

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) – subliminal creation.

Cy Twombly died on 5 July in Rome. The American artist had lived the last 60 years of his life in Italy.

Anish Kapoor – the experience of vision

The Indian artist Anish Kapoor is the next artist selected for the Monumenta exhibition in Paris (11 May to 23 June).

Takashi Murakami – Western-style Manga Art

The world’s most successful contemporary artists also have excellent business acumen.

Artprice: Annual Art Market Report for 2009

According to thierry Ehrmann, founder and CEO of Artprice: "2009 will go down in history as a year when the art market shed its excesses and narrowly avoided a complete meltdown". A drastic purge of the Contemporary art segment, slashed revenue figures and renewed interest in Old Masters and Modern art…

Ben – his biggest ever retrospective in Lyon

Ben is not just child-like writing on a pencil case or a fountain pen with J'écris pour la gloire. To understand the universe of Ben – beyond his ego and his derivative products – we need to look at Fluxus, at his eloquence, his doubts and his struggles.

Giacometti, the new Picasso

This wednesday February 3rd, Sotheby's London's evening sale was a time for a new world record. L'Homme qui marche I, Alberto GIACOMETTI 's human-size bronze was auctioned £58M (£65M premium included), for a £12M-18M estimate, and is now the most expensive artwork ever auctioned.

The highs and lows of contemporary artists

As expected, auction revenue figures for contemporary artists in 2009 contracted quite substantially (divided by 14 in the case of Damien Hirst, and by 3 in the case of Jeff Koons). However, for all that, the market is not in bad condition. The loss of the speculative element has essentially allowed prices to settle back to 2004 levels.

Christian Boltanski - from the Grand Palais to Tasmania

The artist chosen for the Monumenta 2010 exhibition under the great glass-dome roof at the Grand Palais in Paris is the Frenchman Christian BOLTANSKI . His selection follows that of the German Anselm KIEFER in 2007 and the American Richard SERRA in 2008. The exhibition entitled “Personnes” will run from 13 January to 21 February.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

CHRISTO is the artists’ name of the couple Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff (born June 1935 in Gabrovo Bulgaria) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (also born 13 June 1935 in Casablanca Morocco). The couple met in Paris in 1958 and settled in New York in 1964.

Antony Gormley – work on a grand scale…

Antony Gormley was 31 when London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery opened its doors to his first solo exhibition. That was in 1981, the year Gormley created his first hominoid sculptures (Three Ways). In 2008-2009, Gormley was the n° 3 contemporary British artist ranked by auction revenue.

Maurizio Cattelan – The art of deception

Maurizio CATTELAN has made a fortune from displaying his cynicism about art and the art world and attacking its mechanics: he has opened a gallery in New York (the Wrong Gallery) that is always closed and never sells anything; he has set up a foundation allowing an artist to live for one year on condition that he/she exhibits nothing (Oblomov Foundation);

Marc Newson confirms his star designer status

At just 46, Marc NEWSON already has pieces in prestigious public collections such as the Vitra Design Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Among the 30 or so awards he has received since the 1980s, he won the famous Compasso d’oro in 2000, and over the last decade his price index has literally exploded making him the most expensive living designer on the international auction circuit.

Niki de Saint Phalle braves the crisis

After the sale of three Niki de Saint-Phalle’s giant Nanas in Germany in December 2008 for €750,000, the Paris sale last month of her Le Banc produced another excellent result. The French-American artist – whose works are collected all over the world – is generating good sales performances in spite of the crisis.

Wassily Kandinsky – Munich, Paris, New-York

Painter, music-lover, teacher, art theorist and founder of abstract art, Wassily KANDINSKY succeeded in revealing painting, freeing it from objects in order to achieve an immaterial art. The title of his first conceptual work on abstract art – “Concerning the spiritual in art and painting in particular” – has painting elevated to a metaphysical level by the sheer expressive force of shapes and colours.

The Campana Brothers

The Brazilian brothers, Fernando and Humberto Campana, born respectively in 1961 and 1953, have injected new life into contemporary design and today their work features in dedicated exhibitions around the world : in the United States, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. In 1998, The New York MOMA hosted Project 66: Campana/Ingo Maurer. The following year (1999) the brothers were the subject of a first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Bahia (Brazil) and they were awarded the Georges Nelson Design Interiors prize by the American magazine Interiors.
After the dawn of the new millennium, their fame accelerated and their design acquired a veritable international reputation with pieces being integrated into the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the MOMA. From among their most successful creations, their best auctions have been generated by the doll chairs with the evocative name Sushi.

Damien Hirst / Jeff Koons – Artists and managers

The two most well-known and expensive contemporary artists alive today have other talents in common. They both enjoy exceptionally high media profiles, both elicit controversy, both set their respective auction records in 2008… and both know how to communicate. They also both seem to be "financially aware". September 2008 sees both on centre stage with just five days between the two. The American Jeff Koons, the most expensive living artist at auction today, is currently rubbing shoulders with French royal history having inaugurated his exhibition at the Palace of Versailles (10/09/2008 to 14/12/2008) while the English artist Damien Hirst has caused a mini sensation by selling directly through Sotheby’s…

India, the new Himalaya of the market?

Behind China, the other significant emerging force on the international art market is India. In the mid 1990s, India's strong economic growth produced a new generation of patrons and sponsors willing to invest in the art of their fellow-countrymen. Today, the demand is global and fast-growing, substantially fuelled by the speculative incentive to earn attractive gains on quick turnarounds. The works produced by the new stars of Indian art are exchanged in auction houses in Hong-Kong and Dubai, London and New-York, New Delhi and Paris. After China, India looks like a new Eldorado for collectors / buyers attracted to the speculative potential.