Why businesses should support the arts post-pandemic

Sculpture by Leelee Chan, winner of the BMW Art Journey with Art Basel © Leelee Chan As head of BMW’s cultural engagement, Thomas Girst is deeply passionate about arts and ideas. He involves the company in some really interesting projects which not only help these artists and institutions – many of whom rely entirely on corporate sponsorship – but the partnerships also subtly boost BMW’s brand image externally and internally. Of... Read More

Switch House opens at Tate Modern

This week saw the opening of London’s latest gallery dedicated to the display, screening and performance of contemporary art. Switch House at the Tate Modern is designed by Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron, and is the result of a twelve-year scheme. The £260m extension to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s former Bankside power station is the largest cultural project in London since the British Library was opened in 1998. #gallery-1... Read More

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye

Edvard Munch may forever be associated with The Scream, his iconic piece of work that exists in five formats – two paintings, two pastels and a lithograph – one of which sold for a staggering $119m earlier this summer. It is therefore refreshing to see a show dedicated to the work of this Norwegian artist that does not display any version. Instead, Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye sets out to reassess the work of Munch. It proposes a dialogue between... Read More

Turner prize: Sound as sculpture

This year’s Turner Prize was awarded to Scottish artist Susan Philipsz for her sound sculpture Lowlands. Philipsz used a sixteenth century Scottish lament about a sailor who drowns, but returns to give a final farewell to his loved one – recording all three existing versions in her own voice played under different bridges over the river Clyde in her birthplace Glasgow. Philipsz, who now lives in Berlin, is intrigued by the way sound can... Read More

Ai Weiwei’s 100m Sunflower Seeds

The latest installation to fill the enormous Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern is an inch-thick carpet made of over a hundred million tiny artworks collectively knows as Sunflower Seeds. Each intricately handcrafted porcelain sunflower seed carries its own unique note delivered by the skilled craftsmen of Jingdezhen. Sunflower Seeds is the work of Ai Weiwei and the eleventh in the Unilever Series to fill this challenging space at the London... Read More

The artist and their milieu

There was a time when an artist’s retrospective would see his or her paintings hung in some sort of chronological order – nothing more. That is how Oskar Kokoschka’s paintings in the 60’s and Picasso’s ceramics in the 70’s were introduced to London. It was how, more recently, New York’s MoMA exhibited an expanse of Claude Monet’s work with one room given to his haystacks, another to the Japanese bridge at Giverny and another to... Read More