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Martin Holman is a British writer and former Florence resident who often returns to Italy. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and the Burlington Magazine.
Painting on a monumental scale, says the British artist Jenny Saville, “has always felt right for me”. Visiting museums as a child and student, she saw that the great painters ...
In an interview a few years ago Jeff Koons insisted that “I’ve made what The Beatles would have made if they had made sculpture”. While that claim will not help ...
Florence is famous as an epicentre of artistic revolution and the Renaissance is justifiably the best known. Even in the last century, the city contributed a cultural tremor when the ...
“This woman drags the whole of Moscow and the whole of St Petersburg behind her; they don’t just imitate her work, they imitate even her personality.” Praise of that stature ...
Ian Kiaer is a British artist who has exhibited throughout Europe and North America. In 2009, he was accorded a one-man show at Turin’s prestigious GAM, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, ...
Ralph Rugoff, the US curator behind the centrepiece exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, believes in the potential of art. “An exhibition,” he declares, “should open people’s eyes to previously ...
The single constant presence in the work of Marina Abramović is the figure of the artist herself. For more than 40 years, her body has been exposed to an alarming ...
As well as the calamitous flood, late 1966 saw the emergence of ground-breaking ideas about architecture in Florence. The spirit of collaboration that lifted the city’s treasures out of the ...
Standing at over 20 metres and with its gilded surface, The Golden Tower by the American conceptual artist James Lee Byars is hard to miss. Until November 26, this elegant ...
Although Bill Viola’s installations employ innovative sophisticated video and computer equipment, the great themes he explores are ancient and universal. What’s more, during the past two decades, this internationally acclaimed ...
As an artist, Robert Rauschenberg’s radical objective was to operate “in the gap between art and life”. His work crossed boundaries and a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern (touring ...
Ai Weiwei is now described as the world’s most famous living artist. Millions round the globe have followed him on Twitter and Instagram; his impassive, bearded portrait symbolises his defiant ...
Jan Fabre, the Belgian artist whose monumental sculptures are enlivening three of Florence’s most august public spaces this summer, is a modern Renaissance man. As well as a visual artist ...
“No meaning, no symbols, no sense” was one pre-war American verdict on mining magnate Solomon Guggenheim’s collection of abstract art. Echoes of that public resistance to painting and sculpture with ...
The art world’s movers and shakers descended on Venice in early May by plane, train, boat and super yacht for the opening week of the 56th Biennale of visual ...
Ketty La Rocca is now considered one of the most distinctive Italian artists of the 1970s. Yet in 1976, the year La Rocca died, aged 37, one leading American commentator wrote that she had been ‘unable to break into the male art world with her art and her writing.&
Giuseppe Penone, for four decades one of contemporary art’s leading figures, has long sought to bridge the gap that consumerism has opened between our experiences of art and nature. With Florence’s unique skyline for background, the enclosed natural setting of the Boboli Gardens and Forte di
The careers of artists Dadamaino and James Lee Byars began in the late 1950s. There is no record that they met in life or that either was familiar with the other’s work before Byars died in 1997 and Dadamaino in 2004. But two exhibitions in Florence help to
As the Institute approaches its centenary in 2017, The Florentine meets Julia Race, director since last August, to explore the opportunities and challenges of being 100 years young in the era of online learning, virtual travel and widespread cultural tourism. Martin Holman: You are no stranger to Italy, having
Questions about the family as an institution regularly fill the pages of newspapers and magazines as well as the airwaves. So it is not surprising that artists around the world are participating in the debate. Inevitably, questions outweigh answers, but since the arts excel at testing theories and inverting assumptions
The small, edicola-sized interior of BASE Progetti per l’Arte in via San Niccolò provides unexpected proof that ‘precious things come in small packages’. In spite of its tiny setting—or, maybe, because of it—this non-profit-making exhibition space is probably
Before being installed in the Vasari Corridor, a recent addition to the Uffizi’s unrivalled collection of artists’ self-portraits is about to go on view at San Pier Scheraggio, the former church enclosed within Palazzo Vecchio. The subject of the work is American video artist Bill Viola,
Although Florence is a cultural capital with few equals on the planet, its immense historical legacy has tended to overshadow the place that contemporary art occupies in the city. Yet as recently as the 1960s and 70s, Florence was acknowledged as an avant-garde centre for visual arts and architecture
Italy is confronting the impact of migration. Although less than 9 percent of its population was born outside the country (below the average for European Union member states), immigration has risen dramatically since 2001 and poses questions about national borders as populations move in search of prosperity and security. The
