Coincidence and illumination

Wednesday 19 September, 2007

Cologne Cathedral looks back at a long and eventful history. The inauguration of Gerhard Richter's stained glass window for the South Transept adds a new chapter, bright with 72-colour, frame-breaking abstraction. By Petra Kipphoff
read more

Nymphs in the afternoon

Wednesday 29 August, 2007

Cologne's Museum Ludwig presents Germany's first solo exhibition of the French painter Balthus. This self-styled "King of Cats" took a razor to reality and a guillotine to the metaphysical bombast of modernist painting. By Manfred Schwarz
read more

Poison in the air

Thursday 19 July, 2007

Now, as the last eye witnesses are dying out, totalitarianism is tempting a new generation to warm their hands in its fire. From Bernd Eichinger, Jonathan Meese and now Tom Cruise, is there no letting go of the Führer? By Georg Diez
read more

Summer of political art

Thursday 21 June, 2007

Both the Venice Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel have taken the dark side of modernity as their theme. Looking at how the two mega-exhibitons do battle, Hanno Rauterberg prefers Kassel's investigation of evil to Venice's concession to it. (Untitled, from the series Spring-Sow-Plum-Scene, 1996, mask 6, 2003. © Aoki Ryoko)
read more

Art on the cutting edge?

Thursday 14 June, 2007

Is today's art no more than the fashion of the day? Are there only niches in art, each with its own cutting edge? Brigitte Werneburg asks what contemporariness means in a world where the lines are blurred between fashionable art and artistic fashion.
read more

Art to the rescue

Wednesday 6 June, 2007

In a disused dockyard in Rostock, the "Art goes Heiligendamm" initiative has put the final touches to its G8 intervention. The preferred topic among the artworks is borders and overcoming them. Aside from that they deal anything that's good: information, documentation, irony, utopia, anti-consumerism. By Irene Grüter
read more

The unofficial documenta list

Thursday 3 May, 2007

Probable, silent, public, inofficial - there are many categories of participant in this year's documenta. What's lacking are the official ones. Because the exhibition organisers are keeping tight-lipped about what artists have been invited, we are left to guess, speculate, hope and dismay. By Ludwig Seyfarth
read more

Wurm holes everywhere

Wednesday 11 April 2007

Dada is back. Erwin Wurm is the great grandson of the Surrealists. The hilarity and hidden meanings of his stagings and sculptures unsettle and get under your skin. To coincide with a major retrospective in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen, Werner Spies visited the artist in his studio in Vienna.
read more

Smiles permitted, grins less welcome

Thursday 29 March, 2007

The art of glimmer and of deception. Seminal works show the roots and origins of the Op Art movement in an exhibition at Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle. The dynamic of black and white fields meets snuffling electric motors. And a bachelor machine makes jokes and winks. By Ulf Erdmann Ziegler
read more

Bodily finesse

Monday 5 March, 2007

Much of the work of the Renaissance sculptor Conrat Meit has been lost over the centuries. The Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich has pulled together a goodly collection from around the world which proves Meit to be a master of the pot-bellied feminine ideal of the day. By Birgit Sonna
read more

You photograph what you love

Thursday 22 February, 2007

With an exhibition opening in Hanover, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans talks to Dirk Peitz about the digital revolution, the futile search for absolute truth and his private newspaper archive.
read more

The triumph of Eerke, Juerke and Veeke

Tuesday 5 December, 2006

German painter Tomma Abts left for London twelve years ago. Her quiet, geometric paintings with Frisian names have just won her the Turner Prize. Morgan Falconer talked to her on the eve of award ceremony.
read more

The artist and his doctor

Monday 4 December, 2006

A deadly brain disease connects painter Jörg Immendorff and neurologist Thomas Meyer. One has ALS, the other is working on a cure. By Jan Brandt (Image: Jörg Immendorff, "Solo". Courtesy The Saatchi Gallery)

read more

Raiders of the lost art

Tuesday 7 November, 2006

After being restituted to the heirs of its former Jewish owner by Berlin's senator for culture, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Berlin Street Scene" will be auctioned off tomorrow at Christie's in New York. Critics argue whether the heirs really did have a legal claim to the painting. By Brigitte Werneburg
read more

The island of Enlightenment

Friday 20 October, 2006

Berlin's Museum Island is perhaps the most important museum complex in the world. It was embellished this week with the reopening of the Bode Museum, housing the finest display of European sculpture anywhere. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, takes us on a first-ever tour of European history in three-dimensional form.
read more