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Groundbreaking conceptual artist Robert Irwin dies at 95

2023-10-26T15:35:00-04:00

Robert Irwin, a pioneering conceptual artist and leading figure of the Light and Space movement whose work had significant influences in architecture, passed away last night in San Diego. He was 95.

Irwin helped push the boundaries of American post-war art with his understanding of the principles of design. Along with a cohort of artists like James Turrell, Richard Serra, Larry Bell, and Donald Judd, Irwin worked to constantly challenge the perception of his viewers. He left behind painting to pursue a “conditional art” that espoused a further shift away from pictorial composition and towards the responsiveness of art objects to the context of a site.

Irwin’s collaborative site-conditioned work with institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dia Art Foundation, and LACMA set new precedents for the inclusion of living artists in a museum’s program, the influence of which today can be seen in the careers of Marina Abramović and Isaac Julien, among others. Irwin was also ...

Refik Anadol's Machine Hallucinations generative AI piece acquired by MoMA

2023-10-11T15:59:00-04:00

Refik Anadol has made history as one of two prominent digital artists to have their works acquired into the permanent collection of the 94-year-old Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

The museum announced its acquisition of Anadol’s 2022 Generative AI piece Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations, along with the blockchain-based piece 3FACE. 2022 from artist Ian Cheng, this week. Anadol's work was a gift to the museum by the 1OF1 Collection (which is led by Ryan Zurrer) and the RFC Collection, which is led by Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni.

Writing on Instagram, Anadol commended the museum’s curatorial decision, saying it “inscribes a historic chapter as MoMA welcomes the first Generative AI and tokenized artwork into its esteemed permanent collection.” The work was one of three made for last year’s special solo exhibition using a machine learning algorithm to interpret publicly available data taken from the museum’s collection to produce reinterpreted images that...

Renzo Piano’s Istanbul Modern museum opens in Turkey

2023-05-03T14:06:00-04:00

The first dedicated museum of modern and contemporary art in Turkish history is finally opening its doors this week following the completion of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW)-designed Istanbul Modern in the country’s most populous city.

Clad in an “iridescent” envelope of aluminum paneling that aims to resemble the scales of a fish, the 110,000-square-foot facility overlooks Istanbul’s Karaköy waterfront at the confluence of the Bosphorus Strait and Golden Horn waterways. In its site placement and silhouette, the structure evokes the passage of a ship through the harbor. The building’s ground floor is made transparent by a glass curtain wall that showcases two site-specific works by Richard Wentworth and Olafur Eliasson while offering visitors a panoramic view of the ongoing $1.8 billion Galataport development beyond.

Image: © Cemal Emden

RPBW says this material transparency “reflects the ethos of the museum: A multifaceted experience offering visitors audience-oriented exh...

BeMA: a new art museum for Beirut

2016-10-14T13:08:00-04:00

Beirut is to get a new modern art museum with a design inspired by Italian campaniles and Arabic minarets. BeMA, the Beirut Museum of Art, will feature a slender tower rising 124 metres into the sky, according to designs by the winner of an architectural competition revealed on Thursday.

An international jury has selected the Paris-based Lebanese architect Hala Wardé to oversee the complex on what the project backers describe as “a symbolically charged site that once marked the dividing lines in the Lebanese civil war”.

For more from Lebanon and the greater MENA region:

Albright-Knox Gallery announces short list of firms for $80m expansion: Snøhetta, BIG, OMA, wHY, Allied Works

2016-03-02T12:51:00-05:00

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery wants to create a public space that could rival Canalside while expanding and remaking one of the city’s most recognizable institutions. And gallery officials are looking to some of the most respected architects in the world to make it happen. They have narrowed the list of potential architects for the gallery’s upcoming expansion project to five firms with experience building in challenging urban environments.

Located in the historic, Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Delaware Park, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is one of the major cultural hotspots of New York State's second largest city. Now, the contemporary and modern art gallery plans a major expansion of its facilities, which originally opened in 1905 and later gained an addition designed by Gordon Bushaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

The Albright-Knox Gallery announced a preliminary list of prominent designers, with a plan to select one by mid-June. The firms are:

Unlike with other architectural competitions, the Albright-Knox Galley has not asked the firms to submit a near-finalized design. Instead, they've incorporated a yearlong period into the planning process, in order to foster close collaboration with the chosen architects.

“We’re not in a design competition to choose a design and then build it. We’re in a process of choosing a partner,” Albright-Knox director Janne...