Fine Arts News

A major retrospective at Tate Britain showcases more than 60 years of Hockney's art. Above, is his 1972 work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).

Painter David Hockney once said, "It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work." On Thursday in London, a major retrospective at Tate Britain will give visitors the chance to see 60 years of the English artist's "doings."

Oils, acrylics, sketches, photographs, smartphone drawings — Hockney has worked in every medium. He's one of the best-known contemporary artists and his works sell for millions.



Hockney's paintings are full of vivid, saturated colors. Above is his 2000 work, Going Up Garrowby Hill.

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A virtual reality installation allows visitors to experience a doll's perspective as she's poked and prodded by a lab assistant.
Susana Bates for Drew Altizer Photography/Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

The musician and multimedia artist has co-created an immersive experience designed to make people aware of their implicit biases. It's called "The Institute Presents: Neurosociety."

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Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925)
Havana Harbor

The director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art resigned this week. His departure underscores financial difficulties the museum is facing.


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Students from Central Saint Martins art school in London work behind Gustav Metzger, after his worldwide call for a Day of Action to Remember Nature in 2015.

At the heart of Gustav Metzger's best-known work rests a seeming contradiction: The truest work of creation contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Working with acids and liquid crystals, Metzger often made his art to fall apart, break down or disappear entirely — and in doing so, better reflect the crumbling world around it.
Metzger, the inventor of "auto-destructive art," died Wednesday in London at the age of 90. But long before his final days, he regularly confronted the implications of death in both his art and ecological activism.

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Thomas Gainsborough's 1785 painting Mr and Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk) was attacked at The National Gallery in London on Saturday.

A man entered the National Gallery in London on Saturday afternoon, approached a painting by British master Thomas Gainsborough, and proceeded to attack it with a "sharp object."

A Metropolitan Police Service spokesman tells NPR that a 63-year-old man named Keith Gregory, "of no fixed abode," was charged with causing criminal damage to a National Gallery painting.

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For decades, the 61-year-old artist has depicted black lives on canvas. He says inclusion in museums must not be contingent on "whether somebody likes you ... or somebody's being generous to you."

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French artist Abraham Poincheval sits over real chicken eggs until they hatch at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

An artist is sitting on a chair in a Paris art museum over a dozen chicken eggs until they hatch. This is not an April Fools' joke.

"I will, broadly speaking, become a chicken," says Abraham Poincheval, a French performance artist who has recently also had himself encased inside a bear, where he ate worms and beetles, and then inside a limestone rock, where he thought, slept and slurped soup.

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The Charging Bull and Fearless Girl square off in New York City's financial district. Arturo Di Modica, the bull's sculptor, says the girl staring it down has changed the meaning of his work in an unwelcome way.

So far in her young life, New York City's Fearless Girl has drawn countless tourists, a metric ton of media coverage and its fair share of praise as a symbol of the fight for gender equity — so much, in fact, that the statue staring down the financial district's famous Charging Bull recently got a new lease on life, at least through 2018.
For at least one person, though, the Girl has offered less than welcome company.

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The Barmecide Feast, by Simon Birch and KplusK associates (which was co-founded by Paul Kember), recreates the bedroom from the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You really have to go out of your way to get to the 14th Factory, a new pop-up art space in the industrial area of Lincoln Heights, east of downtown Los Angeles. It's housed in an enormous building the size of a Costco warehouse and it sits across the street from an old, abandoned city jail.
The first of many gallery spaces you enter is almost pitch black. When your eyes adjust, you see giant metal shards that look like an asteroid has imploded. At the center, you step inside an almost blindingly bright white room and find yourself in the bedroom from the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.




"It's such a perfect symbol and metaphor for the entire project," says artist Simon Birch, the man responsible for the unusual, immersive experience that is the 14th Factory. Birch is a tall, lanky Brit and a big sci-fi fan. He says he always wanted to recreate that Kubrick set, but it took a stroke of luck to make it happen. All the models and props from 2001 had been destroyed under Kubrick's orders, so Birch asked his architect friend Paul Kember to rebuild the set for him.
"Paul got up from the table with a smile on his face," Birch recalls. "He says, 'I don't need to watch the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey to work out the dimensions of that room. I just need to call my uncle Tony.' He says, 'Well, my uncle Tony just happened to be Stanley Kubrick's chief draftsman/ set designer and built that original room.' "

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