Art

Marcel Duchamp once likened chess players to artists. David Hockney famously echoed the French artist's sentiment, equating drawing as running parallel to the act of playing chess, saying that "your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.” Today, the 1,500-year-old board game has shown a rise in popularity in previously unseen corners of culture, from celebrity players to downtown club nights.World Chess and FIDE has published a new book chronicling the relationship between chess and culture over the past 130 years. Entitled Chess Players: From Charlie Chaplin to Wu-Tang Clan, the coffee table books presents a rare assortment of tidbits on chess maestros, such as Marlon Brando versus James Dean, Beatles superstar John Lennon to savants of the game as they ascended up the ra...

Last Thursday, Blade Study Gallery lifted the veil on a new solo exhibition by interdisciplinary sculptor Brian Oakes. SEED follows a commodity’s journey through the supply chain. Traveling through terrains of conception to display, the show envisions its viewers as agents of productions. In a braid of organic and mechanical materials, the artist explores new rhythms of life in an era of individualism.The exhibition disrupts traditional ideas of labor with consumerist tendencies. For example, “Display Case 2 (A Garden)” presents a collection of homemade rubies beside copper-sulfate seeds. Naturally occurring and handcrafted, this alchemical display challenges the concept of inherent value as the stones’ rich red and blues sparkle back at the audience. Other standout works, such as “ASRS 1”...

Los Angeles's Good Mother Gallery has worked with rising artist Sean Hamilton on a new limited edition print entitled Tire with Chains. Born in Idaho and now based in Seattle, Hamilton's practice revolves around the nuances of rural Midwestern life, drawing on his experience in advertising to cull disparate visual pairings to force an immediacy on topics that range various socio-political topics. Many of Hamilton's graphic compositions feature a subject on negative space, followed by a divide that signals a difference in worldviews — from racecar drivers fighting on the track to a white flag ushering in surrender. “Absurd as it is, I think there’s something to be learned by bringing these raw themes to contemporary art,” Hamilton previously said in an interview. “Over these few years thoug...

Who gets to write history? Adeshola Makinde often ponders on this question each time he enters his studio. Raised within Chicago's Northside, the Nigerian-American artist recalls gaps within his education pertaining Black history, so he sought to retrace the dots in his multi-media practice, splicing together fragments from politics, sports and entertainment, to form new dialogues on his personal journey towards Black consciousness. Makinde is showcasing a new solo exhibition that continues on this thread at Anthony Gallery. I SHOOK UP THE WORLD takes its title from a post-match interview, in which a triumphant Muhammad Ali utters his dominance after knocking out Sonny Liston. Makinde reframes Black excellence through a series of new collage compositions, piecing together snippets from Ebo...

KAWS and Andy Warhol are separated by generations, but a new exhibition draws parallels to the impact each artist had on the world of fine art and pop culture. On view at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the show surveys what the institution calls "dark themes" that run concurrent throughout each artist's respective practices, from skulls to car crashes, as well as a series of new paintings, sculptures and installations KAWS created in response to Warhol's embrace of commercialization.For those unable to attend, Phaidon will publish a book that chronicles the experience, featuring a foreword by Patrick Moore, an interview by Laurie Simmons and essays by Thomas Crow and Marianne Dobner. From poppy silkscreen portraits, cross-bone Mickey Mouse-inspired characters to subverting common ic...

For Titus Kaphar, painting is a language. In his upcoming exhibition at Gagosian, the artist reflects on his past to forge a path to forgiveness, taking the shape of a series of portraits and large-scale neighborhood scenes. Alongside the debut of his first narrative feature, the show advances Kaphar’s compositional approaches toward a home of family, memory, and community.Exhibiting Forgiveness captures life in working-class America. Kaphar channels grief and nostalgia at once, in a display of sunset-lit houses and figures excised by knife-cuts. In pieces like “For your prayer closet”, the artist conjures bittersweet beauty; layering gold leaf and tar, the piece makes space for both “divine transcendence” and feeling trapped.Other paintings call on Kaphar’s previous work with familiar tec...

The RMS Titanic sunk over 112 years ago, but the tragic legacy left by the ocean liner continues to capture imaginations a century later. As popularized through James Cameron's 1997 film, there was a wealth of art on board the ship, many of which have either been lost completely or continue to lay dormant, submerged 12,500 feet on the seafloor. Researchers recently uncovered a two-foot-tall bronze sculpture of Diana of Versailles that once stood on top of a fireplace mantle in a first class lounge.The discovery was recorded by RMS Titanic Inc, a Georgia-based company that owns the legal rights to inspect the ship's wreckage, who recently spent 20 days taking millions of high resolution scans of the site to track “historically significant and at-risk artifacts [that] can be identified for s...

Following the announcement and inaugural exhibition of the Asia Culture Center (ACC) Future Prize recipient, the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism presents a new solo exhibition by Ayoung Kim. Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse broadens Kim’s foray into science fiction, futurism, and archaeology in a multi-channel video and sculptural project.For this large-scale installation, Kim constructs a calendar marker, ticking with mathematical movements, to establish a new rhythm of time. At the center of the exhibition hall sits a three-sided screen that invites onlookers into a virtual world of LED and rubble. Made with generative AI, the artist keenly conjures futurity in both form and focus.The show will expand on the Delivery Dancer’s prequels, as the protagonists find themselves in a clas...

Uzbekistan typically isn't the first destination on art radars, but the Central Asian country will soon play host to its own biennial in 2025, drawing in a number of local and world-renowned artists, including Sir Antony Gormley and Himali Singh Soin to Aziza Azim and Behzod Boltaev.Los Angeles-based curator Diana Campbell will organize the inaugural edition of the Bukhara Biennial, who brings over a decade of experience — having helmed the role of artistic director of the Dhaka Art Summit since 2013, as well as working on exhibitions across Europe, Asia and the Americas. “For centuries, religious and cultural traditions from all corners of the world have commingled in Bukhara, resulting in a rich atmosphere of learning, craft and artistic production,” Campbell said in a statement. “It has...

At the heart of the Hakgojae Gallery stands a trunk-less white elephant, frozen in motion. A nod to Joseon’s white elephant and the Buddhist parable of blind men, the animal has become a powerful symbol for social inclusion. Against the typical art gallery taboo, audiences are invited to touch the sculpture.  To understand the elephant’s unusual form, artist Oum Jeongsoon embraces tactile experience as a new line of sight.I Thought I Lost It! brings together the work of three artists who remind us of the social role of art. Exploring collective resilience, this group exhibition looks at the loss of communal spirit amidst East Asia’s rapid urbanization.Hailing from China, Japan, and Korea, each artist mediates how art comprehends and catalyzes social change. Ding Yi, a pioneer in experiment...