In this audio comissioned for White Cube Salon, former Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, Eric Shiner, discusses the 'Hammer and Sickle' paintings of the 1970s.

Andy Warhol begun his ‘Hammer and Sickle’ series in 1975, which were first exhibited at Castelli Gallery, New York in 1977 under the generic title ‘Still Lifes’. 
 
Like Warhol’s well-known paintings of popular consumer products, the ‘Hammer and Sickle’ series highlight his ability to transform quotidian subject matter into highly charged images that reflect an adroit understanding of their role and power.

Learn more about Salon and our collecting programme with White Cube Online: https://whitecube.viewingrooms.com/collecting

Salon: Andy Warhol | Eric Shiner, former Director of the Andy Warhol Museum

In this audio commissioned for White Cube Salon, Contemporary and Modern Art Professor Sarah Wilson of the Courtauld Institute of Art discusses Picabia's 'Transparencies' and the influence of Romanesque frescoes.

Learn more about Salon and our collecting programme with White Cube Online: https://whitecube.viewingrooms.com/collecting

Salon: Francis Picabia | Sarah Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld

Listen Now: Harland Miller on Paris in the 1990s, his latest White Cube presentation in the city, and the 'French Letter Paintings' series.

This audio was recorded to coincide with 'The French Letter Paintings', a presentation of new works by Harland at White Cube's Paris Office in October 2021. 

Find out more and book an appointment at White Cube's Paris Office (10 Avenue Matignon): bit.ly/3lkjWyB

Harland Miller on 'The French Letter Paintings'

In this audio, Brett Littman, Director of the Noguchi Foundation, art critic, lecturer and essayist, discusses the work of Sara Flores in a personal response.

Littman has curated many projects of Shipibo-Conibo work, and has associations with The Shipibo Conibo Cultural Center. He was the executive director of The Drawing Center from 2007-2018; the deputy director of MOMA PS1 from 2003 – 2007; the co-director of Dieu Donné Papermill from 2001-2003; and associate director of UrbanGlass from 1996 - 2001.
 
His interests are multi-disciplinary. Over the last decade, he has overseen more than seventy-five and curated more than twenty exhibitions dealing with visual art, craft, design, architecture, poetry, music, science, and literature. Littman is also an art critic and lecturer and an essayist for museum and gallery catalogues. He has written articles for a wide range of American and international art, fashion, and design magazines.

Recorded at Newsstand Studios at the Rockefeller Center, New York.

Brett Littman on 'Introductions | Sara Flores'

White Cube Salon is pleased to present Hirtenkopf, a large-scale oil painting by Georg Baselitz. Made in 1986, this masterwork references the artist’s earlier, iconic ‘Heroes’ paintings from the mid-1960s and portrays an inverted head engulfed by pastoral motifs. 
 
In this audio essay, the acclaimed art critic, art historian and journalist Martin Gayford guides us through the enigmatic iconographies of Hirtenkopf, which merge art historical themes with personal memories to conjure a sense of pathos and uncertainty.

Learn more about Salon and our collecting programme with White Cube Online: https://whitecube.viewingrooms.com/collecting

Salon: Georg Baselitz | Critic Martin Gayford on ’Hirtenkopf‘ (1986)

Glenn Adamson is a curator and writer based in New York, who works at the intersection of craft, design history and contemporary art. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York and head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His recent book Craft: An American History (2021) chronicled a history of America through patterns in artisanal labour.


Learn more about Salon and our collecting programme with White Cube Online: https://whitecube.viewingrooms.com/collecting

Salon: Isamu Noguchi | Curator and Author Glenn Adamson on ‘The Seed’ (1946)

The September 2022 Salon presents a bracing oil stick drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat, ‘Untitled (Buck)’ (1982). A series of restrained yet fluid lines in shades of red, blue and black depict a character lifting dumbbells, exemplifying the artist’s unique synthesis of iconographies into a complex graphic system. An audio by London-based writer and researcher Derica Shields furthers the discussion, exploring the mobility of the marks, visually and contextually, and the multiple systems of signification that Basquiat was using.

Derica Shields is a writer, researcher and cultural worker from South London. Recent projects include a multiformat oral history of  Black Londoners’ accounts of the welfare state (Triple Canopy, 2021), property law as debated during abolitionism in the UK (Wysing Arts Centre, 2019) and Black belonging amid exclusionary and assimilationist moves in Britain (ICA, 2017). She is the co-founder of The Future Weird (2013–15), a screening and discussion series of world-unravelling films by African and African-descended artists and directors, which presented programmes in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Detroit, and has collaborated with artists including Ingrid Pollard and Legacy Russell. She is a former Contributing Editor at the New Inquiry and former Story Editor at Rookie. She is currently working on ‘Bad Practice’, a book about the potentials of Black failure, forthcoming from Book Works.

Learn more about Salon and our collecting programme with White Cube Online: whitecube.viewingrooms.com/collecting

Salon: Jean-Michel Basquiat | Writer Derica Shields on ‘Untitled (Buck)’ (1982)

The October 2022 Salon presents a monumental canvas by Beatriz Milhazes, ‘Mulatinho’ (2008). Layering organic imaginary forms, clean shapes, textures and solid colours, the artist constructs a vibrant network dominated by intense vertical swirling. Making extensive use of the modernist grid, Milhazes has garnered international acclaim for the compositions she creates, characterised by their technical innovations and vivid mode of address. An audio by curator and art and architecture historian Delfim Sardo furthers the discussion, exploring the utopianism and multiple points of access in ‘Mulatinho’.
 
Delfim Sardo is a professor at the University of Coimbra and is responsible for the visual arts program at Culturgest, Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Porto. He is the author of books on photography and printing techniques, the utopian premise of avant-garde art from the 20th-century, and Portuguese artists Gabriela Albergaria, Helena Almeida and João Louro. In 2012, he contributed to the monograph on Milhazes published by Fondation Beyeler, Basel.

Salon: Beatriz Milhazes | Delfim Sardo on ‘Mulatinho’ (2008)

The June 2023 Salon presents Robert Ryman’s painting Page (1998). A perfectly square canvas, primed with an ecru base layer and animated by staccato gestures of white pigment, Page serves as a transcript of its own making, each stroke a record of the artist’s pursuit of form, space and light. An audio by Courtney J Martin discusses the purposeful structural qualities and material experimentation that elevate the work beyond what many would simply consider a white painting.
 
Courtney J Martin is the Director at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2015, Martin curated a significant exhibition of Ryman’s works at Dia: Chelsea, New York. She is also co-author of the comprehensive volume Robert Ryman, published by Yale University Press in 2017.

Salon: Robert Ryman | Courtney J Martin of the Yale Center for British Art, on ‘Page’ (1998)

The July and August 2023 Salon presents Anselm Kiefer’s expansive landscape painting, ‘Le Dormeur Du Val’ (2010). Drawing inspiration from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem of 1870, the painting stands as a haunting evocation of loss and renewal.
 
Professor Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is the author and editor of books on 19th and 20th-century fiction, 20th-century poetry, violence and the avante-garde, as well as language and cultural history. Mengham’s recent book Midnight in the Kant Hotel (2021) provides an absorbing account of over 20 years of contemporary art and dedicates a chapter to Anselm Kiefer.

Salon: Anselm Kiefer | Professor Rod Mengham, Cambridge University, on ‘Le Dormeur Du Val’ (2010)

White Cube’s September 2023 Salon presents a painting by the late Danish artist Per Kirkeby. Through a rhythmic variety of lines and textures, Untitled (2006) is a painting that oscillates between abstraction and traditional landscape painting. Perspectivally ambiguous, Kirkeby’s horizontal bands, vertical daubs, cross-hatching and marks emulate layered rock strata.

Charles Darwent is an art critic and historian who regularly contributes to The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Apollo and the Times Literary Supplement. He was also the former chief art critic for the Independent on Sunday. Darwent wrote about Kirkeby’s work in 2009, ahead of the artist’s major career retrospective at Tate Modern.

Salon: Per Kirkeby | Art Critic and Historian Charles Darwent on ’Untitled’ (2006)

‘A Southern Magnolia Blooms On June 27’ by Sasha Bonét

On Kawara’s DEC.30,1996 is an immediate and profound statement of the temporal fact of its production: it was painted by the artist on the inscribed day in 1996. Belonging to Kawara’s most enduring body of work, the Date Paintings, which he began on 4 January 1966 and continued for nearly five decades, the premise being that each painting had to be started and completed before midnight on the date inscribed, otherwise it would be discarded.

Salon: On Kawara | Critic, Curator and Essayist Jonathan Watkins on ‘DEC.30,1996’

White Cube’s Winter 2023–24 Salon presents Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 2017 painting Light of The Lit Wick, belonging to the artist’s transcendent genre of imaginary portraiture. Beginning each composition from flickers of lived experience – a snapshot, a brief encounter, a subtle gesture – the artist draws viewers into a pictorial realm wherein the certainties of time, place and identity evanesce. 
 
Aïcha Mehrez is a curator, art historian and writer. She served as assistant curator on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 2022–23 exhibition ‘Fly In League With The Night’ at Tate Britain, London.

Salon: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye | Curator, Art Historian and Writer Aïcha Mehrez

The February 2024 Salon presents Larry Bell’s Untitled (1967), an early example from the artist’s seminal series of vacuum-coated glass cubes. Appearing weightless and possessing an inner luminosity, Bell’s 1967 cube stands as a true testament of the artist’s career-defining experimentation with light and volume. 
 
Cliff Lauson is a Curator and Writer, currently serving as Director of Exhibitions at Somerset House, London. He was formerly Senior Curator at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, having organised major exhibitions of work by Matthew Barney, Bridget Riley, Martin Creed, Ernesto Neto, Tracey Emin and David Shrigley and the critically-acclaimed group exhibition ‘Light Show and Space Shifters’.

Salon: Larry Bell | Curator and Writer Cliff Lauson on ‘Untitled’ 1967

The April 2024 Salon presents Elizabeth Catlett’s Magic Mask (c.1970–80), an intimately-scaled mahogany sculpture whose rhythmic interplay of convexes and concaves demonstrates the profound capacity of organic form to convey essential human emotion.

Melanie Herzog is Professor Emerita of Art History at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, and is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MFA in ceramics and a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (University of Washington Press, 2000) along with essays on Catlett and other contemporary North American artists.

Salon: Elizabeth Catlett | Art Historian and Curator Melanie Herzog on ‘Magic Mask’ c.1970–80

Dr. David Anfam is a writer and curator based in London. He is Managing Director of Art Exploration Consultancy Ltd., London, and over the past decade has curated a number of major exhibitions at the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver. Amongst Anfam’s many publications are Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas – Catalogue Raisonné (1998), now in its sixth printing, and the catalogue to the retrospective, Lynda Benglis: In the Realm of the Senses, held at NEON, Athens, in 2020. A preeminent authority on Abstract Expressionism, Anfam’s exhibition, Abstract Expressionism, which opened in 2016 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, was the largest survey of its kind ever held in Europe.

Salon: Jackson Pollock | Art Historian Dr. David Anfam on ‘Untitled’ c.1947

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