White Cube Salon Archive

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.

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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.

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

In this audio essay commissioned for White Cube Salon, author and curator Mark Godfrey, discusses the work 'Untitled' (2007) by David Hammons. 

In 2016, Godfrey curated ‘David Hammons: Give Me a Moment’ at The George Economou Collection. Here, he recounts his initial reaction to Hammons’ fur coats upon seeing them at L&M Arts in 2007.

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

Salon: David Hammons | Mark Godfrey, Curator and Art Historian

White Cube Salon is pleased to present a work by Sophie Calle entitled ’Suite Vénitienne‘, which consists of 81 black and white photographs, texts and maps.
 
As an artist, Calle submitted herself to tasks that were profoundly unexpected, but so matter-of-fact, others had no option but to comply. Conceived in 1980, this work marks a major breakthrough for the artist, and involves Calle shadowing a subject without his prior consent. Casting a man she hardly knows as the unwitting protagonist in a game of cat and mouse, she follows his daily movements around Venice and documents them with a notebook and Leica camera, the results of which comprise the work ’Suite Vénitienne‘. Here, writing no longer serves to assert the artist’s personality, rather, it guarantees her anonymity in a game that is constantly changing.
 
Author Chris Kraus, who jokingly compared herself to Sophie Calle while she was writing the novel ‘I Love Dick’, met up with photographer and writer Juliana Halpert to discuss the lasting impact of ‘Suite Vénitienne’.

Salon: Sophie Calle | Author Chris Kraus and Artist Juliana Halpert, In Conversation

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)

Art historian, curator and advisor Dr. Marie-Amélie zu Salm-Salm, who completed her MA on Imi Knoebel’s oeuvre at the Sorbonne (University of Paris) and organised the artist’s major retrospective ‘Works 1966-2014’ in 2014 at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, discusses Knoebel’s use of minimal colours to reveal pure vision. Contextualising ’Figur H 142‘ (1986) in relation to his wider studio practice, she discusses his process of transferring patterns to sketches before they become construction models and an eventual painting.
 
As zu Salm-Salm points out, Knoebel felt that art should be considered as normal a profession as carpentry or architecture: a basic structure that encourages attentive perception. In ’Figur H 142‘, a red landscape rectangle on a larger, white portrait rectangle is constructed from four, tightly proportioned elements, with the smallest red panel leaving quiet traces of the artist’s hand.

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Salon: Imi Knoebel | Art Historian Dr. Marie-Amélie zu Salm-Salm on ‘Figur H 142’ (1986)

David J. Getsy, art historian, curator and author of 'Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender' (2015), discusses wordplay and oxymoron in John Chamberlain's 'Voiceaufondre' (2009) and wider sculptural practice. 

Getsy speculates on the ways that Chamberlain’s training as a poet and also hairdresser might have impacted his approach to mass and volume. As well as being influenced by the poetry of Charles Olson and trained at transforming strands of hair, Chamberlain was also deeply inspired by painterly gesture. By reconciling seemingly disparate disciplines, as well as surfaces and materials, Chamberlain developed a kind of wordplay with three-dimensional form, which was neither symbolical nor strictly literal.


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

Salon: John Chamberlain | Art Historian, Professor David J. Getsy on ‘Voiceaufondre’ (2009)

Klara Kemp-Welch is Reader in 20th Century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is the author of 'Antipolitics in Central European Art'. 'Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1968-1989' (2014) and 'Networking the Bloc. Experimental Art in Eastern Europe' (2018). She is currently working on a new book on art, labour and migration in Europe.
 
Kemp-Welch explores how Alina Szapocznikow’s approach to material and sexualised iconography connects to her itinerant career as a female artist who studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, before moving into sculptural experimentation with synthetic plastics in Paris. Shedding light, teasingly, on the artist's placement in a male-dominated history of sculpture, 'Lampe-sculpture' comments by virtue of its functionality. Taking full advantage of the phallus as a support structure, Szapocznikow uses it as a base from which to conjure an ecstatic eruption from industrial plastics, which echoes the joys, pains and precarities of bodily experience.


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

Salon: Alina Szapocznikow | Art Historian Dr. Klara Kemp-Welch on ‘Lampe-sculpture’ (c.1970)

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)

Professor Namiko Kunimoto is an art historian based in Ohio whose work explores the intersection of social theory and Japanese modern and contemporary art. She is the author of ’The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art‘ (2017) and has written extensively on Shiraga Kazuo, particularly his use and appropriation of the male heroic archetype.

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

Salon: Shiraga Kazuo | Art Historian, Professor Namiko Kunimoto on ‘Untitled’ (1962)

Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau wrote his first book of poems in 1976 and has since published many collections of acclaimed poetry.  A noted art critic and curator, Yau also has numerous published works of art criticism and artists’ books, including 'California Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn / Wayne Thiebaud' (Rizzoli, New York, 2018). Yau has received many honours and awards for his work and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. He now teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.

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

Salon: Wayne Thiebaud | John Yau, Poet, Critic and Essayist on ‘River Cloud’ (2002)

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)

Dr Erika Balsom is a Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of TEN SKIES (2021), An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018), After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video in Circulation (2017), and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013). She is the co-editor of Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (2022), Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines (2021), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 (2019), and Documentary Across Disciplines (2016).
 
David Toop is a musician, author, curator and Emeritus Professor. His first solo recordings were released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975. His most recent albums, Breathing Spirit Forms (with Azio Suzuki and Lawrence English) and Garden of Shadows and Light (with Ryuichi Sakamoto), were released by Room 40 and 33 33 in 2021. He is the author of Into the Maelstrom (2016), Sinister Resonance (2010) and Ocean of Sound (1995). In 2000 he curated ‘Sonic Boom’, a comprehensive exhibition of sound art, at the Hayward Gallery, London.

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Salon: Christian Marclay | Erika Balsom and David Toop on ‘Video Quartet’ (2002)

The December 2022 – January 2023 Salon presents a large sculpture by Jeff Koons, Bowl with Eggs (Yellow) (1994–2009). Transforming an everyday object into a grand monument akin to a megalith, the artist replicates the joyful exploits of childhood as part of his career-long quest to widen the means through which art functions and communicates. An audio by Xa Sturgis, Director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, furthers the discussion, exploring the rituals of production and reception involved in Bowl with Eggs (Yellow).  
 
Dr Alexander Sturgis is Director of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. In 2019, he curated ‘Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean’ with Sir Norman Rosenthal and Koons himself. He has contributed to books including ‘Custodians’ (Ashmolean Museum, 2015), ‘Presence: The Art of Portrait Sculpture’ (Antique Collectors Club, 2012) and ‘The Image of Christ’ (National Gallery, 2000). Prior to the Ashmolean, he was Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath, and Exhibitions and Programmes Curator at the National Gallery, London.

Salon: Jeff Koons | Xa Sturgis, Curator and Art Historian on ‘Bowl with Eggs’ (1994–2009)

White Cube’s April 2023 Salon focuses on Gilbert & George’s 16-panel picture COCK VD from the 1977 series, ‘THE DIRTY WORDS PICTURES’. Limiting the palette to a stark black, white and red, the pictures depict scrawled graffitied expletives, disturbing images from the streets of London and the artists themselves. Together they form a strange, tense, provocative and striking mosaic of late-20th century urban life. 

Art critic for The Guardian since 1996, Adrian Searle regularly contributes to art magazines and publications including The Independent, Time Out, Frieze and Artforum. Covering Gilbert & George’s decades-long career, Searle has lent his incisive wit to reviewing the duo’s 2007 retrospective at Tate Modern, as well as numerous exhibitions including ‘THE DIRTY WORDS PICTURES’ at Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), and their 2006 series of works at White Cube, London.

Salon: Gilbert & George | Adrian Searle on ‘COCK VD’ (1977)

Salon: Luc Tuymans | Philippa Snow, critic and essayist
 
White Cube’s May 2023 Salon focuses on Luc Tuyman’s painting Bend Over (2001). With his signature muted palette, the work exemplifies the artist’s mastery of figurative painting and the complexities of viewer perception.
 
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist whose work has been featured in Frieze, ArtReview, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, and Vogue. In 2012, Snow contributed to the magazine publication Modern Matter with her article ‘The Tuymans Rule: Spitting Fire, Drinking Turpentine, and the Art of Being Luc Tuymans’.

Salon: Luc Tuymans | Philippa Snow on ‘Bend Over’ (2001)

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)

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’

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