Guy Brett News Today

David Morris on 1970s collective Artists for Democracy.

Radical American artist who was a central figure in the European participatory art scene

THERE ARE MANY FORKING PATHS, in life as in art, through the social and political construct that is Britain. At Tate Britain, a rehang of the biggest collection of the nation’s cultural patrimony, from the Tudor period to the present, unfolds chronologically across thirty-nine rooms. Divided by the three-hundred-foot-long Duveen Galleries (which are always devoted to temporary commissions or displays), rooms to the west, whose walls are sumptuously colored in hues of deep blue, mahogany, emera...

An Oblique Autobiography, by Yve-Alain Bois; ed. Jordan Kantor. San Francisco and New York: no place press, 2022. 376 pages.THE PUBLICATION of Yve-Alain Bois’s latest book marks a watershed in the oeuvre of this influential scholar. What is the place of this most personal (and most surprising) of Bois’s publications in the arc of a career that extends from his cofounding of the groundbreaking journal Macula in the mid-1970s to teaching positions at Johns Hopkins and Harvard to his tenure as ...

By Cynthia Garcia A Brazilian artist who confounded the art world with his revolutionary energy is finally getting his due at the Art Institute of Chicago, which currently hosts the artist’s first American retrospective. Born in Rio, Hélio Oiticica’s anarchic socio-political ideals refused all stripes of repression and criticized the staid influence of Western art

The historic sale that puts this underrated Caribbean artist alongside Henry Moore Ronald Moody, the great 20th century sculptor, is finally getting the attention he deserves at auction 2 March 2021 • 7:00am Man with Hands Crossed Listening to the Band, by Ronald Moody (1900-1984), estimate £2,000-3,000, at Christies  Credit: Christies  At approximately 4pm this afternoon, a historic moment is on the cards at a sale of Modern British Art at Christie’s. Towards the end of the sale, standi...

Guy Brett mailing Signals Newsbulletin in London, 1964. Photo: © Clay Perry/England & Co. AT A 2008 TATE MUSEUM TALK on Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn, Guy Brett recalled a studio visit during which Dittborn kept fussing with unwieldy canvases, growing frustrated. “Fucking rigidity,” Dittborn had exclaimed, bashing the canvases to the wall. This aversion to the static, a trait endemic to the artists he championed, is just as applicable to Brett himself. The critic and curator had an abh...

As is true of many others long before me, I first encountered David Medalla (1942–2020) through the pages of the Signals newsbulletin (1964–66), of which he was editor. The context was a graduate seminar on the work of Lygia Clark, and one of Medalla’s folded duo-chrome broadsheets taught us more than any available book. This particular issue, devoted to Clark, combined images representing 15 years of her work with the first English translations of both her statements and writings by Má...

Guy Brett (right) in 1966 with the artist Takis © Clay Perry, England & Co gallery, London The UK curator and writer Guy Brett, who broadened the art historical canon by producing important exhibitions and publications on key Latin American and Asian artists, has died aged 78. Born in Richmond, Yorkshire, 1942, Brett began his career as a critic at the Times where he worked from 1964 to 1975. From 1981 to 1983 he was also the visual arts editor at the London weekly maga...