Flash Art Magazine
Encyclopedia
Flash Art is a bimonthly magazine focusing on contemporary art
. It was founded in Rome in 1967 by Italian publisher and art critic Giancarlo Politi
. The magazine has been based in Milan
, Italy
since 1971. Originally a bilingual publication, it was split in two separate editions, Flash Art Italia (in Italian
) and Flash Art International (in English
), in 1978 when Helena Kontova
joined the editorial team. It also publishes Flash Art Czech
& Slovak
Edition.
Since 1980 Flash Art has an editorial desk in New York
. Jeffrey Deitch, founder of Deitch Projects
and current director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
was Flash Art first U.S. Editor; he was followed by Francesco Bonami, currently artistic director of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and of Pitti Immagine Discovery in Florence, curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale
as well as the 2010 Whitney Biennial
; Massimiliano Gioni, currently artistic director of Nicola Trussardi Foundation
in Milan and associate director and director of exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; and Andrea Bellini, currently co-director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin.
It has been described as "the confident, international journal of Europe
an and North America
n contemporary art
, and features interesting viewpoints on American art from a European perspective." Flash Art extensively covered the Arte Povera
artists in the 1960s, before they became known in the English
speaking world.
The magazine first published or dedicated the first cover to artists such as Marina Abramović
, Vito Acconci
, Matthew Barney
, Vanessa Beecroft
, Cecily Brown
, Maurizio Cattelan
, Francesco Clemente
, Martin Creed
, John Currin
, Rineke Dijkstra
, Peter Halley
, Eberhard Havekost
, Damien Hirst
, Pierre Huyghe
, Jeff Koons
, Sherrie Levine
, Sol LeWitt
, Robert Longo
, Paul McCarthy
, Mariko Mori
, Shirin Neshat
, Gabriel Orozco
, Charles Ray
, Pipilotti Rist
, Matthew Ritchie
, Anri Sala
, David Salle
, Thomas Scheibitz
, Julian Schnabel
, Collier Schorr
, Rudolf Stingel
, Philip Taaffe
, Rikrit Tiravanija, Francesco Vezzoli, Matthias Weischer
.
Contributors have included Klaus Biesenbach
, Bernard Blistène, Achille Bonito Oliva
, Francesco Bonami, Nicolas Bourriaud
, Dan Cameron
, Barbara Casavecchia, Germano Celant
, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, G. Roger Denson
, Alison M. Gingeras, Massimiliano Gioni, RoseLee Goldberg
, Hou Hanru
, Yuko Hasegawa, Jens Hoffmann
, Thomas Lawson
, Francesco Manacorda, Rosa Martínez, Bob Nickas, Hans Ulrich Obrist
, Jeff Rian, Michele Robecchi, Jerry Saltz
, Jérôme Sans, Barry Schwabsky, Harald Szeemann
, Eric Troncy, Benjamin Weil, Catherine Wood, Octavio Zaya
, Raúl Zamudio
and Won-il Rhee
.
s, critics
, galleries
, and museum
s. In 1993, Politi published the catalogue of Aperto '93
a section of the Venice Biennale
organized by his wife Helena Kontova. Also in 1993, Giancarlo Politi
opened the Trevi Flash Art Museum in his hometown, Trevi, which eventually closed due to the lack of public support. In the 2001 Giancarlo Politi started, together with Helena Kontova
, the Tirana Biennale in Albania
. In 2003 they started together the Prague Biennale in the Czech Republic
and they have been the directors of the first four editions (2003-2005-2007-2009).
daughter-in-law Shaun Caley Regen from Regen Projects, London gallerist Alison Jacques and Franklin Sirmans, currently chief curator for contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
. In 1974 Bruce Nauman
created Flesh Art, an artwork consisting of the logo of the magazine with the "a" of "Flash" turned upside down in order to be read as the "e" of "Flesh." This appropriation piece of the magazine’s original title font was later shown at Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf in 1974 and in 2001 the same act was reiterated by post-conceptual artist Jonathan Monk
. In 2002 Flash Art published an interview with John Currin
by Alison M. Gingeras. The interview featured Rachel in Fur – a portrait of Currin's partner, artist Rachel Feinstein. Three years later Flash Art International put on the cover the work Francis, which is a portrait of the couple’s son. During the first edition of the Tirana Biennale an anonymous person contacted Giancarlo Politi
pretending to be Oliviero Toscani
. Politi invited him to the show until the real Toscani dismissed the whole story revealing the plan of the impostor. In 2003 Prague National Gallery director Milan Knížák
launched another recurring exhibition held in Prague called International Biennale of Contemporary Art, which eventually became a triennial in order to avoid the rivalry with the original Prague Biennale.
The publication's Facebook page was later targeted buy hundreds of comments by people referencing the exchange between the two implying the editor's final note was insulting and allusive of Caterina being a prostitute and also complaining about the apparent misuse of internships.
The magazine's editor later publicly denied the insulting phrase in a posting on their website and on their Facebook page, stating that Caterina had maliciously contorted the mail's content, though an october 18 article on Il Fatto Quotidiano confirmed the insulting exchange publishing the original mail thread between the two.
The first issue of Flash appears in Rome, edited and published by Giancarlo Politi as a newspaper in tabloid format. This very first issue, with its journalistic tone and emphasis on information, clearly distinguishes the new publication from all other art magazines in Europe and the United States. Italian artist Piero Gilardi publishes the first of a series of reports from New York and European art capitals. This is the first European discussion on Joseph Beuys
and a few American artists such us Bruce Nauman
and Eva Hesse
. Germano Celant
’s Arte Povera
Manifesto – entitled Notes for a Guerrilla War – engages political issues with the art of Michelangelo Pistoletto
, Mario Merz
, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti
, Luciano Fabro
and Jannis Kounellis
among others. On the verge of 1968 Flash Art registers and anticipates the ideologization of culture. Encounters and collaborations with Joseph Beuys
and Hans Haacke
– at that time the most effective creators of art with a direct impact on socio-political reality – are soon to follow.
1970
Flash Art becomes even more international, concentrating on foreign artists and publishing direct reports from the artists’ native country. Texts are frequently printed in the authors’ native language. The informative nature of Flash Art consolidates and goes hand in hand with the avant-garde’s now predominant ideas on the end of interpretive criticism.
1971
An issue with a cover by Joseph Kosuth
and Carl Andre
including a statement – written by the former devoted to the so-called ‘Conceptual Art’ – is out. The text accompanies a picture of the Italian version of Joseph Kosuth
’s Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea) Proposition One; the project – displayed in three different places (a billboard in New York Chinatown, an advertising space in the Daily World and a large band in Turin) – is afterwards exhibited during the “Information” show at New York’s MoMA. Art & Language
and Vito Acconci
make their first appearance on the cover of an art magazine. Flash Art is more and more devoted to the artists' texts: Gino De Dominicis
’s Letter to Immortality, Robert Smithson
’s Cultural Confinement and Sol LeWitt
's Sentences on Conceptual Art are just a few examples. The magazine’s headquarters shifts from Rome
to Milan
.
1972
On the occasion of Documenta
V, the magazine dedicates an entire issue, with a cover by Hans Haacke, to this large-scale exhibition. Already mixing art and marketing, Flash Art makes an appearance during Documenta, distributing T-shirts reproducing the faces of the artists who at the moment were most discussed, such as Joseph Beuys
, Joseph Kosuth
and Sol LeWitt
.
1973
Flash Art starts to publish its German edition Heute Kunst confirming a particular attention to the new tendencies in the country, from conceptualism to a painter like A. R. Penck, who at that time was still living in East Germany and known only to a very few specialists. Sol LeWitt
designs the cover for Flash Art: a work somewhere between a masthead and a post-Minimalist drawing.
1974
Flash Art acquires a magazine format. At this moment the magazine – published in three languages: Italian
, English
and French
– is divided in two main parts: on the one hand its international side is continuously updated with several sections called Flash Art Italia, England, France, USA and Eastern Europe edited by selective correspondents; on the other hand the editorial staff tries to engage artists in the realization of the magazine. Francesco Clemente
, Bernd and Hilla Becher
, Annette Messager
, Chris Burden
, John Baldessari
, Edward Ruscha
, Gordon Matta-Clark
, Rebecca Horn
and many others are invited to compose pages for the magazine. Always provocative never predictable, Flash Art anticipates the myth of persona within the art community; entire pages are dedicated to snapshots – taken during several art opening all over the world – of emerging artists, critics and dealers such us Joseph Kosuth
, John Baldessari
, Daniel Buren
, Vito Acconci
, René Block, Germano Celant
, Bruno Bischofberger
, Ileana Sonnabend and many others in a way somewhere between a net blog, a celebrity gallery and an artwork of Christian Boltanski
.
1978
In the ages of postmodernism and poststructuralism, the magazine adapts its nature with an increasing attention to the American intellectual scene: Could Leonardo da Vinci make it in New York today?, by artists Olivier Mosset
and Gregor Müller, alongside RoseLee Goldberg
’s interview (part of Helena Kontova
’s Flash Art Performance editorial section), just to name a pair. In 1977 the Committee for the Visual Art and the Artists Space in New York host the exhibition “Picture”. On this occasion Flash Art publishes texts by Douglas Crimp
(a that time managing editor of October and organizer of the show at the Artists Space) and artists Thomas Lawson
and David Salle
, highlighting the birth of the Picture Generation: Robert Longo
, Jack Goldstein
, David Salle
, Sherrie Levine
, Thomas Lawson
, Matt Mullican, and later Richard Prince
and Cindy Sherman
, are recognized for their artworks created by the linguistic deconstruction of preexistent imagery.
1979
Flash Art splits into two editions: Flash Art International and Flash Art Italia. The result of this separation is an incisive intervention into both the international and the Italian scenes, which represents tow different realities that a single publication found difficult to fulfill. The first issue of Flash Art International features the seminal text "The Italian Transavantgarde
" by Achille Bonito Oliva
, whose ‘Ideology of the Traitor’ introduces the art of Enzo Cucchi
, Francesco Clemente
, Sandro Chia
, Mimmo Paladino
, Nicola De Maria, Marco Bagnoli and Remo Salvadori.
1980
Jeffrey Deitch – at that time Vice President of Citibank
where he spent nine years developing and managing the bank’s art advisory and art finance businesses – becomes a regular columnist of the magazine and the first U.S. editor of Flash Art International. In his articles Deitch analyzes the figure of the artist neither as a solitary creator nor as a single-role-identity but as one of the several players of the ‘art system’ among dealers, gallerists, museum directors, art critics and collectors. It is due to these reasons that the editorial board gives increasing attention to the New York
art scene: Thomas Lawson
reviews on David Salle
at Larry Gagosian
Gallery / Nosei-Weber / The Kitchen as well as the famous "Three Cs" (Chia, Clemente and Cucchi) at Sperone Westwater Fisher – that decisively puts the central figures of the Transavanguardia on the New York map – are just a few examples. "Gallery Talk," a new regular column with conversations and presentations of major art dealers (published as a supplement and accompanied by a picture) is soon to follow. Yet Flash Art International investigates the most challenging philosophical instances through a series of texts, essays and interviews dedicated to thinkers like Gilles Deleuze
, Jean-François Lyotard
, Félix Guattari
, Julia Kristeva
, Jean Baudrillard
and Paul Virilio
.
1981
Greater attention is being turned to German artists like Anselm Kiefer
, Georg Baselitz
, Per Kirkeby
, Markus Lüpertz
, Jörg Immendorff
, Rainer Fetting
as much as to the graffiti artists and the shift of Painting to other media such as performance and conceptualism.
1983
Flash Art International covers – mostly accompanied by long interviews – record an emerging group of superstar artists: Julian Schnabel
, Francesco Clemente
, Enzo Cucchi
, David Salle
and Keith Haring
(who makes dresses-as-artworks for Grace Jones
and Madonna
) are the protagonists of changes in the art field; their success has been realized with such a great speed and on so vast a scale in the annals of contemporary art. At the same time the art world grows to unheard-of dimensions: news no longer comes exclusively from New York and a few European centers, but also from many places like Los Angeles
and Chicago
in the States as well as from Japan
and the Soviet Union
. Flash Art Edition Française and Flash Art Edición Española are soon to follow.
1986
Flash Art International asks artist and socio-cultural theorist Peter Halley
to write an essay on Frank Stella
called "Frank Stella and the Simulacrum." In this essay Halley melts his knowledge with a very straight style of writing figuring out the master of modernism as an oxymoron, balancing materialism and bureaucracy under the name of hyperrealization and simulation. After that Halley becomes known also as the author of essays – regarding the relationship between his work and the thoughts of intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard
, Michel Foucault
and Guy Debord
– and for Index Magazine
(founded in 1996 with Bob Nickas), which investigates the tenuous power of photographic representation. Neo-Geo means everything and nothing. It seems to be an attitude towards the flow production instead of a way to make art. Flash Art International decides to invite these artists (Jeff Koons
, Peter Halley
, Ashley Bickerton
, Sherrie Levine
, Haim Steinbach
and Philip Taaffe
) for a panel moderated by Peter Nagy, artist and co-owner of small but significant East Village, Manhattan
Gallery Nature Morte
. Accompanied with a text by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Flash Art International comes out with Gino De Dominicis
on the cover, simultaneously with Artforum
. In fact this coincidence between the two non-speaking leading magazines has to be considered as an act of ubiquity, one of the most utopian of the artist efforts.
1987
Among the neo geo artists, Jeff Koons
is the most radical to embody such new ideas. Flash Art International invites him for a conversation with the staff of the magazine. Paul Taylor interviews Andy Warhol
for the last time before his unpredictable death while brand new critic Jérôme Sans talks to Jean-Hubert Martin about his exhibition “Magiciens de la terre
”. Although the aim of the show is to spotlight art from all over the world, in fact it marks a totally Western-centric behavior towards cultural differences nevertheless, provoking many skeptical responses, which are considered as the first examples of the contemporary African art criticism. In Post-Feminism
, Dan Cameron
describes women artists as more subversive than their colleagues. Consequently Flash Art International features three female icons on the cover: Rosemarie Trockel
, the champion-user of female-based practice as tools for the realization of a hidden self-emancipation, Sherrie Levine
, whose algid attitude towards art-making recognizing her as an undeniable protagonist of the contemporary art scene, and Barbara Kruger
; her unforgettable mottos I shop therefore I am (sampled from René Descartes
's "Cogito ergo sum") displayed through billboards and posters goes ‘outside’ via an unforgettable sardonic language enriched by an ironic flavor, emblematic of the current decade. Meanwhile thousand of people sanctioned the end of the cold war – by destroying the Berlin wall – Flash Art International captured the state of the art in Russia
with a special supplement entirely dedicated on it.
1988
Flash Art News is the new creature of the magazine. Published in a newspaper format and paper, this supplement is made as a compendium; speed news, short interviews with artists and dealers – as well as art facts from the art centers – are put together as a source for the readers ever more needy for information from the increased art system. The Spotlight is another regular column in the magazine. Shorter than a feature, longer than a review the Spotlight is one page for one shows.
On the occasion of a spotlight – dedicated to Jeff Koons
and Christopher Wool
– Koons starts to develop his mission for the artist’s control of the media field, substituting the critic text with a full-page Wool pattern (Untitled, 1987) accompanied by the sentence “this painting remember me of a wall in a summer cottage,” signed by himself. This strategy will find a fulfilled realization in the famous "Ads Series." "During the 1988-89 art season, Koons and his galleries put their money where their mouth was. A series of full-page advertisements was purchased in the major trade magazine of the time: Artforum, Flash Art, Arts, and Art in America. In the center of each highly theatrical tableau, Koons presided over the scene smiling smugly at the camera, impeccably groomed, obviously airbrushed."
1990
Flash Art International is more than ever engaged by giving space to the artists. His new section Flash Art Project is one of the first examples of an editorial artist project. Later on this relationship is more than ever evident by asking them to give their own interpretation of the cover magazine. Several artists, such as Gerhard Merz, Mark Kostabi
, Michael Majerus
, Pierre Huyghe
and Gian Marco Montesano, are selected to contribute.
1991
Talented, alternative and updated: these are the common qualities of the ever-changing Flash Art International contributing editors: from then Cologne-based artist and musician Jutta Koether
to writer and musician Dan Cameron
, from future Palais de Tokyo
directors Nicolas Bourriaud
and Jérôme Sans to globe-trotters interviewers Paul Taylor and Hans Ulrich Obrist
, from Documenta
2012 artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to Klaus Biesenbach
founding director of Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art
and the Berlin Biennale and currently chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art and director of MoMA PS1.
1992
In 1986 the magazine publishes an interview with underground director Wim Wenders
conducted by Italian New York-based painter Francesco Bonami. In 1992 Bonami has been appointed head of the U.S. Editorial Desk inaugurating a series of features focused on the most brilliant and challenging artist of the Nineties: from Damien Hirst
to Elizabeth Peyton
, from Charles Ray
to Doug Aitken
. Meanwhile, anticipating the passage from the figure of the coordinator to the birth of the curator’s practice, Flash Art International registers “Post Human” (or Posthuman
) – curated by former U.S. Editor Jeffrey Deitch – as a "Brave New Art" exhibition. The show – defined a "manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human" – is one of the first examples where the artworks displayed, mostly selected from Greek collector Dakis Joannou
purchases, are chosen and selected to illustrate – together with additional magazines and science images – a curatorial project which aim is to “begin looking at how these new technologies and new social attitudes will intersect with art.”
1993
In 2004 London-based publishing house Phaidon Press
presents “Vitamin P: New Perspective in Painting” with an introducing-essay by poet and former Flash Art International former editor Barry Schwabsky. This book, the first in a series devoted to all the art medias, is directly inspired by the eponymous essay written by Francesco Bonami for the magazine. This is not the first time: in 1987 Flash Art International published an omni-comprehending essay entitled Arte Povera
1976-1987 by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, featuring well compiled profiles of Pino Pascali
, Gilberto Zorio, Mario Merz
, Luciano Fabro
, Michelangelo Pistoletto
, Alighiero Boetti
, Emilio Prini, Jannis Kounellis
, Giuseppe Penone
and Giulio Polini. Christov-Bakargiev will be consequently haired by Phaidon Press
for the Arte Povera book, part of the series “Themes & Movements.” Flash Art International cover is an indicator of success: Damien Hirst
, Gabriel Orozco
, Maurizio Cattelan
, Vanessa Beecroft
and Matthew Barney
, just to name the most recognizable artists who ‘have to pay’ their dues to the magazine. All the artists just named take part to Aperto '93
, the Venice Biennale
section focused on the new generation of artists. For that edition, coordinator Helena Kontova
invites a curatorial team composed by Francesco Bonami, Jeffrey Deitch, Nicolas Bourriaud
, Benjamin Weil, Bob Nickas and Frieze Matthew Slotover among others. The result is memorable. Back to the covers, it happens that Flash Art International has to fight against cultural censorship, like in the case of Larry Clark
’s cover, refused by the current U.S. distributor and consequently substituted.
1995
The success of Aperto '93
as one of the most important contemporary art overview and the uninterrupted discovery of artist from Africa
and Asia
are on the base of Aperto, Cityscape and Global Art, the new regular columns of Flash Art International. The first is a sort of exhibition on paper – published in the form of an article – that captures what is going on geographically or thematically; the second consists in a series of interviews with the chosen city-based artists, curators and museum directors while the third is a one-page feature where writers and curators from all over the world, like Octavio Zaya
and Hou Hanru
, are invited to discuss the practice of and later only one work by a contemporary artist.
1996
In February, the Center for Contemporary Art in Stockholm hosted the show “Interpol”, curated by Jan Äman and Russian curator Viktor Misiano. During the opening artist Alexander Brener
destroyed Wenga Du’s project, a 20-meter long tunnel of human hair. The performance is legitimized by Misiano as a “completely new experience.” Further on, Flash Art editorial staff receives a reclaim letter – signed by artists, critics, curators and Äman himself – which will be published accompanied by Misiano’s response and Giancarlo Politi
’s opinion. Again, a few months later, Politi will return to defend Bremer – arrested after his action consisted of spraypainting the symbol of the American Dollar on Kazimir Malevich
White Cross on Gray, on view at the Stedelijk Museum
, – asking the magazine’s readers to write letters for Brener’s freedom. With "Ambivalent Witnesses," Hou Hanru
drives the reader in the unexplored and soon-to-exploding state of the contemporary art in China
.
1997
Flash Art International is the most updated keeper of the new voices in curating with several pages dedicated to various but still unforgettable blockbuster shows like Chinese situation “Cities on the Move” (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
and Hou Hanru
), Young British Artists
’ triumph “Sensation
” (curated by Charles Saatchi
and Norman Rosenthal
), the 1997’s ‘merry-go-round’ (Venice Biennale
, Documenta
and Skulptur Projekte Münster
) as well as for the new biennials’ ‘roller coaster’ with reports from Cuba
, Sydney
, Gwangju
, Taipei
and many other cities. In 1999, the New York Magazine publishes an article titled The "Mob Squad." Author Phoebe Hoban writes that: “The new painting achieved a sort of critical mass last May, when Cecily Brown
, a 29-year-old British artist who moved to New York in 1994, sounded a clarion call in an article she published entitled "Painting Epiphany: Happy Days Are Where, Again?" in Flash Art.” This ‘squad’ (Cecily Brown
, Damian Loeb
, John Currin
and others) mostly coached by (again) fellow dealer Jeffrey Deitch is captured in an ironic iperrealistic Flash Art International’s cover project made by Loeb.
1998
Gathering the attention of art world, the 1st Berlin Biennial (directed by Klaus Biesenbach
and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
and Nancy Spector) is a sort of celebration of the German capital as a new art center, swarming of alternative spaces and headquarters of a generation of artists. Flash Art International investigates Berlin
, publishing a 16-pages supplement dedicated to the city and its protagonists: Monica Bonvicini, Olafur Eliasson
, Frank Ackermann, Pipilotti Rist
just to name a few. Another ritornello, which distinguishes Flash Art International is its love for challenging parallelisms. While Jan Avgikos underlines common elements between the practice of the porno-star Ilona Staller
(a.k.a. Cicciolina) and her beau Jeff Koons
, Paul Groot compares Bill Gates
’ empire with Andy Warhol
modus operandi. Finally, future U.K. Editor Gea Politi dedicates one of her first regular columns “Gea's World” to the several reminders of Björk
in Mariko Mori
’s show at the Prada
Foundation.
1999
On the rise of the new millennium, Flash Art International distinguishes itself from the other publications for an ever increasing interest in interdisciplinary. Because of this, the magazine maintains a high cultural profile without deny his own cuttin’ hedge philosophy trough interviews with several ‘archistars’, such as Rem Koolhaas
, Frank Gehry
(ironically portrayed by Mark Kostabi
alongside Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
’s Thomas Krens
), Peter Eisenman
and ‘liquid architect’ Marcos Novak, fashion designers like Vivienne Westwood
(interviewed by fashion 'system distorter' Sylvie Fleury
with a cover by Inez van Lamsweerde) and Azzedine Alaïa
– alternated by fashion’s interventions coordinated by Flash Art fashion editor and artist Iké Udé –, reviews of art-field movies like Julian Schnabel
’s Basquiat or Velvet Goldmine
, and MTV
videoclip’s presentations.
2000–2001
Forty curators, more than 2 hundred artists: the 1st Tirana
Biennale is the dream-come-true of Flash Art Giancarlo Politi
and Helena Kontova
. Supported by visionary artist and Tirana
mayor Edi Rama
, the Tirana
Biennale is the first example of an art event organized with unfounded budgets. A new adventure, that confirms the role of the magazine’s editors as cultural entrepreneurs; besides the ever more importance of curating as a fundamental element within the contemporary art landscape is underlined by asking contemporary artists like Maurizio Cattelan
and Vanessa Beecroft
to curate a section for the biennial. September 11’s tragedy completely sticks the whirl within the big apple. Flash Art reaction to the aftermath is a collection of testimonies coordinated by 26-year old former Flash Art Italia Massimiliano Gioni just appointed brand new U.S. editor.
During his tenure as Flash Art U.S. Editor Gioni started to collaborate more and more with Maurizio Cattelan
. Indeed Gioni was the artist's ghost writer and the 'press officer' of the 6th Caribbean Biennial, a project conceived by Cattelan together with curator and Flash Art contributor Jens Hoffmann
. The project – supported by Fundación/Colección Jumex
and accompanied by a catalogue edited by Bettina Funcke – consisted of a 'artist's vacation' featuring biennial habituées Vanessa Beecroft
, Douglas Gordon
(who couldn't make it), Mariko Mori
, Olafur Eliasson
, Elizabeth Peyton
, Gabriel Orozco
, Tobias Rehberger, Pipilotti Rist
and Rirkrit Tiravanija
. "The biennial was over and even if there wasn't any art, there would be reruns of the experience – in the form of a six-page spread in Italian Vogue
and a catalogue that Maurizio and Jens would create as a souvenir of the trip. As for the artists, it seemed to me that they did what they probably would have done at any other biennial – compare ideas, share resources, strengthen relationships and inspire one another.". A series of full-page advertisements was purchased in Artforum, Flash Art and Frieze, which reviewer Jenny Liu called the Caribbean Biennial a "splendid failure: slightly wonderful but doubtlessly cynical; kudos for the conceptual playfulness but let’s just ignore the flawed execution."
2003
Art-star and amphitryon Maurizio Cattelan
continues his special relationship with Flash Art International in a series of sardonic interviews with young and promising artists like Martin Creed
, Verne Dawson, Piotr Uklanski and then Dana Schutz
, Seth Price, Matthew Mohanan, Guy Ben-Ner, Christian Holstad
, Paul Chan, Tino Sehgal
and chef Ferran Adrià
. “It happens in Prague,” is the new motto of the magazine: leaving Tirana, the new ‘mission impossible’ is to run a contemporary art organization in the Czech Republic
capital, former residence of the editor Helena Kontova
. Under the slogan “Peripheries Become the Center” – taken from the book Empire (book)
written by globalization analysts Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt
– Prague Biennale 1, co-produced in collaboration with Prague National Gallery director Milan Knížák
is described by Giancarlo Politi
as a "low-cost show."
2005
As usual Flash Art International is apart from any other publication; premièring anyone, the magazine starts to publish panels and discussions around painting. Masters such as School of Leipzig
's Neo Rauch
and Matthias Weischer
and Cluj-Napoca
leaders Victor Man and Adrian Ghenie as well as John Currin
, Luc Tuymans
, Wilhelm Sasnal
, Peter Doig
and Marlene Dumas
are fully featured. Meanwhile U.K. Editor Gea Politi makes her new exploit: "Fresh Start" is a column that serves as a compass to navigate territories in art, collecting interviews with make up artists, musicians, actors and a series of new creatures generated by the culture system such as musicians Chicks on Speed
, makeup artist Feride Uslu and fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm. Prague Biennale continues, and its second edition is accompanied by two main themes: painting and political art. If on the occasion of Prague Biennale 1, the return of painting is announced as a resurrection with the “Lazarus effect
” section, this year is the turn of the massive art critic Rosalind Krauss, whose text “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” is reprinted and borrowed for the section curated by Giancarlo Politi
and Helena Kontova
titled “Expanded Painting.” On the other side there’s “Acción Directa,” an overview on the ‘guerrilla invasion’ of the Latin American artists, captured by Marco Scotini. Confirming Prague Biennale as an essential event is the coming out of the second volume of the indispensable contemporary art vademecum Art Now, published by Taschen
. In the preface, editor Uta Grosenick writes: “the art scene has changed dramatically in recent years – notably with a return to figurative painting and an increase in political topics.”
2007
In the era of participation, Flash Art International doesn’t miss the chance to involve the readers in a series of collective interviews with art system protagonists Francesco Clemente
, Maurizio Cattelan
, John Currin
and Franz West
. After Flash Art Russia, the brand new Czech and Slovak Republic edition of the magazine underline the former URSS satellite as the new epicenter of Flash Art Eastern Europe activities. A survey concerning the relationship between artists and artistic centers and a diary of a road trip around Kosovo
, Estonia
, Bulgaria
and other spots – compiled by News Editor Aaron Moulton – serve as a foreword for the third edition of Prague Biennale, a 22-sections exhibition fruit of debates around keywords like glocalism, nomad and outsider. On this occasion Flash Art International publishes a triple interview with the ‘Modern Nomads’ Marina Abramović
, Vanessa Beecroft
and Shirin Neshat
organized by Helena Kontova
and conducted by Abramović on skype between Milan
, New York
and Los Angeles
.
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
. It was founded in Rome in 1967 by Italian publisher and art critic Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...
. The magazine has been based in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
since 1971. Originally a bilingual publication, it was split in two separate editions, Flash Art Italia (in Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
) and Flash Art International (in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
), in 1978 when Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
joined the editorial team. It also publishes Flash Art Czech
Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
& Slovak
Slovak language
Slovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...
Edition.
Since 1980 Flash Art has an editorial desk in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Jeffrey Deitch, founder of Deitch Projects
Deitch Projects
Deitch Projects was a contemporary art gallery in New York City founded by Jeffrey Deitch.-History:Since opening with a performance by Vanessa Beecroft in February 1996, the gallery has presented nearly one hundred and eighteen solo exhibitions and projects, ten thematic exhibitions, and a few...
and current director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
was Flash Art first U.S. Editor; he was followed by Francesco Bonami, currently artistic director of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and of Pitti Immagine Discovery in Florence, curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
as well as the 2010 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...
; Massimiliano Gioni, currently artistic director of Nicola Trussardi Foundation
Nicola Trussardi Foundation
The Nicola Trussardi Foundation is a non-profit institution for the promotion of contemporary art and culture. Created in 1996, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation is neither a museum nor a collection...
in Milan and associate director and director of exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; and Andrea Bellini, currently co-director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin.
It has been described as "the confident, international journal of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an and North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
n contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
, and features interesting viewpoints on American art from a European perspective." Flash Art extensively covered the Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
artists in the 1960s, before they became known in the English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
speaking world.
The magazine first published or dedicated the first cover to artists such as Marina Abramović
Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...
, Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
, Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney is an American artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and film. His early works were sculptural installations combined with performance and video...
, Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...
, Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, is a British painter. She has a great respect for art history and her works reveal her reverence and high regard for artists such as Francisco de Goya, Nicolas Poussin, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell while incorporating into her works her distinct female...
, Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....
, Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Martin Creed
Martin Creed
Martin Creed is an artist and musician. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, which was an empty room in which the lights went on and off.-Life and work :...
, John Currin
John Currin
John Currin is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and...
, Rineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra is a female Dutch photographer.-Life and work:Dijkstra concentrates on single portraits, and usually works in series, looking at groups such as adolescents, clubbers, and soldiers. Her subjects are often shown standing, facing the camera, against a minimal background...
, Peter Halley
Peter Halley
-Early Life and Career:Halley first came to prominence as a result of the geometric paintings rendered in intense day-glo colours that he produced in the early 1980s. His practice as an artist is usually associated with minimalism, neo-geo, and neo-conceptualism...
, Eberhard Havekost
Eberhard Havekost
Eberhard Havekost is a contemporary German painter based in Berlin and Dresden. In 1985 he completed an internship as a stonemason. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden from 1991-1996, where he became a master student under Professor Ralf Kerbach in 1997...
, Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
, Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.-Biography:...
, Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
, Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....
, Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
, Robert Longo
Robert Longo
Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...
, Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy , is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.-Life:McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting...
, Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori is a Japanese video and photographic artist. While studying at Bunka Fashion College, she worked as a fashion model in the late 1980s. This strongly influenced her early works, such as Play with Me, in which she takes control of her role in the image, becoming an exotic, alien...
, Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.-Background:Neshat's parents were upper middle-class...
, Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist, who in 1998 was called "one of the most influential artists of this decade, and probably the next one too." He was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and educated in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas between 1981 and 1984. He then continued his education...
, Charles Ray
Charles Ray (artist)
Charles Ray is a Los Angeles-based sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer’s perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways...
, Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist
Elisabeth Charlotte "Pipilotti" Rist , is a visual artist who works with video, film, and moving images which are often displayed as projections.-Life and career:...
, Matthew Ritchie
Matthew Ritchie
Ritchie attended the Camberwell School of Art 1983-86. He describes himself as "classically trained" but also points to a minimalist influence.Ritchie's art revolves around a personal mythology drawn from creation myths, particle physics, thermodynamics, and games of chance, among other...
, Anri Sala
Anri Sala
Anri Sala is a contemporary artist whose primary medium is video. He studied art at the Albanian Academy of Arts from 1992 to 1996. He also studied video at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and film direction in Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing...
, David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
, Thomas Scheibitz
Thomas Scheibitz
Thomas Scheibitz is a German painter and sculptor. Together with Tino Sehgal he created the German pavilion on the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. He lives and works in Berlin.-External links:...
, Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
, Collier Schorr
Collier Schorr
Collier Schorr is an American artist best known for her portraits of adolescent men and women, which often blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy....
, Rudolf Stingel
Rudolf Stingel
Rudolf Stingel is an artist based in New York.Stingel was born in Meran. His work engages the audience in dialogue about their perception of art and uses Conceptual painting and installations to explore the process of creation...
, Philip Taaffe
Philip Taaffe
Philip Taaffe is an American artistTaaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and studied at the Cooper Union in New York, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977....
, Rikrit Tiravanija, Francesco Vezzoli, Matthias Weischer
Matthias Weischer
Matthias Weischer is a painter living in Leipzig. Weischer is considered to be part of the New Leipzig School.- Life :...
.
Contributors have included Klaus Biesenbach
Klaus Biesenbach
Klaus Biesenbach is the current Director of MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York City and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City...
, Bernard Blistène, Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva, is a recognized and respected Italian contemporary art critic, author of many essays on mannerism, and a professor of History of Contemporary Art at La Sapienza University in Rome...
, Francesco Bonami, Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jerôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art , and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from...
, Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron is an American art curator based in New York City and New Orleans.Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools , Syracuse University and Bennington College , where he earned a BA in 1979...
, Barbara Casavecchia, Germano Celant
Germano Celant
Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera" movement in 1967....
, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, G. Roger Denson
G. Roger Denson
G. Roger Denson is an American art critic, theoretician, novelist, and curator. A regular contributor to Huffington Post, his writings have also appeared in such international publications as Art in America, Parkett, Artscribe International, Flash Art, Bijutsu Techo, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien,...
, Alison M. Gingeras, Massimiliano Gioni, RoseLee Goldberg
Roselee Goldberg
RoseLee Goldberg is an American-based art historian, author, critic and curator. She wrote a study of performance art, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present...
, Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru is a Chinese art curator and critic who lives in United States since 2006.He received degrees from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and moved from China in 1990. He lived 16 years in France before moving to America in 1990...
, Yuko Hasegawa, Jens Hoffmann
Jens Hoffmann
Jens Hoffmann Mesèn is a writer and exhibition organizer. He has organzied exhibitions since 1997 and is currently the Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he also directs the Capp Street Project artist-in-residence...
, Thomas Lawson
Thomas Lawson
Thomas Lawson may refer to:*Thomas B. Lawson , American painter*Thomas G. Lawson , U.S. Representative from Georgia*Thomas J. Lawson, Canadian air force general*Thomas W. Lawson , American businessman and author...
, Francesco Manacorda, Rosa Martínez, Bob Nickas, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a contemporary art curator, critic and historian of art. He is currently Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London...
, Jeff Rian, Michele Robecchi, Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltz is an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and a columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice, Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. He was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney...
, Jérôme Sans, Barry Schwabsky, Harald Szeemann
Harald Szeemann
Harald Szeemann was a Swiss curator and art historian.-Life:Szeemann was born in Bern. He studied art history, archaeology and journalism in Bern and Paris, and in 1956 he began working as an actor, stage designer and painter, as well as doing one-man shows. He started creating exhibitions in 1957...
, Eric Troncy, Benjamin Weil, Catherine Wood, Octavio Zaya
Octavio Zaya
Octavio Zaya is an art critic and curator, born in Las Palmas , and living in New York City since 1978. He is Director of Atlántica, a bilingual quarterly magazine published by CAAM ; he is Curator at Large and Advisor of MUSAC ;and a member of the Advisory Board of Performa...
, Raúl Zamudio
Raúl Zamudio
Raúl Zamudio is a New York-based independent curator, art critic, art historian and educator.-Background:Raúl Zamudio was born in Tijuana, Mexico. A native Mexican of Paipai ancestry, he was raised in San Diego, California and later moved to New York City where he currently lives and works...
and Won-il Rhee
Won-il Rhee
Won-il Rhee was a Korean digital art curator. He was born and died in Seoul.Rhee was the artistic director in 2002 and 2006 of the Media City Seoul Biennale. He was the leading curator of the Total Museum of Art and co-ordinator of the Korean Pavilion for the 1995 Venice Biennale...
.
Other activities
Politi, besides the three magazines, publishes different books and catalogues, including Art Diary International, a directory that lists addresses and phone numbers of artistArtist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
s, critics
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
, galleries
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
, and museum
Museum
A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...
s. In 1993, Politi published the catalogue of Aperto '93
Aperto '93
Aperto ’93 is the title of an exhibition of contemporary art conceived by Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi, and organized by Helena Kontova for the XVL edition of the Venice Biennale, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1993.-Concept and realisation:...
a section of the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
organized by his wife Helena Kontova. Also in 1993, Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...
opened the Trevi Flash Art Museum in his hometown, Trevi, which eventually closed due to the lack of public support. In the 2001 Giancarlo Politi started, together with Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
, the Tirana Biennale in Albania
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...
. In 2003 they started together the Prague Biennale in the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
and they have been the directors of the first four editions (2003-2005-2007-2009).
Curiosities
Among the employees who have worked for the magazine are dealer Massimo Minini (Flash Art advertising agent in the 1970s), Barbara GladstoneBarbara Gladstone
Barbara Gladstone is an American gallery owner and art dealer. She owns the Gladstone Gallery on W. 24th St in New York City which was designed by Selldorf Architects, and she represents many popular contemporary artists, including Shirin Neshat, Anish Kapoor, Sarah Lucas, and Matthew Barney...
daughter-in-law Shaun Caley Regen from Regen Projects, London gallerist Alison Jacques and Franklin Sirmans, currently chief curator for contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....
. In 1974 Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
created Flesh Art, an artwork consisting of the logo of the magazine with the "a" of "Flash" turned upside down in order to be read as the "e" of "Flesh." This appropriation piece of the magazine’s original title font was later shown at Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf in 1974 and in 2001 the same act was reiterated by post-conceptual artist Jonathan Monk
Jonathan Monk
Jonathan Monk is an artist living and working in Berlin.-Art practice:Monk questions the meaning of art using conceptualism in a way that Ken Johnson in The New York Times called "sweet, wry and poetic"....
. In 2002 Flash Art published an interview with John Currin
John Currin
John Currin is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and...
by Alison M. Gingeras. The interview featured Rachel in Fur – a portrait of Currin's partner, artist Rachel Feinstein. Three years later Flash Art International put on the cover the work Francis, which is a portrait of the couple’s son. During the first edition of the Tirana Biennale an anonymous person contacted Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...
pretending to be Oliviero Toscani
Oliviero Toscani
Oliviero Toscani is an Italian photographer, best-known worldwide for designing controversial advertising campaigns for Italian brand Benetton, from 1982 to 2000...
. Politi invited him to the show until the real Toscani dismissed the whole story revealing the plan of the impostor. In 2003 Prague National Gallery director Milan Knížák
Milan Knížák
Milan Knížák is a Czech performance artist, sculptor, musician, installation artist, dissident, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.-Childhood and early life in the Protectorate and in the former Sudetenland :...
launched another recurring exhibition held in Prague called International Biennale of Contemporary Art, which eventually became a triennial in order to avoid the rivalry with the original Prague Biennale.
2011 Internship ad controversy
In October 2011 Flash Art magazine published an ad on their website, via newsletter and on their Facebook page, for one or more internships with a minimal compensation for a period of eight to ten months. A young woman named Caterina responded to the posting, addressing her complaint to the editor, Giancarlo Politi, asking why one's family should support a person so as to let them work for free for the publication. Her complaint was followed by a brief exchange with Politi, during which she also defended her skills with four languages, arts and desktop publishing. The exchange ended with the editor's response "Caterina, as you can see sluts must now master 4 languages, be skilled in arts and InDesign. Globalization creates miracles".The publication's Facebook page was later targeted buy hundreds of comments by people referencing the exchange between the two implying the editor's final note was insulting and allusive of Caterina being a prostitute and also complaining about the apparent misuse of internships.
The magazine's editor later publicly denied the insulting phrase in a posting on their website and on their Facebook page, stating that Caterina had maliciously contorted the mail's content, though an october 18 article on Il Fatto Quotidiano confirmed the insulting exchange publishing the original mail thread between the two.
Current editorial team
- Editors: Giancarlo Politi and Helena Kontova
- Editors (features, reviews): Umberta Genta and Lucy Rees
- News Editor: Wendy Vogel
- Editor at Large: Gea Politi
- U.S. Editor: Nicola Trezzi
- Los Angeles Editor: Patrick Steffen
History
1967The first issue of Flash appears in Rome, edited and published by Giancarlo Politi as a newspaper in tabloid format. This very first issue, with its journalistic tone and emphasis on information, clearly distinguishes the new publication from all other art magazines in Europe and the United States. Italian artist Piero Gilardi publishes the first of a series of reports from New York and European art capitals. This is the first European discussion on Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
and a few American artists such us Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
and Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse , was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. -Early life:Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany...
. Germano Celant
Germano Celant
Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera" movement in 1967....
’s Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
Manifesto – entitled Notes for a Guerrilla War – engages political issues with the art of Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera...
, Mario Merz
Mario Merz
Mario Merz was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz.-Life:Born in Milan, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from...
, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti
Alighiero Boetti
Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti known as Alighiero e Boetti was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera....
, Luciano Fabro
Luciano Fabro
Luciano Fabro was an Italian artist associated with the Arte Povera movement.-Life:Born in Turin, Fabro moved to Milan in 1959, continuing to live and work there until his death....
and Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome....
among others. On the verge of 1968 Flash Art registers and anticipates the ideologization of culture. Encounters and collaborations with Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
and Hans Haacke
Hans Haacke
Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...
– at that time the most effective creators of art with a direct impact on socio-political reality – are soon to follow.
1970
Flash Art becomes even more international, concentrating on foreign artists and publishing direct reports from the artists’ native country. Texts are frequently printed in the authors’ native language. The informative nature of Flash Art consolidates and goes hand in hand with the avant-garde’s now predominant ideas on the end of interpretive criticism.
1971
An issue with a cover by Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
and Carl Andre
Carl Andre
Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American...
including a statement – written by the former devoted to the so-called ‘Conceptual Art’ – is out. The text accompanies a picture of the Italian version of Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
’s Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea) Proposition One; the project – displayed in three different places (a billboard in New York Chinatown, an advertising space in the Daily World and a large band in Turin) – is afterwards exhibited during the “Information” show at New York’s MoMA. Art & Language
Art & Language
Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...
and Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
make their first appearance on the cover of an art magazine. Flash Art is more and more devoted to the artists' texts: Gino De Dominicis
Gino De Dominicis
Gino De Dominicis was an Italian artist. A controversial and mystifying figure, even the news of his death was greeted with suspicion, as for years earlier he had reported his own demise in the mock conclusion to a biographical essay.His first show was at Rome's Galleria L'Attico in 1969...
’s Letter to Immortality, Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
’s Cultural Confinement and Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
's Sentences on Conceptual Art are just a few examples. The magazine’s headquarters shifts from Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
to Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
.
1972
On the occasion of Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
V, the magazine dedicates an entire issue, with a cover by Hans Haacke, to this large-scale exhibition. Already mixing art and marketing, Flash Art makes an appearance during Documenta, distributing T-shirts reproducing the faces of the artists who at the moment were most discussed, such as Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
, Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
and Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
.
1973
Flash Art starts to publish its German edition Heute Kunst confirming a particular attention to the new tendencies in the country, from conceptualism to a painter like A. R. Penck, who at that time was still living in East Germany and known only to a very few specialists. Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
designs the cover for Flash Art: a work somewhere between a masthead and a post-Minimalist drawing.
1974
Flash Art acquires a magazine format. At this moment the magazine – published in three languages: Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
– is divided in two main parts: on the one hand its international side is continuously updated with several sections called Flash Art Italia, England, France, USA and Eastern Europe edited by selective correspondents; on the other hand the editorial staff tries to engage artists in the realization of the magazine. Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernard "Bernd" Becher , and Hilla Becher, née Wobeser , were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures.- Biography :Bernd Becher was born in Siegen...
, Annette Messager
Annette Messager
Annette Messager is a French artist who was born in 1943. She is known mainly for her installation work which often incorporates photographs, prints and drawings, and various materials. Messager has exhibited and published her work extensively...
, Chris Burden
Chris Burden
Christopher "Chris" Burden is an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.-Education:Burden studied for his B.A...
, John Baldessari
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
, Edward Ruscha
Edward Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the Pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California...
, Gordon Matta-Clark
Gordon Matta-Clark
Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his "building cuts," a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls.-Life and work:Both of Gordon Matta-Clark's...
, Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn is a German installation artist and film director most famous for her body modifications such as Einhorn , a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece, and Pencil Mask, a mesh harness for the head with many pencils projecting out...
and many others are invited to compose pages for the magazine. Always provocative never predictable, Flash Art anticipates the myth of persona within the art community; entire pages are dedicated to snapshots – taken during several art opening all over the world – of emerging artists, critics and dealers such us Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
, John Baldessari
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
, Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist.- Work :Sometimes classified as an abstract minimalist Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting maxi stripes to integrate the visual surface and architectural space, notably historical, landmark architecture.Among his chief concerns is the...
, Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
, René Block, Germano Celant
Germano Celant
Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera" movement in 1967....
, Bruno Bischofberger
Bruno Bischofberger
Bruno Bischofberger is an art dealer and gallerist from Zurich, Switzerland, and a major figure in the international art market for several decades...
, Ileana Sonnabend and many others in a way somewhere between a net blog, a celebrity gallery and an artwork of Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski is French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker.-Life and work:Having no formal art education, he began painting in 1958. Nevertheless, he first came to public attention in 1960 with few short films and publication of several notebooks...
.
1978
In the ages of postmodernism and poststructuralism, the magazine adapts its nature with an increasing attention to the American intellectual scene: Could Leonardo da Vinci make it in New York today?, by artists Olivier Mosset
Olivier Mosset
Olivier Mosset is a Swiss visual artist. He lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.Mosset has spent considerable time in New York and Paris. In Paris in the ’60s he was a member of the BMPT group, along with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni...
and Gregor Müller, alongside RoseLee Goldberg
Roselee Goldberg
RoseLee Goldberg is an American-based art historian, author, critic and curator. She wrote a study of performance art, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present...
’s interview (part of Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
’s Flash Art Performance editorial section), just to name a pair. In 1977 the Committee for the Visual Art and the Artists Space in New York host the exhibition “Picture”. On this occasion Flash Art publishes texts by Douglas Crimp
Douglas Crimp
Douglas Crimp is an American professor in art history based at the University of Rochester.- Biography :Born in Idaho, Crimp went to Tulane University in New Orleans on a scholarship to study art history. His career started after moving to New York in 1967, where he worked as an art critic,...
(a that time managing editor of October and organizer of the show at the Artists Space) and artists Thomas Lawson
Thomas Lawson (artist)
Thomas Lawson is an artist, writer, and Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. He has exhibited paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of the Pictures Generation exhibit, Metro Pictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London and LAXART in Los...
and David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
, highlighting the birth of the Picture Generation: Robert Longo
Robert Longo
Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...
, Jack Goldstein
Jack Goldstein
Jack Goldstein was a Canadian born, California-based performance and conceptual artist turned painter in the 1980s art boom.-Early life and education:...
, David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
, Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....
, Thomas Lawson
Thomas Lawson (artist)
Thomas Lawson is an artist, writer, and Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. He has exhibited paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of the Pictures Generation exhibit, Metro Pictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London and LAXART in Los...
, Matt Mullican, and later Richard Prince
Richard Prince
Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975...
and Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...
, are recognized for their artworks created by the linguistic deconstruction of preexistent imagery.
1979
Flash Art splits into two editions: Flash Art International and Flash Art Italia. The result of this separation is an incisive intervention into both the international and the Italian scenes, which represents tow different realities that a single publication found difficult to fulfill. The first issue of Flash Art International features the seminal text "The Italian Transavantgarde
Transavantgarde
Transavantgarde is the Italian version of Neo-expressionism, an art movement that swept through Italy, and the rest of Western Europe, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term transavantgarde was coined by the Italian art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva, and literally means beyond the avant-garde...
" by Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva, is a recognized and respected Italian contemporary art critic, author of many essays on mannerism, and a professor of History of Contemporary Art at La Sapienza University in Rome...
, whose ‘Ideology of the Traitor’ introduces the art of Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter. A native of Morro d'Alba, province of Ancona, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Sandro Chia...
, Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor.A native of Florence, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Enzo Cucchi....
, Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino is an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker.-Paintings and drawing:Mimmo Paladino was born Domenico Paladino in Paduli, Campania, southern Italy...
, Nicola De Maria, Marco Bagnoli and Remo Salvadori.
1980
Jeffrey Deitch – at that time Vice President of Citibank
Citibank
Citibank, a major international bank, is the consumer banking arm of financial services giant Citigroup. Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, later First National City Bank of New York...
where he spent nine years developing and managing the bank’s art advisory and art finance businesses – becomes a regular columnist of the magazine and the first U.S. editor of Flash Art International. In his articles Deitch analyzes the figure of the artist neither as a solitary creator nor as a single-role-identity but as one of the several players of the ‘art system’ among dealers, gallerists, museum directors, art critics and collectors. It is due to these reasons that the editorial board gives increasing attention to the New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
art scene: Thomas Lawson
Thomas Lawson (artist)
Thomas Lawson is an artist, writer, and Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. He has exhibited paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of the Pictures Generation exhibit, Metro Pictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London and LAXART in Los...
reviews on David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
at Larry Gagosian
Larry Gagosian
Lawrence Gilbert "Larry" Gagosian is an American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries, with three locations in New York City Lawrence Gilbert "Larry" Gagosian (born April 19, 1945) is an American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries, with three...
Gallery / Nosei-Weber / The Kitchen as well as the famous "Three Cs" (Chia, Clemente and Cucchi) at Sperone Westwater Fisher – that decisively puts the central figures of the Transavanguardia on the New York map – are just a few examples. "Gallery Talk," a new regular column with conversations and presentations of major art dealers (published as a supplement and accompanied by a picture) is soon to follow. Yet Flash Art International investigates the most challenging philosophical instances through a series of texts, essays and interviews dedicated to thinkers like Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
, Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, Félix Guattari
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
, Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
, Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
and Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....
.
1981
Greater attention is being turned to German artists like Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac...
, Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz is a German painter who studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany...
, Per Kirkeby
Per Kirkeby
Per Kirkeby is a Danish painter, poet, filmmaker and sculptor.-Biography:1962 Studies at the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen; works in the School on painting, graphic arts, 8 millimeter films and performance pieces...
, Markus Lüpertz
Markus Lüpertz
Markus Lüpertz is a contemporary German painter and sculptor.In the 1960s, Lüpertz worked primarily in Berlin, moving on to take a professorship at Karlsruhe at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe in the 1970s, then to Düsseldorf where he was for over twenty years director of the Kunstakademie...
, Jörg Immendorff
Jörg Immendorff
Jörg Immendorff was one of the best known contemporary German painters; he was also a sculptor, stage designer and art professor.- Life and work :...
, Rainer Fetting
Rainer Fetting
Rainer Fetting is a German painter and sculptor.Rainer Fetting was one of the co-founders and main protagonists of the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin, founded in the late 1970s by a group of young artists from the class of Karl Horst Hödicke at the former Berliner Hochschule für Bildende...
as much as to the graffiti artists and the shift of Painting to other media such as performance and conceptualism.
1983
Flash Art International covers – mostly accompanied by long interviews – record an emerging group of superstar artists: Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
, Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter. A native of Morro d'Alba, province of Ancona, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Sandro Chia...
, David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
and Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
(who makes dresses-as-artworks for Grace Jones
Grace Jones
Grace Jones is a Jamaican-American singer, model and actress.Jones secured a record deal with Island Records in 1977, which resulted in a string of dance-club hits. In the late 1970s, she adapted the emerging electronic music style and adopted a severe, androgynous look with square-cut hair and...
and Madonna
Madonna (entertainer)
Madonna is an American singer-songwriter, actress and entrepreneur. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance. After performing in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her debut album in 1983...
) are the protagonists of changes in the art field; their success has been realized with such a great speed and on so vast a scale in the annals of contemporary art. At the same time the art world grows to unheard-of dimensions: news no longer comes exclusively from New York and a few European centers, but also from many places like Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
and Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
in the States as well as from Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. Flash Art Edition Française and Flash Art Edición Española are soon to follow.
1986
Flash Art International asks artist and socio-cultural theorist Peter Halley
Peter Halley
-Early Life and Career:Halley first came to prominence as a result of the geometric paintings rendered in intense day-glo colours that he produced in the early 1980s. His practice as an artist is usually associated with minimalism, neo-geo, and neo-conceptualism...
to write an essay on Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
called "Frank Stella and the Simulacrum." In this essay Halley melts his knowledge with a very straight style of writing figuring out the master of modernism as an oxymoron, balancing materialism and bureaucracy under the name of hyperrealization and simulation. After that Halley becomes known also as the author of essays – regarding the relationship between his work and the thoughts of intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
, Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
and Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
– and for Index Magazine
Index Magazine
Index Magazine was a prominent New York City based publication for art and culture. It was created by Peter Halley and Bob Nickas in 1996. The publication featured a mix of interviews with famous arty folks like Björk with not so-famous New York personalities like Queen Itchie or Ducky Doolittle.It...
(founded in 1996 with Bob Nickas), which investigates the tenuous power of photographic representation. Neo-Geo means everything and nothing. It seems to be an attitude towards the flow production instead of a way to make art. Flash Art International decides to invite these artists (Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
, Peter Halley
Peter Halley
-Early Life and Career:Halley first came to prominence as a result of the geometric paintings rendered in intense day-glo colours that he produced in the early 1980s. His practice as an artist is usually associated with minimalism, neo-geo, and neo-conceptualism...
, Ashley Bickerton
Ashley Bickerton
Ashley Bickerton is a contemporary artist living in Bali. A mixed-media artist, Bickerton often combines both photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found object assemblages...
, Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....
, Haim Steinbach
Haim Steinbach
Haim Steinbach is an [American] artist, who lives in New York City. Many of his works consist of arrangements of mass produced objects or readymades.-Life and work:...
and Philip Taaffe
Philip Taaffe
Philip Taaffe is an American artistTaaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and studied at the Cooper Union in New York, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977....
) for a panel moderated by Peter Nagy, artist and co-owner of small but significant East Village, Manhattan
East Village, Manhattan
The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, lying east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side...
Gallery Nature Morte
Gallery Nature Morte
Gallery Nature Morte is an art gallery that deals predominantly in Indian contemporary art. It currenty has three locations, galleries in New Delhi, Gurgaon , and Berlin . Gallery Nature Morte is partners with Bose Pacia Gallery in New York.- History :The gallery's founder, Peter Nagy originally...
. Accompanied with a text by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Flash Art International comes out with Gino De Dominicis
Gino De Dominicis
Gino De Dominicis was an Italian artist. A controversial and mystifying figure, even the news of his death was greeted with suspicion, as for years earlier he had reported his own demise in the mock conclusion to a biographical essay.His first show was at Rome's Galleria L'Attico in 1969...
on the cover, simultaneously with Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
. In fact this coincidence between the two non-speaking leading magazines has to be considered as an act of ubiquity, one of the most utopian of the artist efforts.
1987
Among the neo geo artists, Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
is the most radical to embody such new ideas. Flash Art International invites him for a conversation with the staff of the magazine. Paul Taylor interviews Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
for the last time before his unpredictable death while brand new critic Jérôme Sans talks to Jean-Hubert Martin about his exhibition “Magiciens de la terre
Magiciens de la terre
Magiciens de la Terre was a contemporary art exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in 1989.-Background:...
”. Although the aim of the show is to spotlight art from all over the world, in fact it marks a totally Western-centric behavior towards cultural differences nevertheless, provoking many skeptical responses, which are considered as the first examples of the contemporary African art criticism. In Post-Feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
, Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron is an American art curator based in New York City and New Orleans.Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools , Syracuse University and Bennington College , where he earned a BA in 1979...
describes women artists as more subversive than their colleagues. Consequently Flash Art International features three female icons on the cover: Rosemarie Trockel
Rosemarie Trockel
Rosemarie Trockel is a German Artist, and an important figure in the international contemporary art movement.- Life :...
, the champion-user of female-based practice as tools for the realization of a hidden self-emancipation, Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....
, whose algid attitude towards art-making recognizing her as an undeniable protagonist of the contemporary art scene, and Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...
; her unforgettable mottos I shop therefore I am (sampled from René Descartes
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
's "Cogito ergo sum") displayed through billboards and posters goes ‘outside’ via an unforgettable sardonic language enriched by an ironic flavor, emblematic of the current decade. Meanwhile thousand of people sanctioned the end of the cold war – by destroying the Berlin wall – Flash Art International captured the state of the art in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
with a special supplement entirely dedicated on it.
1988
Flash Art News is the new creature of the magazine. Published in a newspaper format and paper, this supplement is made as a compendium; speed news, short interviews with artists and dealers – as well as art facts from the art centers – are put together as a source for the readers ever more needy for information from the increased art system. The Spotlight is another regular column in the magazine. Shorter than a feature, longer than a review the Spotlight is one page for one shows.
On the occasion of a spotlight – dedicated to Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
and Christopher Wool
Christopher Wool
Christopher Wool is an American artist residing in New York City. Since the 1980s, Wool's studio practice has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas - moving beyond theoretical readings...
– Koons starts to develop his mission for the artist’s control of the media field, substituting the critic text with a full-page Wool pattern (Untitled, 1987) accompanied by the sentence “this painting remember me of a wall in a summer cottage,” signed by himself. This strategy will find a fulfilled realization in the famous "Ads Series." "During the 1988-89 art season, Koons and his galleries put their money where their mouth was. A series of full-page advertisements was purchased in the major trade magazine of the time: Artforum, Flash Art, Arts, and Art in America. In the center of each highly theatrical tableau, Koons presided over the scene smiling smugly at the camera, impeccably groomed, obviously airbrushed."
1990
Flash Art International is more than ever engaged by giving space to the artists. His new section Flash Art Project is one of the first examples of an editorial artist project. Later on this relationship is more than ever evident by asking them to give their own interpretation of the cover magazine. Several artists, such as Gerhard Merz, Mark Kostabi
Mark Kostabi
Kalev Mark Kostabi is an American artist and composer.-Early life:Mark Kostabi was born in Los Angeles on November 27, 1960 to Estonian immigrants Kaljo and Rita Kostabi. He was raised in Whittier, California and studied drawing and painting at California State University, Fullerton...
, Michael Majerus
Michael Majerus
Michael Eugene Nicolas Majerus was a geneticist and Professor of Ecology at Clare College, Cambridge, an enthusiast who became a world authority in his field of evolutionary biology. He was widely noted for his work on moths and ladybirds and as an advocate of the science of evolution...
, Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.-Biography:...
and Gian Marco Montesano, are selected to contribute.
1991
Talented, alternative and updated: these are the common qualities of the ever-changing Flash Art International contributing editors: from then Cologne-based artist and musician Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether is a German artist, musician and critic based in New York since the early 1990s.Koether was born in Cologne. Her paintings are exercises in colour, line, form and pattern and often feature text. Her solo show at Pat Hearn Gallery in 1997 featured a soundtrack by the artist,...
to writer and musician Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron is an American art curator based in New York City and New Orleans.Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools , Syracuse University and Bennington College , where he earned a BA in 1979...
, from future Palais de Tokyo
Palais de Tokyo
The Palais de Tokyo is a building dedicated to modern and contemporary art, located at 13 avenue du Président-Wilson, near the Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The eastern wing of the building belongs the City of Paris and hosts the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris...
directors Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jerôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art , and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from...
and Jérôme Sans to globe-trotters interviewers Paul Taylor and Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a contemporary art curator, critic and historian of art. He is currently Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London...
, from Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
2012 artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to Klaus Biesenbach
Klaus Biesenbach
Klaus Biesenbach is the current Director of MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York City and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City...
founding director of Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art
Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art
The Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art is a contemporary art institution in Berlin’s Mitte District. It is located at - Auguststrasse 69 D-10117 Berlin....
and the Berlin Biennale and currently chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art and director of MoMA PS1.
1992
In 1986 the magazine publishes an interview with underground director Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
conducted by Italian New York-based painter Francesco Bonami. In 1992 Bonami has been appointed head of the U.S. Editorial Desk inaugurating a series of features focused on the most brilliant and challenging artist of the Nineties: from Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
to Elizabeth Peyton
Elizabeth Peyton
Elizabeth Joy Peyton is an American painter who rose to popularity in the mid-1990s. She is a contemporary artist best known for stylized and idealized portraits of her close friends and boyfriends, pop celebrities, and European monarchy...
, from Charles Ray
Charles Ray (artist)
Charles Ray is a Los Angeles-based sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer’s perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways...
to Doug Aitken
Doug Aitken
-Early life and career:Doug Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968. In 1987, he initially studied magazine illustration with Philip Hays at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before graduating in Fine Arts in 1991. He moved to New York in 1994 where he had his first solo...
. Meanwhile, anticipating the passage from the figure of the coordinator to the birth of the curator’s practice, Flash Art International registers “Post Human” (or Posthuman
Posthuman
Posthuman may refer to:*Posthuman, a hypothetical future being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer human by our current standards...
) – curated by former U.S. Editor Jeffrey Deitch – as a "Brave New Art" exhibition. The show – defined a "manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human" – is one of the first examples where the artworks displayed, mostly selected from Greek collector Dakis Joannou
Dakis Joannou
Dakis Joannou born 1941 is a Greek Cypriot industrialist and art collector based in Greece. He owns hotels and a construction business and has been a major international distributor of Coca-Cola "across 27 countries, from Greece to Switzerland to Russia to Nigeria."-Life and career:Joannou is...
purchases, are chosen and selected to illustrate – together with additional magazines and science images – a curatorial project which aim is to “begin looking at how these new technologies and new social attitudes will intersect with art.”
1993
In 2004 London-based publishing house Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press is a British publisher of books on the visual arts, including art, architecture, photography, and design worldwide.As of 2009, Phaidon's headquarters are in London, UK, though they were in Oxford for many years, with offices in New York City, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Tokyo...
presents “Vitamin P: New Perspective in Painting” with an introducing-essay by poet and former Flash Art International former editor Barry Schwabsky. This book, the first in a series devoted to all the art medias, is directly inspired by the eponymous essay written by Francesco Bonami for the magazine. This is not the first time: in 1987 Flash Art International published an omni-comprehending essay entitled Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
1976-1987 by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, featuring well compiled profiles of Pino Pascali
Pino Pascali
Pino Pascali was an Italian artist, sculptor, set designer and performer.-Biography:Pino Pascali was born in Bari, Italy in 1936 and moved to Rome in 1955 to learn scene painting and set design at the Academy of Art...
, Gilberto Zorio, Mario Merz
Mario Merz
Mario Merz was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz.-Life:Born in Milan, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from...
, Luciano Fabro
Luciano Fabro
Luciano Fabro was an Italian artist associated with the Arte Povera movement.-Life:Born in Turin, Fabro moved to Milan in 1959, continuing to live and work there until his death....
, Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera...
, Alighiero Boetti
Alighiero Boetti
Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti known as Alighiero e Boetti was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera....
, Emilio Prini, Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome....
, Giuseppe Penone
Giuseppe Penone
Giuseppe Penone is an Italian artist. Penone started working professionally in 1968 in the Garessio forest, near where he was born. He is the younger member of the Italian movement named "Arte Povera", this term has been coined by Germano Celant. Penone's work is concerned with establishing a...
and Giulio Polini. Christov-Bakargiev will be consequently haired by Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press is a British publisher of books on the visual arts, including art, architecture, photography, and design worldwide.As of 2009, Phaidon's headquarters are in London, UK, though they were in Oxford for many years, with offices in New York City, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Tokyo...
for the Arte Povera book, part of the series “Themes & Movements.” Flash Art International cover is an indicator of success: Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
, Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist, who in 1998 was called "one of the most influential artists of this decade, and probably the next one too." He was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and educated in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas between 1981 and 1984. He then continued his education...
, Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....
, Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...
and Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney is an American artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and film. His early works were sculptural installations combined with performance and video...
, just to name the most recognizable artists who ‘have to pay’ their dues to the magazine. All the artists just named take part to Aperto '93
Aperto '93
Aperto ’93 is the title of an exhibition of contemporary art conceived by Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi, and organized by Helena Kontova for the XVL edition of the Venice Biennale, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1993.-Concept and realisation:...
, the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
section focused on the new generation of artists. For that edition, coordinator Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
invites a curatorial team composed by Francesco Bonami, Jeffrey Deitch, Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jerôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art , and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from...
, Benjamin Weil, Bob Nickas and Frieze Matthew Slotover among others. The result is memorable. Back to the covers, it happens that Flash Art International has to fight against cultural censorship, like in the case of Larry Clark
Larry Clark
Lawrence Donald "Larry" Clark is an American film director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for the movie Kids and his photography book Tulsa...
’s cover, refused by the current U.S. distributor and consequently substituted.
1995
The success of Aperto '93
Aperto '93
Aperto ’93 is the title of an exhibition of contemporary art conceived by Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi, and organized by Helena Kontova for the XVL edition of the Venice Biennale, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1993.-Concept and realisation:...
as one of the most important contemporary art overview and the uninterrupted discovery of artist from Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
and Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
are on the base of Aperto, Cityscape and Global Art, the new regular columns of Flash Art International. The first is a sort of exhibition on paper – published in the form of an article – that captures what is going on geographically or thematically; the second consists in a series of interviews with the chosen city-based artists, curators and museum directors while the third is a one-page feature where writers and curators from all over the world, like Octavio Zaya
Octavio Zaya
Octavio Zaya is an art critic and curator, born in Las Palmas , and living in New York City since 1978. He is Director of Atlántica, a bilingual quarterly magazine published by CAAM ; he is Curator at Large and Advisor of MUSAC ;and a member of the Advisory Board of Performa...
and Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru is a Chinese art curator and critic who lives in United States since 2006.He received degrees from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and moved from China in 1990. He lived 16 years in France before moving to America in 1990...
, are invited to discuss the practice of and later only one work by a contemporary artist.
1996
In February, the Center for Contemporary Art in Stockholm hosted the show “Interpol”, curated by Jan Äman and Russian curator Viktor Misiano. During the opening artist Alexander Brener
Alexander Brener
Alexander Davidovič Brener born 1957 in Alma-Ata, is a Russian-Jewish performance artist. His performances of note include defecating in front of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, having sex on city streets, and vandalizing art work.He was jailed in 1997 for...
destroyed Wenga Du’s project, a 20-meter long tunnel of human hair. The performance is legitimized by Misiano as a “completely new experience.” Further on, Flash Art editorial staff receives a reclaim letter – signed by artists, critics, curators and Äman himself – which will be published accompanied by Misiano’s response and Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...
’s opinion. Again, a few months later, Politi will return to defend Bremer – arrested after his action consisted of spraypainting the symbol of the American Dollar on Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician, born of ethnic Polish parents. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.-Early life:...
White Cross on Gray, on view at the Stedelijk Museum
Stedelijk Museum
Founded in 1874, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has been housed on the Paulus Potterstraat, next to Museum Square Museumplein and to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam Zuid...
, – asking the magazine’s readers to write letters for Brener’s freedom. With "Ambivalent Witnesses," Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru is a Chinese art curator and critic who lives in United States since 2006.He received degrees from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and moved from China in 1990. He lived 16 years in France before moving to America in 1990...
drives the reader in the unexplored and soon-to-exploding state of the contemporary art in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
.
1997
Flash Art International is the most updated keeper of the new voices in curating with several pages dedicated to various but still unforgettable blockbuster shows like Chinese situation “Cities on the Move” (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a contemporary art curator, critic and historian of art. He is currently Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London...
and Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru
Hou Hanru is a Chinese art curator and critic who lives in United States since 2006.He received degrees from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and moved from China in 1990. He lived 16 years in France before moving to America in 1990...
), Young British Artists
Young British Artists
Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...
’ triumph “Sensation
Sensation exhibition
Sensation was an exhibition of the collection of contemporary art owned by Charles Saatchi, including many works by Young British Artists, which first took place 18 September – 28 December 1997 at the Royal Academy of Art in London and later toured to Berlin and New York...
” (curated by Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...
and Norman Rosenthal
Norman Rosenthal
Sir Norman Rosenthal is a British curator. He was Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy from 1977 until 2008. His encyclopedic programme of exhibitions which stretched from Egyptian antiquities to recent art production, included the exhibition of Charles Saatchi's collection of contemporary...
), the 1997’s ‘merry-go-round’ (Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
, Documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
and Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster is an exhibition of sculptures in public places in the town of Münster...
) as well as for the new biennials’ ‘roller coaster’ with reports from Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, Gwangju
Gwangju
Gwangju is the sixth largest city in South Korea. It is a designated metropolitan city under the direct control of the central government's Home Minister...
, Taipei
Taipei
Taipei City is the capital of the Republic of China and the central city of the largest metropolitan area of Taiwan. Situated at the northern tip of the island, Taipei is located on the Tamsui River, and is about 25 km southwest of Keelung, its port on the Pacific Ocean...
and many other cities. In 1999, the New York Magazine publishes an article titled The "Mob Squad." Author Phoebe Hoban writes that: “The new painting achieved a sort of critical mass last May, when Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, is a British painter. She has a great respect for art history and her works reveal her reverence and high regard for artists such as Francisco de Goya, Nicolas Poussin, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell while incorporating into her works her distinct female...
, a 29-year-old British artist who moved to New York in 1994, sounded a clarion call in an article she published entitled "Painting Epiphany: Happy Days Are Where, Again?" in Flash Art.” This ‘squad’ (Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, is a British painter. She has a great respect for art history and her works reveal her reverence and high regard for artists such as Francisco de Goya, Nicolas Poussin, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell while incorporating into her works her distinct female...
, Damian Loeb
Damian Loeb
Damian Loeb is an American painter. Self-taught, he moved to New York City in the early 1990s.Discovered by Jeffrey Deitch, founder of Deitch Projects and current director of LAMoCA, Loeb had his first solo in 1999...
, John Currin
John Currin
John Currin is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and...
and others) mostly coached by (again) fellow dealer Jeffrey Deitch is captured in an ironic iperrealistic Flash Art International’s cover project made by Loeb.
1998
Gathering the attention of art world, the 1st Berlin Biennial (directed by Klaus Biesenbach
Klaus Biesenbach
Klaus Biesenbach is the current Director of MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York City and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City...
and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a contemporary art curator, critic and historian of art. He is currently Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London...
and Nancy Spector) is a sort of celebration of the German capital as a new art center, swarming of alternative spaces and headquarters of a generation of artists. Flash Art International investigates Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, publishing a 16-pages supplement dedicated to the city and its protagonists: Monica Bonvicini, Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research...
, Frank Ackermann, Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist
Elisabeth Charlotte "Pipilotti" Rist , is a visual artist who works with video, film, and moving images which are often displayed as projections.-Life and career:...
just to name a few. Another ritornello, which distinguishes Flash Art International is its love for challenging parallelisms. While Jan Avgikos underlines common elements between the practice of the porno-star Ilona Staller
Ilona Staller
Ilona Staller , also known by her stage name la Cicciolina, is a Hungarian-born Italian porn star, politician, and singer. She continued to make hardcore pornographic films while in office. She is famous for delivering political speeches with one breast exposed.-Early life:Anna Ilona was born in...
(a.k.a. Cicciolina) and her beau Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
, Paul Groot compares Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
’ empire with Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
modus operandi. Finally, future U.K. Editor Gea Politi dedicates one of her first regular columns “Gea's World” to the several reminders of Björk
Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir , known as Björk , is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres, such as rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical and folk...
in Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori is a Japanese video and photographic artist. While studying at Bunka Fashion College, she worked as a fashion model in the late 1980s. This strongly influenced her early works, such as Play with Me, in which she takes control of her role in the image, becoming an exotic, alien...
’s show at the Prada
Prada
Prada S.p.A. is an Italian fashion label specializing in luxury goods for men and women , founded by Mario Prada.-Foundations:...
Foundation.
1999
On the rise of the new millennium, Flash Art International distinguishes itself from the other publications for an ever increasing interest in interdisciplinary. Because of this, the magazine maintains a high cultural profile without deny his own cuttin’ hedge philosophy trough interviews with several ‘archistars’, such as Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas
Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA. Koolhaas studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam, at the Architectural...
, Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry
Frank Owen Gehry, is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions...
(ironically portrayed by Mark Kostabi
Mark Kostabi
Kalev Mark Kostabi is an American artist and composer.-Early life:Mark Kostabi was born in Los Angeles on November 27, 1960 to Estonian immigrants Kaljo and Rita Kostabi. He was raised in Whittier, California and studied drawing and painting at California State University, Fullerton...
alongside Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
’s Thomas Krens
Thomas Krens
Thomas Krens is the former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City, and currently the Guggenheim's Senior Advisor for International Affairs, overseeing the completion of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi...
), Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman is an American architect. Eisenman's professional work is often referred to as formalist, deconstructive, late avant-garde, late or high modernist, etc...
and ‘liquid architect’ Marcos Novak, fashion designers like Vivienne Westwood
Vivienne Westwood
Dame Vivienne Westwood, DBE, RDI is a British fashion designer and businesswoman, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream.-Early life:...
(interviewed by fashion 'system distorter' Sylvie Fleury
Sylvie Fleury
Sylvie Fleury is a Swiss contemporary pop artist employing sculpture, mixed media. Her work addresses the issues of shopping, and the paradigm of the new age. Born 1961, Geneva...
with a cover by Inez van Lamsweerde) and Azzedine Alaïa
Azzedine Alaia
Azzedine Alaïa is a Tunisian-born couturier and shoe designer, particularly successful since the 1980s.-Biography:Alaïa was born in Siliana, Tunisia on 7 June 1940. His parents were wheat farmers but his glamorous twin sister inspired his love for couture. A French friend of his mother fed Alaïa's...
– alternated by fashion’s interventions coordinated by Flash Art fashion editor and artist Iké Udé –, reviews of art-field movies like Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
’s Basquiat or Velvet Goldmine
Velvet Goldmine
Velvet Goldmine is a 1998 British/American drama film directed and co-written by Todd Haynes. The film tells the story of a pop star based mainly on David Bowie's 'Ziggy Stardust' character and is set in Britain during the days of glam rock in the early 1970s.Sandy Powell received another Academy...
, and MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
videoclip’s presentations.
2000–2001
Forty curators, more than 2 hundred artists: the 1st Tirana
Tirana
Tirana is the capital and the largest city of Albania. Modern Tirana was founded as an Ottoman town in 1614 by Sulejman Bargjini, a local ruler from Mullet, although the area has been continuously inhabited since antiquity. Tirana became Albania's capital city in 1920 and has a population of over...
Biennale is the dream-come-true of Flash Art Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...
and Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
. Supported by visionary artist and Tirana
Tirana
Tirana is the capital and the largest city of Albania. Modern Tirana was founded as an Ottoman town in 1614 by Sulejman Bargjini, a local ruler from Mullet, although the area has been continuously inhabited since antiquity. Tirana became Albania's capital city in 1920 and has a population of over...
mayor Edi Rama
Edi Rama
Edi Rama is an Albanian politician, painter, publicist, professor, and former athlete. Currently he is the leader of the Socialist Party of Albania, the biggest party in Albania , by wining the most of votes as a party in the last eight election.He has served as board member at the local Soros...
, the Tirana
Tirana
Tirana is the capital and the largest city of Albania. Modern Tirana was founded as an Ottoman town in 1614 by Sulejman Bargjini, a local ruler from Mullet, although the area has been continuously inhabited since antiquity. Tirana became Albania's capital city in 1920 and has a population of over...
Biennale is the first example of an art event organized with unfounded budgets. A new adventure, that confirms the role of the magazine’s editors as cultural entrepreneurs; besides the ever more importance of curating as a fundamental element within the contemporary art landscape is underlined by asking contemporary artists like Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....
and Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...
to curate a section for the biennial. September 11’s tragedy completely sticks the whirl within the big apple. Flash Art reaction to the aftermath is a collection of testimonies coordinated by 26-year old former Flash Art Italia Massimiliano Gioni just appointed brand new U.S. editor.
During his tenure as Flash Art U.S. Editor Gioni started to collaborate more and more with Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....
. Indeed Gioni was the artist's ghost writer and the 'press officer' of the 6th Caribbean Biennial, a project conceived by Cattelan together with curator and Flash Art contributor Jens Hoffmann
Jens Hoffmann
Jens Hoffmann Mesèn is a writer and exhibition organizer. He has organzied exhibitions since 1997 and is currently the Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he also directs the Capp Street Project artist-in-residence...
. The project – supported by Fundación/Colección Jumex
Jumex
Jumex is a brand of juice and nectar in Mexico. The Jumex brand is also popular among Hispanic consumers in the United States. Currently, the Jumex Group offers lines of fresh and preserved fruit juices, nectar, children's drinks, milk, smoothies, energy drinks, and sports drinks in...
and accompanied by a catalogue edited by Bettina Funcke – consisted of a 'artist's vacation' featuring biennial habituées Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...
, Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist; he won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the following year he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale...
(who couldn't make it), Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori is a Japanese video and photographic artist. While studying at Bunka Fashion College, she worked as a fashion model in the late 1980s. This strongly influenced her early works, such as Play with Me, in which she takes control of her role in the image, becoming an exotic, alien...
, Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research...
, Elizabeth Peyton
Elizabeth Peyton
Elizabeth Joy Peyton is an American painter who rose to popularity in the mid-1990s. She is a contemporary artist best known for stylized and idealized portraits of her close friends and boyfriends, pop celebrities, and European monarchy...
, Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist, who in 1998 was called "one of the most influential artists of this decade, and probably the next one too." He was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and educated in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas between 1981 and 1984. He then continued his education...
, Tobias Rehberger, Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist
Elisabeth Charlotte "Pipilotti" Rist , is a visual artist who works with video, film, and moving images which are often displayed as projections.-Life and career:...
and Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary artist residing in New York. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element...
. "The biennial was over and even if there wasn't any art, there would be reruns of the experience – in the form of a six-page spread in Italian Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
and a catalogue that Maurizio and Jens would create as a souvenir of the trip. As for the artists, it seemed to me that they did what they probably would have done at any other biennial – compare ideas, share resources, strengthen relationships and inspire one another.". A series of full-page advertisements was purchased in Artforum, Flash Art and Frieze, which reviewer Jenny Liu called the Caribbean Biennial a "splendid failure: slightly wonderful but doubtlessly cynical; kudos for the conceptual playfulness but let’s just ignore the flawed execution."
2003
Art-star and amphitryon Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....
continues his special relationship with Flash Art International in a series of sardonic interviews with young and promising artists like Martin Creed
Martin Creed
Martin Creed is an artist and musician. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, which was an empty room in which the lights went on and off.-Life and work :...
, Verne Dawson, Piotr Uklanski and then Dana Schutz
Dana Schutz
Dana Schutz is a painter in New York.She graduated with a BFA the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2002. She grew up in Livonia, Michigan a suburb of Detroit and graduated in 1995 from Adlai E...
, Seth Price, Matthew Mohanan, Guy Ben-Ner, Christian Holstad
Christian Holstad
Christian Holstad is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York City. He received his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994....
, Paul Chan, Tino Sehgal
Tino Sehgal
Tino Sehgal is a British-German artist based in Berlin. His works, which he calls "constructed situations", involve one or more people carrying out instructions conceived by the artist.-Early life and education:...
and chef Ferran Adrià
Ferran Adrià
Ferran Adrià i Acosta is a Catalan chef born on May 14, 1962 in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. He was the head chef of the El Bulli restaurant in Roses on the Costa Brava, and is considered one of the best chefs in the world.-Career:...
. “It happens in Prague,” is the new motto of the magazine: leaving Tirana, the new ‘mission impossible’ is to run a contemporary art organization in the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
capital, former residence of the editor Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
. Under the slogan “Peripheries Become the Center” – taken from the book Empire (book)
Empire (book)
Empire is a text written by post-Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The book, written in the mid-1990s, was published in 2000 and quickly sold beyond its expectations as an academic work.-Summary:...
written by globalization analysts Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.Negri is best-known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university...
and Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000...
– Prague Biennale 1, co-produced in collaboration with Prague National Gallery director Milan Knížák
Milan Knížák
Milan Knížák is a Czech performance artist, sculptor, musician, installation artist, dissident, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.-Childhood and early life in the Protectorate and in the former Sudetenland :...
is described by Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...
as a "low-cost show."
2005
As usual Flash Art International is apart from any other publication; premièring anyone, the magazine starts to publish panels and discussions around painting. Masters such as School of Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
's Neo Rauch
Neo Rauch
Neo Rauch is a German artist whose paintings mine the intersection of his personal history with the politics of industrial alienation. His work reflects the influence of socialist realism, and owes a debt to Surrealists Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, although Rauch hesitates to align...
and Matthias Weischer
Matthias Weischer
Matthias Weischer is a painter living in Leipzig. Weischer is considered to be part of the New Leipzig School.- Life :...
and Cluj-Napoca
Cluj-Napoca
Cluj-Napoca , commonly known as Cluj, is the fourth most populous city in Romania and the seat of Cluj County in the northwestern part of the country. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest , Budapest and Belgrade...
leaders Victor Man and Adrian Ghenie as well as John Currin
John Currin
John Currin is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and...
, Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Tuymans is considered one of the most influential painters working today. His signature figurative paintings transform mediated film, television, and print sources into examinations of history and memory.-Life:Tuymans...
, Wilhelm Sasnal
Wilhelm Sasnal
Wilhelm Sasnal is a Polish painter. Sasnal received his diploma of painting in 1999 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.-Early life and career:Wilhelm Sasnal was born in Tarnów, Poland, in 1972...
, Peter Doig
Peter Doig
Peter Doig is a contemporary artist born in Scotland. In 2007, a painting of Doig's, entitled White Canoe, sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist.-Early life:...
and Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas is a South African born artist and painter who lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Stressing both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value, Dumas tends...
are fully featured. Meanwhile U.K. Editor Gea Politi makes her new exploit: "Fresh Start" is a column that serves as a compass to navigate territories in art, collecting interviews with make up artists, musicians, actors and a series of new creatures generated by the culture system such as musicians Chicks on Speed
Chicks on Speed
Chicks on Speed is a multi-national musical ensemble, formed in Munich in 1997, when members Melissa Logan, Kiki Moorse and Alex Murray-Leslie met at the Academy of Fine Arts....
, makeup artist Feride Uslu and fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm. Prague Biennale continues, and its second edition is accompanied by two main themes: painting and political art. If on the occasion of Prague Biennale 1, the return of painting is announced as a resurrection with the “Lazarus effect
Lazarus effect
When semiconductor detectors are used in harsh radiation environments, defects begin to appear in the semiconductor crystal lattice as atoms become displaced because of the interaction with the high-energy traversing particles...
” section, this year is the turn of the massive art critic Rosalind Krauss, whose text “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” is reprinted and borrowed for the section curated by Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi
Giancarlo Politi is the founder of Flash Art Magazine.-Magazine:In 1967 he moved to Rome, where he started his own art magazine, called Flash, and then changed it to Flash Art...
and Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
titled “Expanded Painting.” On the other side there’s “Acción Directa,” an overview on the ‘guerrilla invasion’ of the Latin American artists, captured by Marco Scotini. Confirming Prague Biennale as an essential event is the coming out of the second volume of the indispensable contemporary art vademecum Art Now, published by Taschen
Taschen
Taschen is an art book publisher founded in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen in Cologne, Germany. It began as Taschen Comics publishing Benedikt's extensive comic collection...
. In the preface, editor Uta Grosenick writes: “the art scene has changed dramatically in recent years – notably with a return to figurative painting and an increase in political topics.”
2007
In the era of participation, Flash Art International doesn’t miss the chance to involve the readers in a series of collective interviews with art system protagonists Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....
, John Currin
John Currin
John Currin is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and...
and Franz West
Franz West
Franz West is an Austrian artist.-Work:His art practice started as a reaction to the Viennese Actionism movement has been exhibited in museums and galleries for more than three decades...
. After Flash Art Russia, the brand new Czech and Slovak Republic edition of the magazine underline the former URSS satellite as the new epicenter of Flash Art Eastern Europe activities. A survey concerning the relationship between artists and artistic centers and a diary of a road trip around Kosovo
Kosovo
Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...
, Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
, Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
and other spots – compiled by News Editor Aaron Moulton – serve as a foreword for the third edition of Prague Biennale, a 22-sections exhibition fruit of debates around keywords like glocalism, nomad and outsider. On this occasion Flash Art International publishes a triple interview with the ‘Modern Nomads’ Marina Abramović
Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...
, Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...
and Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.-Background:Neshat's parents were upper middle-class...
organized by Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova
Helena Kontova is an art critic and curator born on November 16, 1955 in Prague, Czech Republic. She has lived in Milan, Italy since 1977 and has been the editor of Flash Art International since 1979...
and conducted by Abramović on skype between Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
.