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Site-specific art

274 articles

Site-specific art is a form of artistic creation designed for a particular location, taking into account the space’s unique characteristics. This genre emerged in the 1960s with the rise of installation art and land art. Artists like Robert Smithson, with his “Spiral Jetty,” and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, known for wrapping buildings and landscapes, pioneered this approach. Site-specific works often integrate with their environment, whether natural or urban, and can encompass various mediums including sculpture, performance, and multimedia installations.

Notable examples include Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” and Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project” at Tate Modern. Site-specific art challenges traditional notions of portable, commodifiable artworks, often emphasizing experience over object. It can be permanent, like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, or temporary, such as Ai Weiwei’s installations.

Cao Fei’s Cosplayers & the power of costumes

Performances, Photography, Video art   6 min read
Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei’s 2004 work explores the imagined identities of cosplayers, young people who dress up like game characters, and how they interact with the real world. A costume bestows magical powers upon the wearer of these individuals, rendering their person more special and enabling them to transcend their mundane reality. These are [...]

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Yoshitomo Nara’s shining dog sculptures – What you should know

Sculptures   6 min read
Yoshitomo Nara is a well-known and influential Japanese contemporary artist who lives and works in Nasushiobara. He grew up in post-Pacific War Japan. For some reason, throughout his work, he usually channels memory of his lonely childhood into his sculptures and paintings, evoking the viewers to revisit their own childhood memories. His projects and artwork [...]

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Cai Guo Qiang’s stunning Watering Hole in Brisbane

Installations, Sculptures   6 min read
What was it? Cai Guo-Qiang’s first solo exhibition in Australia was staged at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) from November 2013 to April 2014. Spanning the ground floor galleries of GOMA, this exhibition presented a large-scale installation by the Chinese artist. A centerpiece of the exhibition was a dramatic new commission, Heritage (2013), which [...]

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Yayoi Kusama – Dots for Love and Peace, 2009, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand feat

Yayoi Kusama covers the City Gallery Wellington with her dots

Installations   2 min read
Dots for Love and Peace (2009) was one of only three temporary public art projects worldwide designed by iconic Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. It was installed on the exterior architecture of the City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand. Dots for Love and Peace is an intense and unexpected public artwork and reflects Kusama’s obsessive interest in [...]

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Elmgreen & Dragset’s Short-Cut looks like an accident scene

Installations   7 min read
Berlin-based artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset have carved their career out of fixation with objects and their settings and what happens when those particular objects are recontextualized in the name of art. In this instance, the duo was commissioned by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi to create a large-scale installation for Milan’s quintessential shopping mall, Galleria Vittorio [...]

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Why are Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings so influential?

Murals, Paintings   4 min read
1,350 Wall Drawings in four decades Over the course of his prolific and influential career, Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) produced approximately 1,350 wall drawings, comprising approximately 3,500 installations at more than 1,200 venues. Why did Sol LeWitt let others paint his ideas? Early in his career, Sol LeWitt began to have others help execute his wall [...]

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Why did Michael Lin install a complete house on a roof in Shanghai?

Architecture, Installations   4 min read
Model Home – A Proposition by Michael Lin was an exhibition of new conceptual work, made by Michael Lin. For the exhibition, he installed a temporary structure on top of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, China. The exhibition has been created in collaboration with building workers, furniture makers and musicians, filmmakers, and urban studies [...]

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Dave Cole’s Knitting Machine is producing a gigantic American flag

Installations   2 min read
In 2005, MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) presented a monumental and uniquely American sculptural installation by Providence-based sculptor Dave Cole. For Cole’s industrial-sized project The Knitting Machine, he used two excavators and replaced their shovels with telephone poles, fitting them with massive 6 meters (20 ft.) knitting needles. This giant machine produced an [...]

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Why did Josephine Meckseper install oil pumps in Midtown Manhattan?

Sculptures   2 min read
In March 2012, two monumental kinetic sculptures, each about 7.5m tall, transformed a disused public space in Midtown Manhattan into an art piece by Josephine Meckseper. Though mirroring the forms and materials of the mid-century oil industry, the artist locates her work firmly inside the contemporary debate about American business, wealth and consumerism. What inspired [...]

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