Alejandra de Argos

ART

Caspar David Friedrich. Landscape Painting to Another Dimension

It is 250 years since the birth of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great German painters of Romanticism. On the occasion of his anniversary, Germany is preparing various tributes, the most important being that of the Alte Nationalgalerie Museum in Berlin, which will open on 19 April: "Caspar David Friedrich. Infinite Landscapes". It will be an important exhibition featuring 60 paintings and 50 drawings by the paradigmatic painter of German Romanticism, including his most iconic works. It was in Germany that European Romanticism had its origin through its literature, its painting and its music, exalting feeling above the preponderance of Enlightenment reason.

by Elena Cué

Las 10 Mejores Exposiciones de Arte en Madrid

Las 10 Mejores Exposiciones de Arte en París

Las 10 Mejores Exposiciones de Arte en Nueva York

Las 10 Mejores Exposiciones de Arte en Londres

The best exhibitions

Madrid - Paris - New York - London

Banksy: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

Cecily Brown: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

Miquel Barceló: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

Francisco de Goya. Biography, works and exhibitions

Joaquín Sorolla: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

Tamara de Lempicka: Biography, works and exhibitions

Frida Kahlo: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

Artists

Biography - Works - Exhibitions

Thomas Aquinas: Biography, Thought and Works

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Biography, Thought and Works

Michael J. Sandel, a Philosopher Against Perfection

Philosophers

Biography - Thought - Works

NEWS

“Agudas” by Michelle Dean: Words That Cut Like Knives

Jordan Casteel: First Retrospective at the Denver Art Museum

Sorolla’s Mediterranean Light Lands in London

“La chica de la Leica”, or the Woman Behind the Photojournalist

An Art Center, Oceans and Science in a Venetian Church

The Magnificent Roberto Polo Collection Comes to Toledo to Stay

The Arc de Triomphe in Paris Will Be Wrapped by Christo in 2020

Julian Barnes Analyzes Painting “With His Eyes Wide Open”

Antonio Garcia Villaran and “El arte de no tener talento”

Carlos Garcia Gual Invites Us to Discover a “Grecia para Todos”

EXHIBITIONS

Caspar David Friedrich. Landscape Painting to Another Dimension

Elena Cué

The Soul of James Turrell

The reappearance of the work of the American artist James Turrell (Pasadena, LA, 1943) in Paris has caused great expectation. The Gagosian Gallery in Le Bourget, near the Air Museum, has presented the exhibition "James Turrell: At One", which can be visited until summer 2025. This exhibition consists of more than thirty works including luminous murals, projections, photographs, holograms, models and plans of his Roden Crater in Arizona.

Elena Cué

Fra Angelico: Divine Reflection

Florence hosts until 25 January the extraordinary exhibition "Fra Angelico", devoted to one of the great masters of the Early Renaissance. Spread between the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museum of San Marco, the show brings together more than 140 works and allows one to enter into the spiritual, aesthetic and theological dimension of a painter who knew how to harmonize monastic devotion with the modern language of the Renaissance. In a journey of great beauty and recollection, Fra Angelico reveals himself as a creator of light, serenity and transcendence, whose painting still moves us by its purity and depth.

Elena Cué

Man Ray: Lights and Dreams

"Man Ray: Forms of Light", the new exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, reveals the essential figure of the artist who redefined photography and the avant-garde of the 20th century. Through rayographs, solarizations and objects charged with Dada wit and surrealist spirit, the show illuminates Man Ray's experimental power and his still-current legacy, in dialogue with the parallel exhibition at the Met in New York. His life, marked by innovation, aesthetic rebelliousness and the influence of women such as Kiki de Montparnasse and Lee Miller, reveals a creator who turned light into language and imagination into form.

Elena Cué

TRAVEL

Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance

Florence, during the first decades of the fifteenth century, was the axis around which the world turned. In among its twenty neighbourhoods with their gonfaloniers, their streets and palaces, their churches and houses, Alberti was writing his treatise “On Painting”, Masaccio had painted the Brancacci Chapel frescoes and his Holy Trinity adorned Santa Maria Novella church, Ghiberti completed the North Door of the Baptistery and Brunelleschi crowned Florence cathedral with a dome which, using never-before-seen techniques, he made to float in its enormity above the Santa Maria del Fiore apse.

Marina Valcárcel

The Colosseum: Machine of Roman power

Coliseum director Dr Rosella Rea accompanies ABC Cultural on an exceptional visit through some of the recently restored, but as yet unopen to the public, areas of this prodigious monument . Back in Madrid, we consult with Pritzker prize-winning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. “You need to close your eyes to imagine this gallery ... Archaeologists have found coloured, stuccoed areas and many frescoes. We know now that the interior of the Coliseum was red. Only the exterior was light, the colour of limestone travertine. Ancient architecture was always painted in bright colours and to forget this is to veer from reality", says Dr Rea, as we walk through a gallery whose restoration began in 2012 - thanks to a €25 million funding grant from luxury brand Tod's – and, although now completed, is still absolutely out of bounds to the public.

Marina Valcárcel

Jerusalem, a historical enigma

that God granted the world ten measures of beauty (yofi), nine for Jerusalem and just one for the rest of the world. The Holy City has no rivers, no sea view, no gardens. It is, rather, an ochre-hued stoney plateau set amongst valleys and dry riverbeds in the mountains of Judea. So what then is Jerusalem? Is it a concept, a wound, a state of mind? Jerusalem is two rocks and a wall. It's the custodian of the three symbolic stones of the three religions that derive from the same book: the Wailing Wall for Jews, the Holy Sepulchre for Christians and the Dome of the Rock for Muslims. One could say that its power resides in its promise of the cosmic, or its being the epicentre of stories about creation. According to Enrich Klein's 2005 account, Jerusalem has been destroyed 12 times, sieged 23 times, captured 52 times and recaptured 44 times. It is the only city in the world where history is both the past and also the future. Whatever our particular faith or whether we even have one or not, here is where its chaotic, propulsive energy is to be found.

Marina Valcárcel

And if Venice dies?

Classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, Venice now finds itself at death's door, not drowning in the Adriatic's high tides but suffocated by mass tourism. UNESCO has extended until December 2018 its deadline for Venice to meet twelve criteria, to the letter, that might spare it being added to the World Heritage in Danger List alongside Aleppo, Damascus and the historic centre of Vienna. Around 9.30 in the morning, crossing the Campo Santa Maria Formosa towards San Zaccaria, there is still a real feel of authentic Vienna with children on their way to school, kiosks piled high with bundles of Corriere della Sera and Il Gazzettino and the local dialect of young Venetians stepping off gondolas and vaporettos en route to the Plaza's fresh vegetable stalls piled high with basil, chicory, vine tomatoes and aubergines.

Marina Valcárcel

BOOKS AND MUSIC

Andrea Chénier. Gran Teatre del Liceu

Yesterday, some privileged ones, attended at the Liceu a perfect performance of Andrea Chenier. When opera reaches that degree of perfection, very rare on the other hand, and the audience surrenders like yesterday's at the Liceu, opera lovers understand what Riccardo Muti means about the difficulty of the art of conducting: "... I believe that I am halfway along the road, and I am sure that I will never reach the other shore of the river, because behind the notes dwells the infinite, which means God, and we are too small before God". The great attraction was the debut in Spain! of Jonas Kaufmann (48!) singing staged opera, so the house was completely full and the expectation indescribable.

Alfonso Cortina

Another Look at the Crisis. Blue Jasmine.

Woody Allen never ceases to surprise. In his latest film, Blue Jasmine presents a completely new approach to the economic crisis about which cinema has also spoken so much in recent years. Inside Job, Margin Call, The Company…

Maira Herrero

The Accident

I saw your eyes fixing on my answer. “YES”. It came out of a dark and unsuspected part inside me. I remembered exactly that sensation and the need to breathe pure air. To sweat and feel the…

Marina Valcárcel

On the Shore. Rafael Chirbes.

To read such surprising literature in Spanish at this stage of my life fills me with satisfaction. Chirbes has devoted his life to this craft, but through sheer ignorance I have only just discovered him in this novel of…

Maira Herrero

INTERVIEWS

Interview with Richard Branson

Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin empire, is much more than an entrepreneur: he is a visionary who has pushed the boundaries of business, adventure, and philanthropy. From his beginnings with a student magazine to his journey into space, Branson champions a human-centered leadership committed to people and the planet. In this interview, he reflects on artificial intelligence, climate change, and his calling to change the world with passion, empathy, and action.

Elena Cué

Interview with Nicolas Berggruen

Nicolas Berggruen (1961) is the founder and chairperson of Berggruen Holdings and the interdisciplinary think-tank, the Berggruen Institute, where scientists, economists, philosophers and artists from around the world engage and put forward proposals to tackle the 21st-century challenges facing humanity. Among the issues raised against the technifying, globalization and capitalist background of our time is that of how we see ourselves and recognize the other person in all their fullness from a moral perspective.

Elena Cué

Interview with Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst (1965) began his artistic career as an iconic member of the Young British Artists group. The advertising mogul and gallery owner Charles Saatchi raised this group to the heights of world recognition and made Hirst its foremost representative, by funding and supporting his career. He was the one who managed to sell - in 2004 and for 9.5 million euros - Hirst’s tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde. This particularly representative work forms part of his Natural History series, along with his cabinets of fish in formaldehyde.

Elena Cué

Interview with Ai Weiwei

Recently inaugurated in Lisbon, Rapture, is the largest exhibition by artist and political activist, Ai Weiwei, (Beijing, China, 1957) described by The New York Times as one of the most important critical artists of our time, with his eloquent and unsilenceable voice for freedom. The exhibition title has various meanings; one is the “transcendent moment that connects the earthly dimension with the spiritual dimension.” Another is the “hijacking of our rights and freedom”

Elena Cué

PHILOSOPHERS

George Berkeley. Matter Is an Illusion

The philosophy of George Berkeley can be summed up in a few words: matter does not exist. A radical and provocative claim that he tried to argue in his most important book: “Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous”, written when he was 28. Hylas is a Cartesian thinker who defends the existence of matter, while Philonous is Berkeley himself, who inspired the well-known principle: esse est percipi. This could be translated as: the world only exists if it is perceived.

Pedro García Cuartango

Thomas Aquinas: Biography, Thought and Works

Thomas Aquinas taught at several universities (Paris, Naples and Viterbo, among others) and was a most profound connoisseur of Aristotelian philosophy. But these facts, rather than turning him into the paradigm of Scholastic philosophy, show only that Aquinas was a child of his time. If Thomas holds interest for philosophy beyond the fact that his thought can be situated within a particular historical period, it is because he presents an extraordinarily powerful and original philosophy.

Iker Martínez Fernández

Stoicism as a Mass Phenomenon

In recent years Stoicism has grown so popular that it has become a mass phenomenon. Hardly a week goes by without the general press offering us a newly published Stoic synthesis just out in the bookshops, or a cursory analysis of the reasons for the return of this ancient philosophy. All sorts of Stoic podcasts circulate on the internet; youtubers, opinion leaders and great entrepreneurs claim to promote Stoic values, and the Greco-Roman classics of this school, such as Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, find a place in bookshop windows for the first time.

Iker Martínez Fernández

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Biography, Thought and Works

Jean-Jacques Rousseau always liked to swim against the current, like an enfant terrible who let himself be swept along by no fashion or opinion, perhaps because he understood philosophy as an existential rather than a professional commitment. He grew up in the company of many readings in which "that free and republican spirit took shape, that indomitable and proud character, incapable of bearing the yoke and servitude" (Rousseau, 1997, 34).

Kilian Lavernia

ARTISTS

Banksy: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

Banksy is the pseudonym of the most high-profile graffiti painter in contemporary Street Art. Although there are no concrete biographical facts to go by, it is believed he was born in the outskirts of Bristol in 1974, later moving into the city where he spent his adolescence. A recent study by Queen Mary University in London identified the artist as Robin Gunningham and confirmed he grew up in Bristol. According to the illustrator and graphic designer Tristan Manco, one of the most ardent researchers into urban art, the controversial Banksy was an apprentice butcher before getting into graffiti during the 80's "aerosol boom". In the 90's, he was a gang member of Bristol’s DryBreadZ crew, aka DBZ, at which time his fame began to spread like wildfire, mainly due to his tit-for-tat overpainting war with the top graffiti artist of the day, King Robbo.

Clelia

Cecily Brown: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

To contemplate a painting by Cecily Brown is to experience something vital, especially as regards the massive canvasses she churned out feverishly during the early years. Their surfaces manifest an intense vacuous horror, where a profusion of colours and brushstrokes reveal bodies twisted in passion or revulsion, fairytale characters, nudes, fruits, trees or, even, just lines of expression and vibrant colours that are a masterclass in composition.

Marta Sánchez

Miquel Barceló: Biography, Works and Exhibitions

“I am a specialist in life as a permanent crisis.” Thus defines himself Miquel Barceló, one of the most sought-after and internationally recognized Spanish artists alive today. His capacity for communication goes hand in hand with the scope and variety of his work: huge canvasses, small drawings, murals, engravings, book illustrations, ceramics, sculpture, opera staging, album covers, posters, television programmes

Marta Sánchez

Francisco de Goya. Biography, works and exhibitions

Francisco de Goya's work is universally famous for its spectacular quality, its modernity and its commitment. The Fuendetodos teacher was a pioneer in technique and subject matter; a nonconformist in a society where he never quite fit in, but who surrendered to his dazzling artistry.

Marta Sánchez