Contemporary artists have extended the vocabulary of the sublime by looking back to earlier traditions and by engaging with aspects of modern society. They have located the sublime in not only the ...

Bernd and Hilla Becher first began their project of systematically photographing industrial structures in the late 1950s. This paper, first given at a conference at Tate Modern, investigates the ...

The sublime evades easy definition. Today the word is used for the most ordinary reasons, for a ‘sublime’ tennis shot or a ‘sublime’ evening. In the history of ideas it has a deeper meaning, pointing ...

Jack Burnham’s systems aesthetics was one of the first, fully developed, critical theories of postformalist artistic practice. Yet Burnham, undeservedly, is little known today. Recovering, reprising ...

Franz Kline’s relationship with East Asian calligraphy is one of the most contested aspects of the interpretation of his oeuvre, with critics making comparisons between his work and Chinese or ...

This article focuses on American artist Lee Bonteco’s drawing practice during the early 1960s, focusing in particular on Drawing 1961. Made with graphite, charcoal and soot, Bontecou’s works on paper ...

This article examines the sexual imagery of particular paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. It argues that criticism has overlooked the sophisticated poetry of the body in ...

This paper examines the notion of the contemporary technological sublime, and asks what sublime affect means in the context of contemporary digital technologies such as video games. It argues that the ...

Suspended, collapsed, stacked, wrapped or folded, the works of Phyllida Barlow spring from an interrogation of some of the most fundamental aspects of sculpture: its physical attributes and its ...

De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals ...

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), who trained originally as an architect, is best known for his spectacular ‘building cuts’. These have often been seen as an outright rejection of the architectural ...

This is one of four reports produced by researchers in the project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum. Each offers a perspective from one of four practices that are changing ...