Magnificent Obsessions on Front Row

I have a fascination with, and am attracted to collections. The psychology of collecting interests me, as well as the method of displays.

Damien Hirst, Birds display

 Danh Vo I M U U R 2, 2013 (detail)

The new exhibition, Magnificent Obsessions at the Barbican in London is featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Front Row. The exhibition focuses on the artist as collector. Many post-war and contemporary artists are represented, including the possessions of Howard Hodgkin, Edmund de Waal, Damien Hirst and Peter Blake. The show's curator Lydia Yee gives John Wilson a personal tour.

Edmund de Waal from the collection of a private man, 2011

Sol LeWitt, Autobiography, 1980

Featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Front Row, 11th February http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051s2m1

Blanton Museum of Art presents Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt

Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWittFebruary 23–May 18, 2014

Blanton Museum of ArtMLK and Congress
Austin, Texas

www.blantonmuseum.org

Eva Hesse, "Untitled," 1968. Gouache, watercolor, 
silver paint and pencil on paper, 22 1/8 x 15 1/4 
inches. Private collection. © The Eva Hesse Estate. 
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Curator: Veronica Roberts Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt celebrates the close friendship between two of the most significant American artists of the post-war era: Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). While their practices diverged in innumerable, seemingly antithetical ways—LeWitt's art is associated with ideas and system-based conceptual art and Hesse's is associated with the body and her own hand—this exhibition of approximately 40 works will highlight the crucial impact that their decade-long friendship had on both their lives and work. In 1970, immediately upon learning of Hesse's premature death at the age of 34, LeWitt created a wall drawing filled with "not straight" lines as a way of paying homage to the organic contours that were a hallmark of Hesse's art. Organized by the Blanton, the exhibition will take this wall drawing, Wall Drawing #46, as its point of departure, while also revealing the way Hesse's approach to making art had vast-reaching implications on LeWitt's work. Included are wall drawings, sculpture, painting, drawings, prints, and correspondence between the artists.