conceptual art Archives -

July 12, 2025August 3, 2025

Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional

At the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional is the first museum exhibition in Mexico in nearly 20 years for one of the country’s leading contemporary artists. The show surveys Orozco’s work from the 1990s to the present, spanning four floors and the museum’s public plaza. With more than 300 works—sculptures, installations, photographs, drawings, paintings, and games—the exhibition explores Orozco’s practice of creating an interplay between objects and concepts.

April 30, 2025April 30, 2025

Benoît Pype, Le Sablier Millénaire

In the Palais de l’Élysée, the 300-year-old palace that is the official residence and office of the president of France, a conceptual work of art by the artist Benoît Pype is a recent addition to more than 5,000 arts décoratifs, 500 works of art, and 100 clocks from the collections of the Mobilier National. In one of the 365 gilded rooms once home to Madame de Pompadour, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles de Gaulle before Emmanuel Macron, Pype’s Le Sablier Millénaire (Millenium Hourglass) proposes a much longer potential history.

November 30, 2024December 1, 2024

Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian

At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan presented a work of art that captured public attention and has kept it, now five years later, past any expiration date. It was deceptively simple—a banana duct-taped to a wall and titled Comedian—but it was a provocation that became the subject of discussions about the value of art.

September 22, 2024September 22, 2024

Today and One Million Years

On Kawara, JAN. 4, 1966, 1966, acrylic on canvas, via David Zwirner — On Kawara, JAN. 4, 1966; image via David Zwirner

On January 4, 1966, the conceptual artist On Kawara made a painting recording that day’s date. The work, Jan. 4, 1966, with white letters and numbers on a solid blue background, was begun and finished that day, signed on the reverse, and placed in a handmade box with a clipping from the New York Times.

February 19, 2024December 4, 2024

City

In a remote valley of central eastern Nevada, a complex of shaped landmasses and monolithic structures is thought to be the largest sculpture in the world. Composed of rocks, compacted dirt, and concrete, a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, Michael Heizer’s City is a vast work of Land Art.

April 28, 2019December 1, 2024

Orbital Reflector

Trevor Paglen, Nine Reconnaissance Satellites over the Sonora Pass, 2008, C-Print, 48 x 60 inches; courtesy of Trevor Paglen, Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; © Trevor Paglen

At 10:34 a.m. on December 3, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Two hours later, 350 miles above Earth’s surface, it released 64 satellites into orbit for the largest satellite launch in US history. One of those, Orbital Reflector, will be the first “purely artistic” object in space.

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July 7, 2018June 10, 2023

The London Mastaba

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake), 2016-2018, photo by Wolfgang Volz

In London’s Hyde Park, a monumental form floating on the Serpentine Lake is a feat of engineering and a spectacle many years in the making. Titled The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake), it is a temporary installation by the conceptual and environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

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April 12, 2018December 1, 2024

The Vertical Earth Kilometer

The Friedrichsplatz and Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, photo by Carroy via Wikimedia Commons

Every five years in Kassel, Germany, documenta is a contemporary art exhibition lasting 100 days. Each edition presents hundreds of works in and around the city, typically conceptual and frequently site-specific. Of the thousands of works shown since the first documenta in 1955, sixteen have become permanent installations in Kassel.

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February 19, 2018June 10, 2023

I stormens öga

At Artipelag, a museum overlooking a bay in the Stockholm archipelago, an exhibition by Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström considers the intersection of culture and climate change. I stormens öga (In the storm’s eye) comprises works from 1990 to 2017 focusing on weather, climate, and human activity.

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February 19, 2017December 4, 2024

Biennale de La Biche

The art world’s newest biennale is also the smallest. On an uninhabited Caribbean island, works by 14 artists comprise In a Land of, the inaugural edition of the Biennale de La Biche.

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