The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography

Once elaborate maps were rare and precious—vital, often state-owned documents considered key to war and exploration. Now you can locate any address you like on Google Earth, and be continuously guided there by GPS. While maps have changed in precision and accessibility, they remain fraught with cultural and individual meaning. In her striking new book The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, freelance author Katharine Harmon brings together a wide selection of maps clearly meant to be more psychologically expressive than geographically correct.

The Warhol of Our Minds

Sotheby’s sale in November of Andy Warhol’s 1962 painting 200 One Dollar Bills, for $43.7 million, was a signal not only that the art market is roaring back but that fascination with Warhol has never gone away.

Ryan Schneider on Ambition and the Beach

Ryan Schneider's commanding paintings are not for the faint of heart.  They're full of intense colors and emaciated figures and, in one notable case, a dead shark. Simultaneously, their graphic power and bold patterns establish alternate spaces of creeping unease. Send Me Through, his current show at Priska Juschka, in Chelsea, is his most ambitious project yet.

Dexter Dalwood

In advance of a survey show at Tate St. Ives, the painter discusses the heterogeneous sources for his distinctive history painting.

Interview: Michael Borremans

In his current exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York, the Belgian artist Michaël Borremans is showing films that unfold at a radically slow pace. Their tableau-vivant images could be mistaken for stills but for a flickering light or a figure’s discreet breathing. Borremans, born in 1963, is best known for paintings that engage past masters like Manet and Goya—but the haunted characters who inhabit them display a distinctly contemporary unease, as if they were prey to an uncertain fate.

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids—taken 1970-75, when the artist was 23 to 29 years old—document his emerging identity, both artistic and sexual. The book Polaroids: Mapplethorpe, published to accompany an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, reveals a photographer determined to bring formal rigor to the medium’s intimacy.

Interview: Michael Borremans

Dexter Dalwood

The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography