Sally Grant
Art Historian. Curator. Writer.
Published Work
A sample.
Food for thought: A slew of new eateries in New York galleries shows how palatable art is.
Australian Gourmet Traveller, October 2016
An artful dining space in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new modern and contemporary art building is the latest in a series of creative gallery-restaurant collaborations in New York. Due to open in the northern autumn, the as-yet unnamed project is being overseen by chef Ignacio Mattos and beverage director Thomas Carter, the team behind the hit downtown restaurant Estela. Their latest eatery is taking shape at The Met Breuer, the landmark Upper East Side building formerly home to the Whitney Museum of American Art and now named in honour of its Bauhaus-trained architect, Marcel Breuer. ...
Esther Bubley, Greyhound Terminal, NYC, 1947,gelatin silver print, 9 x 13". From the series “Bus Story,” 1947.
NEW YORK
“1947, Simone de Beauvoir in America”
SOUS LES ETOILES GALLERY
100 Crosby Street #603
December 13, 2018–March 2, 2019
Art exhibition review for Artforum, January 2019
The opening line of America Day by Day (1948), Simone de Beauvoir’s diary of her US travels in 1947, conveys the French writer’s intense sense of anticipation at the beginning of her first visit to the New World: “Something is about to happen.” When Corinne Tapia, owner and director of Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, encountered the journal a number of years ago, she was struck by its visual quality, an aspect that she wanted to explore further. Now, over a decade later, Tapia has curated a homage to the book. The exhibition features more than sixty black-and-white photographs—most of which date to the year of de Beauvoir’s tour—by an array of photographers. …
Alexander McQueen.
McQueen
Film review for Australian Book Review Arts, September 2018
In old interview footage included in the documentary McQueen, the late British designer Lee Alexander McQueen states, ‘If you want to know me, just look at my work.’ Relatively few had the privilege of seeing his extraordinary designs on the runway firsthand. Many more got to witness the results of his impeccable craftsmanship and raw, romantic vision at Savage Beauty, the landmark exhibition presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2015. With this new documentary, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui provide another, more far-reaching opportunity to view McQueen’s work, but also to learn that bit more about Lee McQueen, the man whose imaginative genius revolutionised the fashion industry. …
On Country: Australian Aboriginal art from the Kaplan–Levi Gift (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Art exhibition review for Australian Book Review Arts, October 2017
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is known for its large-scale, ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. These are usually impressive, often enlightening. But sometimes it can be even more rewarding (and less exhausting) to visit a show on a much smaller scale. Such is the case at the moment at The Met, where six paintings by modern and contemporary Indigenous Australian artists are displayed in On Country: Australian Aboriginal art from the Kaplan–Levi Gift. Installed in a room with four large windows overlooking Central Park – a deliberate choice by the curator, Maia Nuku – these magnificent works reference a very different landscape from the one visible through the glass. Yet the exhibition’s location skilfully acknowledges the cultural meaning of place that its paintings vitally express. ...
"Torre David #2" by Iwan Baan, 2011. Chromogenic print, 48 x 72 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles. © 2018 Iwan Baan.
ART REVIEW: Transformative Eye of the Camera Turned on Architecture at Parrish
Hamptons Art Hub, April 2018
The Parrish Art Museum’s latest exhibition, “Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture,” is an outstanding exploration of how the camera’s lens modifies the visual experience of built space. Including more than 50 works by 21 artists, the engaging exhibition is divided into three loosely thematic areas: Domestic Spaces, Cityscapes, and Public Places. ...
CY TWOMBLY, "Untitled (In Beauty it is finished)," 1983 - 2002 (detail). Acrylic, wax crayon, pencil and pen on handmade paper in unbound handmade book, 36 pages. Each page: 22 3/8 × 15 3/4 inches (56.8 × 40 cm). Collection Cy Twombly Foundation. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian.
ART REVIEW: A Cy Twombly Odyssey of Pictorial Exploration at Gagosian
Hamptons Art Hub, March 2018
“In Beauty it is finished: Drawings 1951-2008,” the Cy Twombly exhibition currently on view at Gagosian on West 21st Street, is an appropriately expansive tribute to one of the great, and most abstruse, artists of post-war American abstraction.
A career-spanning installation, the show is presented in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the birth of Cy Twombly (1928-2011), and of the completion of the eight-volume Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings. To this end, the vastness of Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery is a fitting space in which to encounter the work of an artist deeply influenced by the storytelling richness of ancient epic and myth, and to be swept along on Twombly’s own odyssey of pictorial exploration. ...
"White Mountain" by Wayne Thiebaud, 1995. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Allan Stone Projects.
ART REVIEW: The Pleasurable Melancholy of Wayne Thiebaud’s Landscapes
Hamptons Art Hub, November 2017
[One of the 15 most popular stories of 2017 on Hamptons Art Hub]
To describe the landscapes of an acclaimed American artist known for his images of cakes and candy in terms of the language of food might seem clichéd. But on viewing the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) in “Land Survey” at Allan Stone Projects in Chelsea, the word delicious cannot help but come to mind. ...
Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
15 November 2017, New York
Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Morning Session
16 November 2017, New York
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Málaga [Málaga (Spanish Elegy Series), 1949-50.
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Still Life with Fruit and Coffeepot, 1940.
Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920), Cherries, 1982
"Assault On the Solar Plexus" by Lee Krasner, 1961. Oil on cotton duck, 81 x 58 inches. © 2017 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery.
ART REVIEW: Krasner, Hockney and Sodi Works Brim with Vitality and Renewal
Hamptons Art Hub, December 2017
A visit to the three spaces of the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea in New York City offers an enlivening education in the power of three of the backbones of traditional art-making: painting, drawing, and sculpture.
The Hamptons’ own Lee Krasner demonstrates the expressive possibilities of the first medium in “The Umber Paintings, 1959 – 1962,” while “David Hockney: Works on Paper, 1961 – 2009” provides a close-up view of the world of the beloved British painter, who is currently the subject of a major exhibition at The Met. In the plastic arts, the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi reveals the transfixing, restorative power of minimalist sculpture as seen through the lens of nature. ...
British Painter Jenny Saville Responds to the Old (Male) Masters
Ms. Magazine Blog, December 2015
Two parallel exhibitions are currently on view at the University of Oxford’s venerable Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice brings together masterpieces from the 16th to 18th century by some of the greatest early-modern Venetian artists, such as Titian, Tiepolo and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. Running alongside this is a smaller collection of drawings by the contemporary British painter Jenny Saville (b. 1970), which respond to these earlier works. ...