Movies: Modern art

A hitman, his boss, an art dealer and a money-laundering scheme that accidentally turns the assassin into an overnight avant-garde sensation, one that forces her to play the art world against the underworld....

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resis...

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filme...

Sometimes reduced to the image of a cursed artist, Amedeo Modigliani, an admirer of the masters of the Italian Renaissance, has traced an unparalleled path in modern art....

In 1919 an art school opened in Germany that would change the world forever. It was called the Bauhaus. A century later, its radical thinking still shapes our lives today. Bauhaus 100 is the story of Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauh...

Manet is one of the main candidates for the title of the most important artist there has been. As the reluctant father of Impressionism, and the painter of Dejeuner sur l'herbe, he can probably be accused of inventing modern art. But his story is fas...

In a near-future where grief can be outsourced, a bereaved artist considers a new outpatient procedure: an AI implant that can copy her mind, replace her with a digital copy, and spare her loved ones the pain of loss. But one unsettling discovery for...

CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the s...

Loïe Fuller, stage name of Marie Louise Fuller: the American actress and dancer trained in burlesque, circuses and variety shows who, in the 1890s, signed by the Folies Bergère of Paris, became a star. She was portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec, loved by ...

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find...

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes....

A rural American town suffering economically from factory closures finds an unconventional route to recovery with the help of MASS MoCA....

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Martin Creed has said that part of living is coming to terms with horrible feelings. 'The problem with horrible feelings is you can't paint them. But horrible vomit – you can film that.' And he has. It's a difficult piece to watch but highlights Cree...

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists....

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No understanding of the modern movement in architecture is possible without knowledge of its master builder, Mies van der Rohe. Together with documentation of his life, this film shows all his major buildings, as well as rare film footage of Mies exp...

M.C. Escher is among the most intriguing of artists. In 1956 he challenged the laws of perspective with his graphic Print Gallery and his uncompleted master-piece quickly became the most puzzling enigma of modern art. Fifty years later, can mathemati...

In this hybrid political thriller and verité portrait documentary, Sara Nodjoumi, working with co-director and husband, Till Schauder, makes her directorial debut with this personal film, diving into the mystery surrounding the disappearance of more ...

A collection of BBC archive material about painter Francis Bacon, including a previously unseen interview recorded in 1965....