Spike Art Magazine is a Berlin-based quarterly magazine on contemporary art offering independent, meaningful and accessible art criticism.
Originally founded in Vienna by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike features essays and analysis by leading critics, curators and thinkers on artists making work relevant to and in many cases impacting on current developments or issues from the aesthetic to the technical. Situated between art theory and practice, it's a magazine not afraid of controversy and provocation.
About Issue 88: 'Spirituality', from the publisher:
For our Summer 2026 issue, amid the latest revival of SPIRITUALITY in culture, Spike asked: what are people reaching for beyond what can be measured? The answers are eclectic, emphatic, and most of all personal: Johanna Hedva’s essay about the human voice’s part in the divine; portraits of mystic artists Lee “Scratch” Perry, Natasha Tontey, and Santiago Yahuarcani by Isis Semaj-Hall, Riar Rizaldi, and Miguel A. López; Jamieson Webster’s psychoanalytic look at Renaissance painting’s body of Christ; a spiritual history of perfumes by Élisabeth de Feydeau; Patrick McGraw’s soulful reading of America’s (perhaps) greatest living author, Joy Williams; queries of Gen Z’s search for God by Lamorna Ash, the disappearance of atheism by Steven Phillips-Horst, and a new form of contemplation by Aodhan Madden; and LIFEMAXXING recommendations to purge the soul, sometimes devilishly. Plus, some backpage words of wisdom from Tea Hačić-Vlahović: “Devotion and humiliation are holy.”