Tate Britain
Frank Bowling, Tate Britain review - a marvelWednesday, 05 June 2019
In a photograph taken in 1962, Frank Bowling leans against a fireplace in his studio. His right hand rests on the mantlepiece which bears books, fixative and spirit bottles, his left rests out of sight on the small of his back. His attire is... Read more... |
Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain review - tenuous but still persuasiveWednesday, 27 March 2019
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a... Read more... |
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain review – exhilarating reminder of industrial mightThursday, 21 March 2019
Mike Nelson has turned the Duveen Galleries into a museum commemorating Britain’s industrial past (pictured below right). Scruffy workbenches, dilapidated metal cabinets and stacks of old drawers are pressed into service as plinths for the display... Read more... |
Don McCullin, Tate Britain review - beastliness made beautifulMonday, 11 February 2019
I interviewed Don McCullin in 1983 and the encounter felt like peering into a deep well of darkness. The previous year he’d been in Beirut photographing the atrocities carried out by people on both sides of the civil war and his impeccably composed... Read more... |
Edward Burne-Jones, Tate Britain review - time for a rethink?Monday, 12 November 2018
When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up... Read more... |
Turner Prize 2018, Tate Britain review - a shortlist dominated by political issuesTuesday, 25 September 2018
I’ve just spent four hours in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain. The shortlisted artists all show films or videos, which means that you either stay for the duration or make the decision to walk away, which feels disrespectful. For unlike... Read more... |
Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One, Tate Britain review - all in the mindTuesday, 05 June 2018
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship... Read more... |
All Too Human, Tate Britain review - life in the rawSaturday, 03 March 2018
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray... Read more... |
Imagine... Rachel Whiteread: Ghosts in the Room, BBC Two review - making memories solidSunday, 03 December 2017
Eureka! A programme about a woman artist that doesn’t define her as a wife and mother first and an artist second. In fact, Rachel Whiteread’s husband and two sons were mentioned only briefly in this excellent documentary that followed her career... Read more... |
Impressionists in London, Tate Britain review - from the stodgy to the sublimeTuesday, 07 November 2017
Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Perhaps not household-name Impressionists, but the subtitle of Tate Britain's exhibition, French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, makes... Read more... |
Rachel Whiteread, Tate Britain review – exceptional beautyWednesday, 13 September 2017
The gallery walls of Tate Britain have been taken down so turning a warren of interlinking rooms into a large, uncluttered space in which Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are arranged as a single installation. What a challenge! And curators Ann... Read more... |
Queer British Art 1861-1967, Tate BritainThursday, 20 April 2017
"Good for the history of music, but not for music," one of Prokofiev's professors at the St Petersburg Conservatoire used to say of artistically dubious works which created a splash, according to the composer's diaries. I'm not even sure that this... Read more... |
