Visual arts
Ismene Brown
You're going to test your stomach and sweet temper to the maximum today - test your brain and memory too with our monster quiz about the arts covered by theartsdesk in 2011. Every artform is represented here in 12 dozen questions. Settle down between courses, films and presents and see how many you and your near and dear can do.There's a linkable clue to each question where you will find an article that furnishes the answer. All the answers are on another page here - which will become live at noon today to give you a start.In film, what is “the Great Whatsit?” ClueWhich shuttered cultural Read more ...
theartsdesk
Here are the answers to our monster Christmas arts quiz of 12 dozen questions on the year past, as seen by theartsdesk writers. There are clues in all the questions in the main quiz page. If you don't want to know the answers just yet till you've grappled with them, close this page now.A suitcase bomb in Kiss Me DeadlyThe Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, which reopened its main theatre in October, having lost its ballet director Gennady Yanin to scandal and its stars Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev to the Mikhailovsky Ballet"Everyday"29205Noel GallagherPhyllida Lloyd1980 Read more ...
theartsdesk
Any day now most of us will be hunkering down and for the most part drawing a curtain about the world outside. Before that happens, we’d like to tell you about theartsdesk’s plans for Christmas and the New Year.As well as posting our usual range of reviews (coming up in the next couple of days, some terrific writing on theatre, film and television), we also have a selection of seasonal treats. On Christmas Day we are publishing a bumper arts quiz specifically tailored for readers of theartsdesk, who know their cultural onions. (Sample questions: "In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy what type of mint Read more ...
fisun.guner
Graham Sutherland and George Shaw have two things in common. They are both painters and both are associated with Coventry: Sutherland made his famous altarpiece work – a tapestry – for the city’s rebuilt cathedral, while Shaw grew up in Coventry’s Tile Hill, a housing estate that’s become familiar to us through Shaw’s beautiful and melancholy Humbrol enamel oil paintings.But other than these tenuous connections, you may find little common ground between the pair. Sutherland’s imagery reaches back to the 19th-century Romantic tradition through painters such as Samuel Palmer, whilst his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which includes two Berliners – Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud – who came to England as children. David Hockney is the witty, adventurous northerner who has now returned, mostly, to Yorkshire from a life lived between London and Los Angeles. Patrick Caulfield is primarily concerned with vibrant still lifes and domestic interiors, Euan Uglow and William Read more ...
fisun.guner
Brace yourselves for pure Damien Hirst madness next year. As well as Tate Modern’s retrospective survey opening in April, there will be a “worldwide” retrospective of Hirst’s spot paintings opening next month.The Gagosian Gallery will be hosting the global exhibition of Hirst’s jaunty but dull spot paintings across all of its 11 galleries, from Hong Kong to Paris, and from New York to London, as well as in Los Angeles, Athens, Rome and Geneva.The simultaneous display will total more than 300 of the mostly studio assistant-painted works, from the first spot-on-board created in 1986, to a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night sky for enemy aircraft during World War Two.As you walk around them, the threads visually overlap to produce shimmering moiré patterns. The structure is extremely simple, but rather than diminishing its impact, figuring out how it is done only enhances its mesmeric effect. The installation is titled Web and weaving threads of light through Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken. It left Kiefer and his fellow New Imagers overshadowed and, in a paradox that is absolutely typical of the art Read more ...
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fisun.guner
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in favour of Edinburgh’s better attractions. Built in 1889 by Robert Rowand Anderson as the world’s first dedicated portrait gallery – paid for by the proprietor of The Scotsman, John Ritchie Findlay, and inspired in part by the Doge’s Palace in Venice – the SNPG had, in fact, shared over half the building with the Scottish Society of Antiquaries.The Read more ...