Visual arts
josh.spero
Every year the art lovers of the world assemble in London and burn themselves out during Frieze Week - the fairs, the galleries, the parties - and (if they're anything like me) they vow to take it a bit easier next year. It never happens. The entire art ecology of London takes its cue from the Frieze Art Fair: if you're going to launch something, you may as well do it now, when all the major collectors are in town. And so art lovers and art-lover-hangers-on once again spin around town like dervishes on speed. I don't think we'd have it any other way.Frieze itself opens today, but the VIP/ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Modern’s lofty Turbine Hall is dominated by a giant CinemaScope screen flipped on its side so it becomes 42ft high and resembles a lift shaft or cathedral window. Instead of angels, saints or sinners, though, the starring role in Tacita Dean’s FILM is given to the building’s east window – the one hidden behind the huge screen. One of the main subjects of the film, then, is the very spot where you are standing – where much of the film was shot.On film, the familiar glass and steel structure plays host to images culled from the outside world such as fountains, waterfalls, lakes, the sea, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A single snare drum greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; there’s no one playing it, yet in response to an inaudible cue, the drumsticks begin to vibrate autonomously. Meanwhile on a nearby wall, a pair of blue rubber gloves revolves slowly as if searching for something; every now and then they take on the shape of human hands, as though embodying the gestures of the absent drummer.The various parts of Anri Sala’s installation are in continual dialogue with each other, and the uniting factor is sound. The ghostly drumsticks are activated by low frequency vibrations emanating from the Read more ...
mark.hudson
You might think that a sharp-talking, cross-dressing potter-artist with a teddy bear obsession would present a challenge to the British public. Not a bit of it. Grayson Perry is music hall, he’s pantomime – there’s even a touch of Brideshead in the teddy bear thing. One of Britain’s most intelligent and articulate artists, Perry was barely in the public eye before he was hived off into that comfort zone the British reserve for the loveable eccentric. And his articulacy is itself a problem: the fact that most of what he says makes perfect sense means he can’t hide behind waffling Read more ...
fisun.guner
In recent years it seems we have seen an awful lot of Gerhard Richter. There have been three major exhibitions in London well within the last seven or eight years. One is hardly complaining, since there is always a demand to see “the world’s most influential living painter”, as he is often claimed to be (and not without some reason). But in each case these have, and with varied success, focused on one particular, narrow aspect of Richter’s output: portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, colour charts at the Serpentine, intimate “scrapbook” photos, many obscured with paint, at the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ex-voto paintings are a tradition in Mexico, an offering of gratitude to God and the saints for answered prayers, row after row of them lining the walls of Mexican churches, testifying to the congregations’ devotion, and to the enduring link between man and the spiritual. In artistic terms, however, these paintings, which have been created from the 16th century onwards, are one of the great national archives of folk art, extraordinary depictions of ordinary people: a moving, comic, tragic, epic narrative that is not to be missed.Ex-votos, or retablos, began to be painted in the 16th century, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 1997 the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist produced one of the most delightful videos ever made, and it won her the Biennale. Ever is Over All shows a young woman skipping down a city street gaily smashing car windows with a red-hot poker; and since it is shaped like a knobkerry, the flower makes a surprisingly convincing weapon. Oh dear, though, here comes a policewoman; but instead of admonishing or arresting the vandal, the bobby gives her an encouraging smile, salutes and walks on by. On the adjoining screen meanwhile, close-ups of the orange bloom reveal that, although its overall Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dogs, horses, cows, sheep, goats and pigs are the creatures that, however minuscule in stature, take pride of place in the fascinating exhibition of Thomas Gainsborough’s imaginary landscapes at the Holburne in Bath, an ideal complement to the nine major Gainsborough portraits in their British picture gallery.Surprisingly for one of the most prominent portrait-painters in all of British art, Gainsborough's animals, lovingly portrayed, their body language based on acute observation, dominate their human counterparts in these landscapes, who are more or less rural stereotypes.The half-dozen Read more ...