Visual arts
Sarah Kent
It took a long time for architects to embrace popular culture. I attended a talk at the Architectural Association in the mid 1970s, when someone (probably the architect Robert Venturi) waxed lyrical about shiny American diners and hot-dog stands shaped like Frankfurters and extolled the virtues of the madcap fantasies built in Las Vegas."Dazed by desert sun and dazzled by signs, between loving and hating what we saw, we were both jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins," wrote Venturi’s partner Denise Scott-Brown of their American road trip. A nervous buzz of excitement swept the room; Read more ...
judith.flanders
John Martin is heaven. Well, as many of his contemporaries would have pointed out, John Martin is also hell, or The Last Judgement, or, as the Tate’s show title would have it, the Apocalypse at the very least. For John Martin was, after Turner, the 19th century’s premier painter of catastrophe. Unlike Turner, however, he was not much rated by the more respected critics, and his work, frequently oversized, tends to spend more time in storage than on the walls of public galleries. So all praise to the Tate, with good Martin holdings, for finally getting Martin back into public view with this Read more ...
fisun.guner
A beguiling shadow play greets and enchants on arrival: the silhouettes of three ballerinas, each performing an arabesque, are cast upon the wall as you enter. The effect, as their softly delineated forms dip and slowly rotate, is mesmerising. It’s also an apt opener to an exhibition devoted to exploring how Degas strove to achieve a sense of fluidity and movement in his paintings of dancers, a subject for which he is chiefly known.And yet these delightful silhouettes suggest the contradiction at the heart of Degas’s paintings: his charming images are, in fact, exposés. We witness the endless Read more ...
judith.flanders
A retrospective of an artist’s work is not usually a history of a working relationship, but in the case of Christo, this impressive exhibition of works from the past 40 years also marks two crucial partnerships: with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who was his equal and co-creator from 1961, and with the Annely Juda gallery, which has mounted 12 exhibitions over four decades, as well as being intimately involved in their massive environmental “wrapped” pieces. Photographs of the end results are breathtaking, but even more gripping is watching the development of the processes over the years.The very Read more ...
mark.hudson
Hard on the heels of the death of Lucian Freud comes the departure of another British art great, an artist who was Freud’s exact contemporary but who seems to belong in a different aesthetic universe – Richard Hamilton. While he was the more influential of the two, by some distance, Hamilton was never a contender for that nonsensical soubriquet "Britain’s greatest living artist". His work was too challenging, too difficult to pin down and it never told Britain anything it wanted to hear about itself.Born into a working-class London family, Hamilton left school without qualifications, becoming Read more ...
josh.spero
There is nothing new, nor inherently artistic, about making miniature models. Otherwise everyone who's ever stuffed a small ship into a glass bottle would be in the National Gallery. (Yes, Yinka Shonibare's fourth plinth ship-in-a-bottle outside the National Gallery is different.) But the boîtes (boxes/enclosures) of Charles Matton are of a different order entirely: recreations of artists' studios, imaginings of authors' libraries, tiny real rooms and tiny fake rooms. As well as the craft and the beauty, they challenge our very idea of seeing, space, reality.These are grand claims for what Read more ...
mark.hudson
Exhibitions with titles appended "in Britain" or "and Britain" tend to be the kiss of death: indicating concentration on a brief and insignificant visit, on the subject’s impact on British art or – even worse – the influence of local collectors on his or her reputation. With Mark Rothko, though, it has to be different. The New York abstractionist’s current near-sacred status is such that a show of his dog-ends and nail clippings would probably prove a major draw.Indeed, the sheer incongruity of the grouchy high priest of Colour Field Painting being in Britain at all, never mind socialising in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the most surprising and exciting collections of contemporary stuff on view for many a while. Some is functional, from coffins to bicycles, wine caskets, guns, bespoke shoes. Some would not be out of place in a contemporary sculpture show: life-size predatory creatures include David Mach’s King Silver Gorilla made out of silver wire hangers, Shauna Richardson’s life-size crocheted brown Crochetdermy Bear (pictured below), while Ji Yonf Ho’s shark made out of tyres swims in the air above us.Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk, or theartsdesk.com, is a website created in 2009 by leading British professional arts journalists and critics to offset the decline in supply of arts coverage in the print media where most of them worked. Launched on 9 September 2009, it publishes daily updating reviews, interviews and features by its member writers that aim to combine the best of print journalism standards with the speed, accessibility and technical opportunities of the web.Its particular strengths are overnight reviews of live plays, concerts and dance, in-depth Q&As with leading arts figures, weekly Read more ...