Visual arts
Sarah Kent
A town in desperate need of regeneration commissions David Chipperfield, the architect of the moment, to build an art gallery in the hope of attracting visitors with deep pockets. In case you are suffering an attack of déja vu, this is not an action replay of the opening of Turner Contemporary in Margate a month ago, but Wakefield’s turn to use the same tactics. The two scenarios appear similar yet the distinctions are significant enough to make the difference between failure (in the case of Margate’s half-baked efforts) and success, which is guaranteed by the intelligent planning of Read more ...
judith.flanders
Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at full strength less than 20 years ago could have a past that is so strongly entwined with these legendary names – hard to imagine, that is, until one looks at the work displayed in this fine retrospective, which even so manages to encompass only five decades of a nearly seven-decade-long career.A Swiss artist (he was one of the few, or perhaps Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit. “Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,” recalled George Borrow, author of the prolix Victorian classic Wild Wales, “none made a greater impression upon me.” He was not alone. Arenig Fawr, a southern outcrop of Snowdonia, was also the entry point for British art into Post-Impressionism. This at any rate was the claim of a scenic documentary which joined Augustus John and his young protégé James Dickson Innes on their productive two-year sojourn at the foot of the mountain.It’s a mountain in the Welsh sense of the word mynydd, being at 854 m/2 Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Tracey Emin is one of the defining personalities of our time isn’t in doubt. Even if you never want to hear another second of her guileless wittering, another word about her abortions, traumatic early rape and relentless onanistic neediness, you can't deny that her self-effected transformation from chippy Margate outsider to big-league art-world player represents something extraordinary. As to her work, it's been difficult to be certain of her value - or to entirely write her off - as there's never been the chance to see a big enough body of her work at one time. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“As a student at Glasgow School of Art I used to visit the amazing anatomy, zoology and ethnographic collections at Glasgow University,” says Christine Borland. “I couldn’t understand why I was so intrigued, except for the question of how something so awful – so dead – could also be so beautiful. I was trying to unpick my responses, to understand how beauty and death could co-exist.”Ever since graduating in 1987, she has been unpicking her responses to medical specimens and old bones in installations that attempt to confer dignity on the dead. When she acquired a human skeleton from the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As well as a new album, Destroyed, Moby is putting out a book of photographic prints under the same title. The idea of the book is to capture the essence of being on a global tour, from the mundanity of waiting in airports to the majesty of landscapes and cities, from the explosive excitement of stadium-sized crowds to the solitude of hotel rooms at night. The images will also be on display in the Proud Gallery in Camden Town, north London. theartsdesk showcases a selection below.
Read theartsdesk's Q&A with Moby
Moby, Destroyed at the Proud Camden, London NW1 from 18 May to 19 June Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is now 37 days since Ai Weiwei was detained at Beijing international airport by the Chinese authorities. His family and friends have heard nothing since. His lawyer, to whom under Chinese law he must have access, was arrested as well, and since his own release he too has heard nothing. Officially, unless charges are brought today, the period in which he can be held without charge expires. And yet, where is Ai Weiwei? The whereabouts of Ai Weiwei the man are unknown. In London, however, Ai Weiwei the artist makes two stellar appearances.“Liberty,” writes Ai Weiwei, “is about our right Read more ...
fisun.guner
How easy is it to stage a dialogue between two artists when they are, in fact, separated by over a century? And is it really an artistic conversation that takes place or merely an imposition of values by the living over the dead? This pertinent question confronts the viewer in an exhibition of two photographers of war-torn Afghanistan. The first, John Burke, took sepia-toned documentary photographs of the second Anglo-Afghan war, from 1878 to 1880 (the first having taken place in 1839-1842), while the second, Simon Norfolk, takes artfully constructed contemporary photographs that blur the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Mostly the Venice Biennale passes me by entirely: ho-hum, another tired bit of Brit Art, I think, and turn the page. But Mike Nelson, twice nominated for the Turner Prize, is a terrific artist, too little seen, too odd, too unsettling to have been shown much in the mainstream. His selection is a boost – for him, I very much hope, but even more for the profile of British art. No more cringing when old-hat, old-school Emin or Hirst get wheeled out again, same old, same old.Certainly, same old is not something that can be said about Nelson. An installation artist, he creates what almost Read more ...
judith.flanders
In this month of royal weddings, endless bank holidays and (possibly?) equally endless good weather, it can be hard to focus, so perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to catch up with a show that nearly got away. Instead of winsome blockbusters like Tate Modern’s Miró, or the V&A’s The Cult of Beauty, Ivor Abrahams' print show is tart as well as sweet, small but perfectly formed, the ideal restorative after too much sugar, whether in wedding cakes or art galleries.Ivor Abrahams is perhaps better known as a sculptor, studying under Anthony Caro in the 1950s, and first exhibiting, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Freud’s West Hampstead house is tied up in a cat’s cradle of thick rope. The rope is the same colour as the brick, a deep orange but with a sheeny lustre. It makes the house look not quite real, a Brobdingnagian doll’s house transplanted to this unsuspecting corner of leafy west-London suburbia. It’s an uncanny impression heightened by the pristine condition of its squat, many-windowed façade.Housebound is the name of this punningly titled "intervention" by Alice Anderson, a 35-year-old French-English artist who now lives in London; and the proffered themes of constraint, imprisonment and Read more ...
judith.flanders
Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a merger of the two, and for the last few years these shockingly vivid “paintings” (I use the scare quotes intentionally) on Plexiglass.In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Bustamante (b 1952) made his name with a long-running photographic cycle of C-prints, including the overarching Tableaux (Pictures). These were images taken on the margins, generally Read more ...