Visual arts
fisun.guner
There have been exhibitions, indeed even a whole museum, dedicated to cleanliness: the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, for instance (image 9), which was founded for the purpose of public education in hygiene and health, but which later embraced and diffused racist theories during the Nazi era. Yet there haven’t been many – or any, as far as I’m aware – devoted entirely to dirt. It’s all around us, yet historically we seem to have considered the subject unworthy of serious cultural examination. And the reasons for avoidance are just as interesting as the filthy matter currently under the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I can still remember the excitement of pounding the pavements of SoHo in the early 1970s. Nowadays, this part of downtown Manhattan is awash with expensive restaurants, boutiques and smart galleries, but then it was a scruffy industrial area of warehouses and sweatshops. The factories were closing and the container trucks leaving, though, and artists were gradually infiltrating and turning the huge empty spaces into studios where they often lived illicitly.Sleeping on a platform in the workshop of an industrial designer on Broome Street, I felt the thrill of being in the right place at the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The sea: the depths from which all life emerged, and a force of destruction. Anselm Kiefer contemplates its sublime beauty and terror in a new exhibition of 24 panoramic photographs, ranged three-deep on two facing walls. Each grey and grainy seascape has been smeared and splattered with white paint and transformed by “electrolysis”, a process which isn’t further explained in the press release but which sounds suitably and impressively dramatic.Characteristically, Kiefer takes as his starting point a work of literature, references to which have been elegantly scribed in a looping hand on Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“What’s the story?” It’s a question you’ll hear again and again in the streets and pubs of Dublin. You can tell a lot about a nation from their greeting; the traditional salutation of northern China, born of decades of famine and physical hardship, translates to “Have you eaten?”, and a psychologist could extrapolate much from our English fondness for impersonal, weather-related pleasantries. So it’s surely no coincidence then that Ireland, and Dublin in particular, should favour this conversational opener. A city home to some 50 publishing houses, that has produced four Nobel Laureates, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
"I’m very hard to categorise,” says John Byrne (b 1940), tugging at his magnificent moustache. A restless, defiant, shape-shifting polymath who was an exponent of multimedia long before computers ruled the world, Byrne's singular career is perhaps doomed to gentle underappreciation simply because he can do so much so well. “If you’re hard to categorise they don’t like that." He peers into his coffee as though looking for something. "Whoever 'they' are.”Raised in the “Dickensian” gloom of Paisley’s Ferguslie Park estate in a family shaped by his mother’s severe mental illness, Byrne graduated Read more ...
josh.spero
I will confess, the emotion which engulfed me when watching three films from Nathaniel Mellors’s Ourhouse series was not (initially) admiration but aggravation. The temporary plyboard cinemas of the ICA show episodes one, two and four of this pseudo-drama about the bohemian Maddox-Wilson family in their country house, whose communications start to go terribly wrong after a betracksuited man called The Object turns up, and with every passing minute I grew more frustrated even as I laughed.The Object causes some sort of linguistic break when he arrives, gleaming in a white tracksuit like Read more ...
judith.flanders
What ever happened to Ida Kar? If the question is not quite on the level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, perhaps the answer is more interesting, if less melodramatic. Ida Kar - born Ida Karamian in Russia of Armenian parents, resident of Cairo, Alexandria, Paris and Soho, the first photographer to be given a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in its heyday under that curator of genius Bryan Robertson – is now, all too often, known as “Ida Who?” even by those who should know better. So, What Did Happen to Ida Kar?The answer, sadly, is one that all too frequently occurs: not herself Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A maypole greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; don’t expect a cheery celebration of spring, though. Nancy Spero’s installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008) is a scream of rage against violence and its hapless victims. Dangling from coloured ribbons, dozens of decapitated heads hang in the air like an explosion of shrapnel. Mouths gape open in pain and terror - or is it hatred? One can’t be sure, since some seem to be spitting venom from bloody tongues as though, even in their death throws, they are intent on spreading a gospel of vengeance and destruction.The strength of the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As a young man searching for a way to make a living in Paris, Antoine Watteau briefly tried his hand at engraving fashion plates. He seems to have had a natural affinity for cloth and drew its folds and creases with such apparent ease that you can almost feel the slipperiness of satin and hear the rustle of taffeta as it moves with the body. This was just as well, since he didn’t attend the Academy where students did life drawing and learned anatomy. For most people such lack of training would have been a serious setback, but by copying the work of artists like Rubens and Veronese, Watteau Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’m in an exhibition of ancient artefacts from Afghanistan, all from the National Museum at Kabul, but I may well have stumbled into the wrong room at the British Museum. I could be in the BM’s Hellenic section of Greek art, or, taking a few steps to my left, the Egyptian rooms. But then again… here are some sensual sculptures of curvaceous semi-clad women from India (main picture), while a little further on there’s a Chinese hand mirror and some boot buckles, the latter with Chinese dragons whose wings are of turquoise.Afghanistan, a country whose recent war-torn history is part of our Read more ...
fisun.guner
An artist as inventive and as protean as Picasso, and one who ceaselessly absorbed influences throughout his life, will inevitably present an ever-changing face to the world. Hence, we have an apparently inexhaustible supply of exhibitions devoted to him. Two UK exhibitions last year were of particular note: the ambitious but skewed Peace and Freedom at Tate Liverpool, which interpreted the work solely through the single, distorting lens of Picasso’s “political activism”, and the Gagosian Gallery’s Mediterranean Years, which, in simply highlighting Picasso’s playfulness, was by far the more Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Tretyakov Gallery is currently housing a landmark exhibition to mark the 150th anniversary of Isaac Levitan. His glorious “mood landscapes” catch the understated beauty of provincial Russia, with an often gloomy philosophical perspective behind them, as he considers man’s insignificant place in time and history. But the show reveals lesser-known sides to his work too, and reminds us again that his close friendship with Chekhov was a remarkable artistic-literary alliance.How little we know in the West of Russian art. The gaps are huge between the ancient icons and early-20th-century Read more ...