Visual arts
mark.hudson
The latest exhibition from Beirut-born, sometime Turner Prize-nominee Mona Hatoum – best known for sending a camera through her inner tubes and projecting the results – explores themes of displacement and geographical and political tension. I know this because since I signed up to review it a fortnight ago, invites and reminders concerning this exhibition "exploring themes of displacement and geographical and political tension" have been hitting my mailbox with hectoring insistence.It isn’t that White Cube are particularly aggressive in their marketing (they’re reticent by the standards of Read more ...
judith.flanders
The National Gallery has done it again: a small but perfectly formed exhibition in their little Room 1, now a by-word for intelligent show-making. Something new, something revelatory, something profoundly beautiful – what more can the gallery-goer ask? The Ashcan School is not widely known outside the USA, and I can think of no better introduction than this dozen-canvas-strong showing of some of the highlights (and, it must be admitted, a couple of low-lights as well).The highlights include The Art Student (Miss Josephine Nivison) (pictured right, courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum, MACI Purchase Read more ...
hilary.whitney
When musician Edwyn Collins, who had a massive hit both sides of the Atlantic with "A Girl Like You", and was also the front-man of Eighties band Orange Juice, suffered a double brain haemorrhage in 2005, he was initially unable to speak, read or write. So the extent of his recovery – he is now performing and writing music again - without wishing to resort to triumph-over-tragedy mawkishness, seems nothing short of miraculous. Of course, there were no miracles, just six long years of arduous, on-going rehabilitation – not to mention unswerving support from his wife and manager, Grace Maxwell Read more ...
alice.vincent
Taxidermy – the rather morbid art of stuffing and mounting dead animals – has witnessed a rise in popularity not seen since its Victorian heyday in the last few years. Vintage dead artefacts are being given an afterlife in trendy lounge bars all over east London, while taxidermist Polly Morgan has enjoyed further fame after her first major exhibition last summer. However, few have attempted to bring the scalpel to the stage as well as Charlie Tuesday Gates.Gates, a Camberwell graduate, branched into her own D.I.Y taxidermy thanks to a countryside upbringing and easy access to found ( Read more ...
judith.flanders
If you’ve seen pictures of the Ballets Russes, then you’ve seen Hoppé photographs. But then, if you’ve seen any society pictures from the 1920s and 1930s, then you’ve seen Hoppé. And famous writers. In fact, for portrait photography in Britain between the World Wars, you can pretty well bet the photo is Hoppé’s. But what's so good about this new exhibition is that it shows a side to Hoppé that is much less well-known - the street-view. And these photographs are thrilling, in form as well as content.E.O. (for Emil Otto) Hoppé moved to Britain from his native Germany in 1902, aged 22, and Read more ...
judith.flanders
Jan, or Janin? Gossart, or Gossaert? Or Mabuse? After a mere five centuries, we haven’t settled on a name quite yet (even for this exhibition: at the Metropolitan Museum, the same show spelt it “Gossart”). We don’t know where he was born, although Maubeuge, then in Hainault, now in France, is the best guess, hence “Mabuse”. His birth date too is a mystery: the Grove Dictionary of Art suggests 1478, while the National Gallery just shrugs and gives us “active 1503”. What is in no doubt, however, in this very model of an exhibition, is that Jan Gossaert represented not merely one of the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Louise Bourgeois died last year at nearly 100, a revered figure: survivor of the Surrealist movement into the 21st century, a pioneer of autobiographical expression, whose fame came only late in life. Tracey Emin, by contrast, found fame early, coming to the attention of the general public in Charles Saatchi’s Sensation show at the Royal Academy while she was still in her thirties. Both, however, work a single-mindedly autobiographical vein – indeed, open their veins figuratively to pour their lives into their art. The idea of a collaborative work, therefore, seems natural.Bourgeois created Read more ...
hilary.whitney
A burgeoning North London art scene, which includes the Zabludowicz Collection in Chalk Farm and one of the London outposts of the Gagosian Gallery, suggests that the art world has the North firmly in its sights and tomorrow sees the opening of its latest addition, Cob Studios & Gallery, based in the heart of Camden Town. Cob is jointly run by playwright Polly Stenham and Victoria Williams and aims to be a truly collaborative venue exhibiting work by emerging and established artists and comprising a large ground-floor gallery, a communal first-floor studio with enough space for four Read more ...
fisun.guner
Does watercolour painting suffer from an image problem? Do you think of the wild, vaporous seascapes of Turner, or Victorian ladies at their sketchbooks dabbing daintily at wishy-washy flower paintings? Do you associate the medium with radical innovation or with staid tradition? And would Jackson Pollock have appeared quite so heroic flinging thin washes of watercolour around instead of viscous oils?The curators at Tate Britain certainly think there’s a problem with perception, so they want us to lay down whatever preconceptions we might have of watercolour simply being the medium of choice Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
February is guitar month in New York City. Synchronicity rules at those two giants, the MoMA and the Met. At MoMA, Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 shows his austere guitar paintings, collages and drawings - often using newspaper, wallpaper and sand - as well as constructions of guitars made of cardboard and one of sheet metal and wire. “What is it? Painting or sculpture?” asked snooty visitors to his Paris studio. “It’s nothing, it’s el guitare,” Picasso, who didn’t play an instrument, is said to have replied.(Pictured right: Still life with Guitar, 1913. Paperboard, paper, string and painted wire Read more ...
theartsdesk
From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great Read more ...
fisun.guner
After writing about a recent survey of French artist Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I found myself wondering about his collaboration with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. In 2006 the two artists made the acclaimed film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and while Parreno’s skills as a film-maker were pretty evident from that first UK solo exhibition, Gordon’s talents must surely lie elsewhere - that is, outside the frame. Neither technically ambitious nor visually seductive, his films are not even meant to be seen in their entirety, certainly not his 1993 24-hour Read more ...