Visual arts
sue.steward
To Futureproof is to ensure that we don’t become technologically obsolete, but keep in touch with as yet undeveloped technologies and exploit those already in the ether. It’s an apt title for this exhibition of work by 16 graduates from the five Scottish university photography departments. That most are already future-proofing themselves is apparent in their diverse approaches to their work.But that leaves those who choose to walk backwards in time, away from the digital world and into the dark room, from phones, camera and pens, screens and keyboards to ancient image-recording methods and Read more ...
sue.steward
International photography festivals are rivalling rock festivals this summer - and rock festivals are featuring photographers. PhotoEspaña (PHE) Madrid beats the lot. Packed with surprise revelations, with central Madrid as the main stage, the fringe all around it, and the whole city involved in the Night of Photography PhotoMaratón, it’s a highly ambitious, even labyrinthine affair.Sixty-nine exhibitions by 379 photographers from 42 countries occupied the city’s elegant state institutions and museums, international cultural centres, a former water tower, and a bank or two. The latter are Read more ...
sue.steward
“There is a tradition of photographing people with Down’s syndrome, but not of positive, strong images of people staring back at you, challenging you to look at them. This exhibition reverses that. The images we produce are not sympathetic or sentimental, but strong and covering all aspects of life, and using contemporary photography to get our message across. We’ve turned the camera 180 degrees and now the former subjects are in control.”
Xanthe Breen, Campaigns Officer for the Down’s Syndrome Association, was talking to me amongst excited exhibitors and their families at the launch of My Read more ...
fisun.guner
The former Museum of Mankind, just behind the Royal Academy, has been the temporary home of the Haunch of Venison gallery for some two years. They’re moving back to their original home next spring, and though the newly extended building (Lord Nelson’s former residence at Haunch of Venison Yard, near Old Bond Street) is big and rather grand, the former museum is even bigger and grander. With neither longevity nor reputation to rely on, it’s a tough space for any young artist to fill. Still, if you think Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos might be better served in a tighter space, her first UK Read more ...
theartsdesk
Charlotte MacMillan took these exclusive pictures last week of the Bolshoi corps de ballet in class. The pictures brought back memories of his training to English National Ballet's Kirov-trained principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev, as he prepares to perform Michael Corder's Cinderella at the Coliseum next month. A regular coach for younger dancers after 17 years in the company, he has a keen eye for the training differences between his native land and his adopted country.DMITRI GRUZDYEV: "Looking at the pictures I see some familiar things from my training - the open shoulders, standing tall, and Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything from taking photographs of Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the historic Selma-Montgomery marches through producing oil paintings inspired by the scale of billboards to making pop-art assemblages, abstracts, and painting large-scale figures appropriated from commercial advertising.But then Hopper was always a terribly tricky person to pin down. While Read more ...
judith.flanders
Camille Silvy may be the least recognised of all the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. After a decade of almost ceaseless technical innovation, and astonishing output as the society portrait-photographer of the 1860s, he abruptly closed his London studio, aged only 34, returned to France, and, after a brief stint in the garde mobile in the Franco-Prussian War, spent much of the rest of his life in and out of asylums. It has been suggested that the chemicals used in these pioneering decades of photography caused mental illness; but given his prodigious output - 17,000 sittings Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s a little-known side to the 19th-century American artist John Singer Sargent, and it is as far removed from the razzle-dazzle of his glittering career as a high-society portraitist as you can imagine. The artist who was famously described by Rodin as “the Van Dyck of our times” started his career emulating that great master of the seas, J M W Turner. He diligently honed his craft by painting dramatic seascapes, gentle coastlines and noble fishing folk. And if the 20-year-old Sargent couldn’t quite manage the roiling waves and lowering skies with quite the same level of brilliance as Read more ...
sue.steward
The fourth Brighton Photography Festival (BPB) has been launched amid dramatic economic hardships, but my money is on it being a roaring success. It will put Brighton on the map as somewhere other than a gay clubbers’ delight and a hen-party hub. The reason for my confidence? The guest curator, Martin Parr. He's a Zelig-like character who spends his life dropping into every photo festival around the world and is the best-known UK photographer on the international stage today, his reputation made through his controversial high-colour documentary photographs and the touring exhibition Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I must admit that I enjoy killing things and, since the target of my murderous instincts are clothes moths, fruit flies and, occasionally, rats or mice, society condones my bloodthirsty instincts. But while I get some satisfaction from my exploits, the women in Paula Rego’s drawings and prints appear to go about their murderous business with a mixture of resignation and detachment. These things have to be done, their world-weary faces seem to say, let’s expedite them with as little fuss as possible.The main difference, though, is that their victims are human; a series of large pastels shows Read more ...
mark.hudson
It’s not often you find yourself in an art gallery with the business end of a bullwhip whizzing inches from your nose. Wielded by a disconcertingly slight, black-haired woman who can barely be half its length, the terrifying instrument defines the dimly lit space with its whirling undulations and earsplitting crack, sending the gaggle of spectators cowering into adjacent rooms. Why there is also a grand piano present is probably only entirely known to the unnamed artist who brought this trickily titled exhibition into being.If there’s plenty to object to in the cult of the branded art figure Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a mother herself, the daughter, Isabetta, committed suicide); life as a single mother raising two later sons on welfare in the slum district of New York's Spanish Harlem; and a neglected but always diligent artist for much of the rest of it, only achieving fame and acclaim towards the end.And yet we find her, in variously dated archive footage featured Read more ...