Visual arts
Florence Hallett
From her fourth floor flat, which is also her studio, the painter Celia Paul looks out over the British Museum, the figures of the Muses carved into its pediment huge and present compared to the antlike, and usually teeming, human life below (main picture: British Museum and Plane Tree Branches). Up here, it is pigeons not people who provide company and entertainment, their springtime rituals carrying on as usual in the balustrades and gutters.Paul has lived here since 1982, and though married, she has never lived with her husband, preferring she has said, to maintain her own private space. Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The note of longing scored into this exhibition’s title is well-judged: as things are now, it is the sight of the elderly in the company of friends, watching the world go by from a doorstep or park bench, that provokes a pang of nostalgia, far more than the surface details of the mid-20th century, when these pictures were taken.Produced in response to the virus, this selection of 20 photographs by Shirley Baker (1932-2014), focuses on her depictions of the elderly, who blossom under her gently satirical gaze. The online exhibition includes examples of Baker’s colour work as well as her Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The former home of 19th century architect Sir John Soane has long been celebrated as one of London’s hidden marvels, an astonishing treasure trove of architectural models, paintings, sculptures and historical artefacts concealed behind an elegant but unassuming facade. Now, parts of Sir John Soane’s Museum can be accessed even in lockdown, the result of an ongoing project to create a 3D digital replica of the site and its contents, accessible online by anyone, anywhere.Created using 3D scanning technology, the digital replica follows a major restoration project, intended to return the museum Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The death of Christo, aged 84, was announced on Sunday, marking the end of a visionary and flamboyant artistic career. Best known for huge, ephemeral projects like the Wrapped Reichstag which stood for two weeks in June 1995, the American artist believed completely in the value of art for art’s sake, his vast, technically and logistically mindboggling creations brought into being for no purpose beyond their own existence.Christo was born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in communist Bulgaria in 1935, attending art school in Sofia before escaping to the west by bribing a customs officer when he Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Salvador Dalí’s house at Portlligat on the Costa Brava is straight out of the pages of a lifestyle magazine, its sunbaked white walls dazzling in the sunshine, and light pouring in from every angle. It was a fisherman’s hut when Dalí moved there in 1930, extending it over 40 years like “a true biological structure” to make a home and a place to work for himself and his wife Gala, with every window letting in a view of the sea.The house is one point of the Dalí Triangle: another is the Gala Dalí Castle at Púbol, not far from Girona (pictured below right). Dalí moved here after the death of his Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The limitations of life on screen are all too apparent at the moment, and yet still there are instances where online can offer something beyond the reach of an old-fashioned trip to an art gallery. Ultra-high resolution reproductions of works of art are a case in point, and many museum websites now allow us to examine their collections in the microscopic detail once reserved for conservation departments. A new photograph of Rembrandt's The Night Watch, 1642, renders it in a whopping 44.8 gigapixel image, itself a composite of 528 exposures, and allows anyone interested to zoom in on Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Museums and galleries have found innovative and varied ways to keep their collections within reach, and to bring us the many temporary exhibitions forced to close by the virus. But even the most dedicated gallery-goer may by now be tiring of online talks and tours, which so often make unreasonable demands on both guide and viewer and increasingly feel like a very poor substitute for the real thing.For a breath of fresh air, try the Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village in the Surrey village of Compton, whose immersive online offering is as close to a day in the country as we might reasonably Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When New York artist Adam Parker-Smith said “I feel like so many of my ideas start out as jokes, for better or worse”, he may not have anticipated featuring in an exhibition that looks like the mother of all art-world pranks. Parker-Smith, Damien Hirst, Banksy, KAWS, and Jeff Koons are among the 20 artists included in XXI, advertised as “the world’s first asset-based contemporary art exhibition”, launched online this week by ARTCELS, a new digital broker for blue chip art investments, and hosted by the Los Angeles branch of contemporary art dealers, House of Fine Art (HOFA).By now you might Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Arguably one of the most poignant effects of the lockdown has been to simultaneously draw attention to the connections between the arts and the distinct ways they have evolved into their own forms. Sculpture, painting, textiles, performance art, sonic installations – are now all in the same place, namely the internet. In a way, it’s exciting to have so much accessible. In another it’s deeply dreary; when viewed via a screen things are literally flat.However, though we expect words to be 2D, they conjure in different dimensions. Visual Verse is a digital publication dedicated to ekphrasis Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anyone lucky enough to have a garden will be newly appreciative of the oasis that even the humblest of outdoor spaces can provide. Based on the Royal Academy’s hugely successful 2016 exhibition of the same name, and broadcast on Monday evening by Exhibition on Screen via Facebook, Painting the Modern Garden opened the door to a different world. As the camera lingered on constellations of dahlias, banks of lavender and waterlilies, tended by contented insects to the twitter of birdsong, the film’s opening sequences plunged us into the living artwork that is Monet’s (not humble) garden at Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Newly conserved and restored, the eight exterior panels of Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, 1432, are the focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, cut short by Covid-19, but now available to view via an online tour. Along with as yet untreated interior panels depicting Adam and Eve, the paintings are displayed at eye level, allowing unprecedented and truly remarkable views of works that transformed the art of painting in the Renaissance with their realism and revolutionary use of oil paint.When later this year they resume their position high up in Van Eyck’s immense work, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
As the art world adjusts to our new reality, social media has allowed galleries and museums to remain open in spirit at least. Tate has kept up a stream of pictures, films and activities for children, while the often brilliant Royal Academy twitter account dispenses a daily dose of silliness via #radailydoodle. What might have been a fun but shortlived corona-craze for dressing up as works of art has only become more refined, with particularly impressive contributions by National Gallery staff, whose head of press has the Lady with the Ermine and Girl with a Pearl Earring (pictured below) Read more ...