Visual arts
Florence Hallett
Done well, a one-room exhibition can be the very best sort, a small selection of paintings allowing the focused exploration of a single topic without the diluting effect of multiple rooms and objects. In this respect, Artists in Amsterdam rather misses its mark, providing neither the detail nor the scholarly insight we have come to expect from the National Gallery’s Room One exhibitions.Even so, Dulwich Picture Gallery’s display is not without its merits, and it uses eight works from its extensive collection of Dutch paintings, plus one loan, to sketch an evocative, if slight impression of Read more ...
David Kettle
Below the Blanket ★★★★ There’s a deep vein of melancholy running through Glasgow producing house Cryptic’s promenade installation Below the Blanket, which currently occupies several sites across Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden. Bringing together the work of a clutch of artists, and blurring boundaries between the sonic and the visual (a fertile hinterland that Cryptic has made very much its own), Below the Blanket is inspired by northern Scotland’s Flow Country, a spellbinding and little-known landscape stretching across Caithness and Sutherland. Not only a vital environment Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The well-spring of certain musical genres and hometowns of certain influential musicians have long been a source of civic pride – and a boost to the tourist industry – in many clued-in parts of the world. One only has to think of the co-opting of Bob Marley’s life and influence in attracting tourist dollars to Jamaica or the raising of the Beatles to mythic status – bus tours and all – in Liverpool. Birmingham, arguably the birthplace of heavy metal through the music of the magnificent Black Sabbath, however, has been slow to give appropriate due to its own sons and rock’n’roll heroes. For, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Light creeps under the church door. Entering as a slice of burning white, it softens and blues into the stone interior, seeming to make the walls glow from the inside. Beneath the lintel, a milder slot of sun pours upwards. To the right, a plain column, only half in the composition, supports an arch which merges with the back wall, disappearing against its horizontal plane. The chapel is empty but its stillness feels peopled. Here, absence is watchful.The Door, 1884, was painted at the Chapelle de Trémalo in Pont Aven by Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck. A grant from the Finnish Senate Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The City of London is an ecological disaster. Around Bank, Mansion House and Cannon Street there’s scarcely a green leaf to be seen. Glass, steel, concrete and tarmac create an environment that excludes plant life, birds and insects and is detrimental to human health.Everyone in the Square Mile seems to be ignoring the twin disasters of air pollution and climate change – everyone, that is, except Bloomberg. Over the summer, they are hosting Beuy’s Acorns, an installation of 52 saplings grown by artists Ackroyd & Harvey (Pictured below right). They harvested the acorns from trees planted Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Sculpture is as much a part of Yorkshire as cricket and a decent cup of tea, with the “sculpture triangle”, comprising four prestigious museums and galleries, feeling almost as well-established as the county’s famed rhubarb triangle. Now the Hepworth Wakefield and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park have collaborated with the Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute next door to launch a sculpture festival.Yorkshire Sculpture International, which runs until 29 September, showcases work new and old against the backdrop of the county’s considerable sculptural heritage, with Barbara Hepworth and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At their best, Olafur Eliasson’s installations change the way you see, think and feel. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Londoners would take off their togs to bask in the glow of an artificial sun at Tate Modern. That was in 2003, when The weather project transformed the Turbine Hall into an indoor park suffused with yellow light.Then last winter, Eliasson brought us Ice Watch. Fished from a fjord in Greenland, blocks of 10,000 year old ice were left to melt on Tate Modern’s lawn. Not only were the effects of global warming made horrifyingly apparent, but the euphoria induced by The Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Half organic, half high-tech, a bank of magnet-flowers sways not in response to a breeze, but to a magnetic field. Their uncannily naturalistic movements are coupled with a form that is blatantly functional: an unseen, elemental force masquerades as nature at its most benignly pastoral (Pictured below right: Magnetic Fields, l969). For Takis (real name: Panayiotis Vassilakis), magnetism introduces an extra dimension to sculpture, providing an active component that serves both as material and means. No longer restricted to the mere representation of action, for Takis, sculptures are action.In Read more ...
Bill Knight
With 50 curated exhibitions spread across the town, there is much to see at Arles. In an effort to whittle it down I asked the man in the press office what was hot. "The weather," he replied deadpan.For this feast we have to thank Lucien Clergue, who founded the festival in 1968 with Jean- Maurice Rouquette and Michel Tournier and whose photographs were shown here some 17 times before his death in 2014. This year we can see some of them again. Clergue & Weston mounts a selection of his images alongside a repeat of Edward Weston’s show which in 1970 introduced him to the Rencontres, and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Once a year, the National Portrait Gallery gives us a slice of immediate social history presented in an array of contemporary painted portraits of the young, the old, and the inbetween. In its 40th iteration the international competition 44 paintings have been chosen from well over 2000 entries submitted by artists from 84 countries, ranging from Australia to Turkey, with the vast majority being from the UK.The subjects are from the artists’ worlds: self portraits, family, friends, models. Over the years the ethnicities have widened visibly, in heartening ways. Charlie Schaffer’s Imara in her Read more ...
David Nice
Fortunate those Italian towns and cities whose Renaissance rulers looked to the arts to enrich their domain. Now neglect of cultural heritage can be laid at the doors of successive governments, but regional enlightenment can make a difference even in the era of Salvini. Treviso, clutching the inevitable title of "the Venice of the mainland" and only 30 kilometres distant from that still dreamlike city, was lucky to have a cultured centre-left mayor for five years between Lega Nord representatives, one of them convicted for trying to form an armed criminal gang during the late 1990s; sadly in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing.Loosely based on the life of Gerhard Richter, probably Germany’s foremost visual artist, his new film Never Look Away, epic in scale, the story spanning several decades over more than three hours, is a dramatic rollercoaster, both a pleasure and shocking to watch. It is also very moving. And yet, although made with great brio – the camerawork, editing Read more ...