Visual arts
Sarah Kent
This weekend the Royal Academy (R.A) celebrates its 250th anniversary with the opening of 6 Burlington Gardens (main picture), duly refurbished for the occasion. When it was dirty the Palladian facade felt coldly overbearing, but cleaning it has highlighted the bands of sandstone and brown marble columns that lend warmth to the Portland stone. Originally built in the garden of Burlington House as the HQ for the University of London, this Victorian edifice turns out to be rather handsome. The R.A bought the building in 2001. It is separated from Burlington House by only a few feet and is Read more ...
David Shrigley/Brett Goodroad, Brighton Festival review - showcases puncturing the medium's pretence
Mark Sheerin
In his 1991 novel Mao II, Don DeLillo called the literary medium “a democratic shout”. His oft-quoted claim is that any man or woman on the street could strike it lucky, find their voice, and write a great book. Not only does everyone carry round a novel, but those novels are potentially brilliant. Well, it’s not a Pulitzer nomination but in Brighton right now, any ordinary Joe can walk in off the street and find their art put on the wall at the city’s foremost gallery. Fabrica’s installation, which goes by the name of Life Model II, is certainly a democratic shout.This former chapel in the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Brighton Festival is the UK’s leading annual celebration of the arts, with events taking place in venues both familiar and unusual across Brighton & Hove for three weeks every May. This year, the Festival boasts an eclectic line-up spanning music, theatre, dance, visual art, film, comedy, debate and spoken word, with visual artist David Shrigley as Guest Director.Enter this competition by entering your details here for a chance to win a fantastic break for two over the closing weekend of Brighton Festival (Fri 25 – Sun 27 May).The prize package includes:A two-night stay at Sooty’s Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In bronze, marble, stone and plaster, as far as the eye can see, powerful figures and fragments – divine and human, mythological and real; athletes, soldiers and horses alongside otherworldly creatures like Centaurs – stride out. They pose, re-pose, twist, turn and captivate as that 19th century sculptor of genius, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), encountered and absorbed, with such sensual pleasure, the art of antiquity.This game-changing exhibition places a selection from the magnificent Greek marbles, taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin and now residing – not without controversy – in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"From today painting is dead" was the pessimistic outcry of Paul Delaroche on first seeing a photograph. Ever since its inception, photography has had a vexed but fruitful relationship with painting. Delaroche specialised in hyper-real historical scenes so he was right to be alarmed, and one could argue that photography's ability to record things in fine detail encouraged painters to seek new forms of expression, including abstraction. Photographers soon followed suit, though, and so the chase continued.Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art sets out to show how photography Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
David Shrigley (b. 1968) is an artist whose work has become broadly popular via a wide range of formats. At first glance, his stark pen-on-paper drawings seem akin to humorous newspaper cartoons – and, indeed, he’s contributed to The Guardian for years – but there's another layer to his work, something odder, slyer, psychologically attuned to the relationship between the subconscious and the ruthlessness of the human condition.As well as a long series of books and multiple exhibitions all around the world, including forthcoming ones this year in Shanghai, Stockholm and on the Greek island of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Shot in 2004 when photographer Robert Frank was 80 (main picture), this award-winning film was aired on The South Bank Show the following year, but is only now on release. I hope the experience was cathartic for Frank, because to the viewer it feels as if he is being put through the ringer. “Anything else the public needs to know?” he asks wearily as he sinks onto a divan, having exposed his soul to camera in elucidation of “how it feels to be here.”His patience is sorely tested when the camera runs out of film. Director Gerald Fox (notable for films on artists Gilbert & George, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a superb location for a performance! The flats on the north-east corner of Islington Green back onto a crummy atrium from which a staircase leads down to a vaulted, concrete pit (pictured below). A cross between a car park and a bull ring, or a subterranean version of a de Chirico painting, this huge chamber reminded me of the stark designs of the Italian modernist, Aldo Rossi.Peering over the topmost balustrade, one sees silent figures entering the subterranean space through portals created with slender rods of light. Most are dressed in black; they are professional mourners flown in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Art historians can so easily get carried away looking for a thesis, a scaffolding on which to hang theories which can sometimes obscure as much as reveal. Not so here: as near perfect as might be imagined, this is a beautifully laid out, fresh look at a master painter, that lights up the National Gallery's basement exhibition space. For decades Monet has been the epitome of the blockbuster artist, but we take almost for granted the pleasure of looking at his incandescent paintings. He has become the feel-good painter par excellence. His paintings are gorgeous and sumptuous and long ago Read more ...
Rupert Edwards
Sexy is an overused word in the arts but it’s an adjective you can’t help applying to some of Helaine Blumenfeld’s voluptuous marble sculptures as you run your fingers over their surfaces. These abstract bodily forms, often in the purest icing-white crystalline stone, are so tempting that you almost want to lick them. Licking is not actively encouraged but Blumenfeld is very keen that you touch and feel the surface of the work. It’s a transgression of art world conventions that’s typical of this sculptor, who has never had much to do with the contemporary art world… and which maybe explains Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brett Goodroad (b. 1979) is an artist and painter based in San Francisco. Born and raised in rural Montana, in 2012 he received the Tournesol Award, overseen by Sausalito’s Headland Center for the Arts. The Award recognises one Bay Area painter each year and financially assisted Goodroad and gave him studio space, allowing him to develop his distinctive, figurative, abstract style. He has since exhibited extensively in California as well as New York and Vermont. His monograph, A Sequence in Love was published in 2016 and in May he will be exhibiting at the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton as part Read more ...
Michael Rakowitz: The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Fourth Plinth review - London's new guardian
Katherine Waters
Fifteen years ago on a cold grey Saturday in mid-February, Trafalgar Square was filled with people marching to Hyde Park in opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. A million people gathered in London. Three times that number turned out in Rome. That day, across Europe and the rest of the world, between six to eleven million people participated in the largest coordinated anti-war rally in history. The scale of the movement was unprecedented. Protest globalised. Just over a month later air strikes took out Iraqi observation posts and troops crossed over the borders. The invasion of Iraq Read more ...