Visual arts
Sarah Kent
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.Normal relationships are reversed; by acting as a counter balance, the buckets hold up the table rather than the other way round. On the Shelf, 1970, consists of 15 milk bottles lined up on a shelf tilted at a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers includes many of his best known pictures and, amazingly, it is the first exhibition the National Gallery has devoted to this much loved artist. Focusing mainly on paintings and drawings made in the two years he lived in Provence (1888-1890), it charts the emotional highs and lows of his stay in the Yellow House in Arles, and the times he spent in hospital after numerous breakdowns.From the incredibly touching and lucid Self-Portrait of 1889 (pictured right), you wouldn’t know he’d just left the psychiatric hospital in St Rémy after recovering from two major Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Stop the War Coalition the visual equivalent of marching songs.Influenced by John Heartfield who, in 1930s Germany, used his scissors to create lacerating images denouncing Nazism, Kennard has similarly gone on the attack to reveal the hypocrisy of politicians, his revulsion at war Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s been a long time since the Whitechapel Gallery has presented three seriously good exhibitions at the same time. Already reviewed are Gavin Jantjes’ paintings on show in the main gallery. He is now joined, in gallery 2, by Dominique White, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in galleries 5, 6 & 7, by Peter Kennard.Funded by the Max Mara Fashion Group, the Art Prize provides the winner with a six month residency in Italy and, in an interesting film, White describes the research she was able to carry out during that time. The four powerful sculptures now on show were Read more ...
mark.kidel
The artist Bill Viola died, after a long illness, early in the morning of Friday 12 July. I had the privilege of getting to know him while making a documentary about his life and work in 2001-2003. He quickly became a friend, as did his wife Kira and his sons, Blake and and Andrei. He felt like a kind of brother, who’d grown up through the same changes that shook culture up in the 1960s and 70s. Although he was American, I felt that we spoke the same language.I’d become interested in video art – the principal domain of his work – in the mid-1970s. I wrote about it, persuaded the BBC to give Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ukraine’s history is complex and often bitter. The territory has been endlessly fought over, divided, annexed and occupied. From 1917-20 it enjoyed a brief period of independence before being swallowed up once more by the Soviet Union after a vicious three year war – an example that Vladimir Putin is copying with his monstrous invasion.Now Ukrainians are being forced to fight, once more, for independence is an appropriate time to reveal that many artists of the so-called Russian avant-garde were actually from Ukraine. Famous pioneers of abstract art such as Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Belgian artist, Francis Alÿs has filled the Barbican Art Gallery with films of children playing games the world over. Many of them are familiar; they’re playing five stones in Nepal (pictured below left), conkers in London, stone skimming in Morocco, scissors/paper/stone and musical chairs in Mexico, hopscotch and leapfrog in Iraq, flying kites in Afghanistan and having snowball fights in Switzerland.On one level, then, the show is about the ubiquity of children’s games and it provides perfect entertainment for the kids. But it is also much, much more. Some of the films are pure delight. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Born in Cape Town in 1948, Gavin Jantjes grew up under apartheid. He openly criticised the regime in his work and, forced into exile, was granted political asylum in Germany in 1973.Nearly 10 years later he moved to England and his Whitechapel retrospective begins with work from those early years of exile. School Days and Nights, 1978 (pictured below right) was painted in response to the Soweto uprising, when black schoolchildren held a rally in protest against the imposition of the Afrikaans language in schools. The police opened fire on the children sparking an uprising that lasted eight Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Two shows at Jupiter Artland, one in a barn, one in a ballroom, showcase two Scottish artists, whose work shares a sense of lightness and joy. The sun was out, there was happiness all round. Laura Aldridge had painted the walls of her barn space a buttercup yellow and applied translucent film to the windows so that to spend time in her bijou show was like being in a solarium. Andrew Sim, on the other hand, offered a suite of cheery pastel works depicting plants, which echoed the decorative plasterwork of his ballroom ceiling to create another totalising space.Whereas Aldridge bathes her work Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Being a successful artist is not Judy Chicago’s primary goal. She abandoned that ambition six decades ago when the Los Angeles art world greeted her with hostility. Now she’s having the last laugh, though. At 84 she is being heaped with accolades, including induction into America’s National Women's Hall of Fame, and is enjoying worldwide celebrity.Currently filling four floors of the New Museum in New York, for instance, is Herstory, a major retrospective of her work. Which explains why the Serpentine Gallery survey feels a bit thin; inevitably, this show is only an echo of the full- Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Now You See Us could be the most important exhibition you’ll ever see. Spanning 400 hundred years, this overview of women artists in Britain destroys the myth that female talent is an exotic anomaly.We were led to believe there’d been no great women artists until, searching the archives, female art historians were able to reveal the genius of Artemisia Gentileschi whose Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), c.1638-1639 (pictured below right) kicks off this brilliant survey.How I wish I’d known of this powerful painting when I was a student at the Slade! It Read more ...