Visual arts
theartsdesk
They are hardly the ideal conditions in which to create. Danger is a constant and lurking menace, and it comes in multiple guises. Industrial injury is the main threat, as is the constant risk of arrest. Other hazards include deafness, breathing polluted air and public discontent. The tools and materials used in this form of installation - power drill, tarmac and steamroller - are expensive. And the work cannot be sold. But despite these powerful deterrents, a clandestine group of vagabond practitioners will stop at nothing to get their work into the public sphere. You may not know them, but Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“My mother has always been a bit of a mystery to me not only as an artist but also as a mum,” declares Nick Willing by way of introduction to his film for BBC Two on the painter Paula Rego, who turned 82 in January. What follows is as far removed from a traditional biopic as you could hope to find. There are no experts wittering on about Rego’s importance to contemporary British art or analysing the meaning of her strange, narrative pictures and the powerful women who inhabit them. There’s no bigging up of her career; you have to wait until the end to learn that in Portugal, where she Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Artist and curator Tyler Mallison has chosen the world’s most generic title for his current exhibition. It's called New Material, and the surprising thing one discovers is that the hackneyed "new" really can be quite fresh. Sculpture and painting comprise display units, work desks, gym equipment, packing tape and whitewash. Several films feature window dressing, cross-dressing and gallery furniture. Meanwhile the whole show is haunted by a Madonna lyric and broadly identifies with the concerns of Generation X.Mallison’s interesting background might lead one to expect a certain utility, or Read more ...
Grayson Perry
I have always felt very lucky to have been working as an artist in London during the period when it transformed into the capital of the art world. It has been a beautiful, fascinating and profitable ride. When I started art school in 1978, contemporary art in Britain seemed like a cottage industry situated in some little backwater seldom visited by the public or the media. Art history happened elsewhere – in Paris, Vienna or New York. Twenty years later, London was cool once again, and its exploding art scene was a large part of that. This was the heyday of the Young British Artists, Charles Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.French Touch traces electronic music back from now to when the Futurist musician Luigi Russolo performed in Paris in 1914 – his home-country Italy had not received him warmly – and on through Maurice Martenot, Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Jean-Jacques Perrey (pictured below right in 1997), Jean-Michel Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The story of two characters whose friendship ended in bitter enmity is juicy enough for a typical spring blockbuster and yet this is an exhibition with a serious and scholarly bent. While the National Gallery is no stranger to academic exhibitions they are usually relatively low-key, occupying the small space of the Sunley Room, for which this exhibition feels as if it might originally have been conceived. Scaled up, it has lost some of the vigour and focus that often characterises the gallery’s smaller efforts, and the result is a High Renaissance exhibition as austere as its chilly grey Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dream or nightmare? Bay of Pigs, assassinations, Vietnam, space race, Cold War, civil rights, AIDS, legalised abortions, same-sex marriage, ups, downs and inside outs. From JFK to The Donald in just under 60 years, as seen in 200 prints in all kinds of techniques and sizes by several score American artists (although, shush, a handful are – shock, horror – immigrants).In The American Dream: Pop to the Present we are rushed through the isms from pop to agitprop, Conceptualism and Minimalism to figurative Expressionism and photorealism with a bow to geometric abstraction along the way Read more ...
David Nice
Leif Ove Andsnes directing two great Mozart piano concertos from the keyboard may be the chief attraction when the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra comes to London's Cadogan Hall on Friday to celebrate its 40th birthday. It was certainly the bait which lured me to Oslo last week. But in talking to the Renaissance man who has led the ensemble since its foundation in 1977, Terje Tønnesen, I discovered that what I heard – including a Haydn symphony just as revelatory as the Mozart concertos – was just the tip of the creative iceberg. Londoners will get a greater slice of that individuality Read more ...
Alison Cole
A lovely, scholarly and gently revelatory exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles explores a neglected area of the perennially popular and much-studied Italian Renaissance – the place of piety in the Renaissance home. We are used to admiring the great 15th- and 16th-century gilded altarpieces and religious frescoes of Italian churches, palace chapels and convents, but this exhibition – one of the main outcomes of a generous four- year European funded research project – shows how the laity experienced religion in the context of their everyday domestic lives, as well as during extraordinary Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted in c.1640, David Teniers the Younger’s Boy Blowing Bubbles depicts a theme that would have been entirely familiar to his wife’s great-grandfather, the founder of one of art’s most illustrious dynasties, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569). Indicating the fleeting nature of life, the motif carries proverbial associations, its moral message one that in the 17th century was understood principally as memento mori. While Bruegel the Elder included depictions of proverbs in his panoramic scenes of peasant life, their meanings discussed and puzzled over by guests in the dining-rooms of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This show of work by two artists who use photography to explore the complexities of their own identity has to be the most interesting exhibition ever staged at the National Portrait Gallery, and opening in the same week as International Women's Day couldn't be more fitting.Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun were born 70 years apart in different countries – England and France respectively – yet they share remarkably similar preoccupations. Both use the self-portrait to pose questions about what makes us who we are and to suggest that we each have multiple selves lodged within us. Gillian Read more ...
Bill Knight
Lending its name to a major photography prize for the 12th year running, Deutsche Börse has joined the ranks of business organisations known to many for their involvement in the arts rather than what they actually do. Unlike Taylor Wessing or Man Booker, the clue is in the name: German Stock Exchange is reasonably self-explanatory, at least if you speak the language.The nominated projects from the shortlisted artists for 2017 occupy the gallery's upper floors. Entering the fourth floor you are confronted with Dana Lixenberg’s large black and white portraits from the Imperial Courts housing Read more ...