Visual arts
Marina Vaizey
Here comes the Switch House. The 10-story new build attached to the Gilbert Scott Bankside power station that was the first instalment of Tate Modern in 2000 opened to the public this weekend. Tate Modern’s expansion became almost a necessity as the original estimate of two million annual visitors became five million. Designed by the Basel-based duo of Herzog and de Meuron, also responsible for the original Tate Modern, it is an astonishing building which is intended, much more overtly than its mother gallery, to change the ways in which the public approaches and understands contemporary art Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Black Brook, 2014, is sublime. Two bands of acid-green grass frame a horizontal band of deep-violet water that appears to have hidden depths. Dotted randomly over the darkness are clusters of light blobs; they could be floating leaves or reflections dancing on the surface. There’s no way of telling. Hovering midway between the abstract and figurative, the painting is deliberately paradoxical. The language used to create the image is as important, and as visible, as the image itself. This allows the work to occupy parallel universes – that of material fact (paint on canvas) and that of Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
As if to signal a coming of age, this year's Whitstable Biennale has a theme: The Faraway Nearby. And so for the first time artists have a guiding idea with which to post-rationalise their work. Until now, the 10-day festival of visual art has staked out broad territory with performance, film and emerging talent. So perhaps an equally broad theme was needed to ensure that works comprised of fan letters, a lecture tour in a car park and a new flavour of ice cream could cohere as a successful biennale. And as we gear up for a referendum about our place in Europe and consider the ongoing refugee Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pure euphoria! The lady, a mere 87, her stature diminutive, her hair and lipstick a blazing scarlet, is a painter, but also a draughtsman, a sculptor, a creator of environments and installations, a performer, a designer of objects and clothing (affordable too at UniQlo) an illustrator, a writer, a poet, and an all-round polymath. Kusama has lived by choice for nearly 40 years in a psychiatric hospital in her native Japan, working indefatigably.It is typical that her work remains accessible even though the grand installations and large paintings are only available to an institution, gallery or Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Cornelia Parker invited over 60 fellow artists to join her in exhibiting at the Foundling Museum in London. Titled Found, the show spills out from the basement gallery to infiltrate every room in the building and remind us that, when the Foundling Hospital was set up as a charity for destitute children in 1739, artists made an important contribution. William Hogarth invited friends to exhibit at and donate work to the hospital while Handel ensured the charity's place in the social calendar by giving benefit concerts there every year. The museum contains some moving exhibits; when Read more ...
Hugh Pearman
Arts festivals the size of the Venice Biennale are inevitably patchy. The appointed directors are hardly ever given enough time to curate and fill absolutely vast volumes of space. They can exhort the many national and individual participants to follow their lead, and yet they have no editorial control over them. And so for this year’s architecture biennale, with its theme of social responsibility – Reporting from the Front – set by director Alejandro Aravena, consider the newly-built Australian pavilion. This proudly features a swimming pool. Nothing else, apart from some voices.A swimming Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces indistinct but for red-slit mouths and coal-black eyes. We seem to be in the room with them, and yet we are isolated. Even a woman looking out from the edge of the canvas gazes straight past us: if not invisible, we are certainly inconsequential.The painting is a heavily symbolic start to this exhibition, which tells the well-worn but, to all but the Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
Tanya Habjouqa, winner of the World Press Photo Award 2014, is a founding member of the all-female Middle Eastern photography collective Rawiya (meaning “she who tells a story”) which focuses on raising the visibility of female Arab photographers as well as presenting an insider’s view of the region, and defying Western stereotypes of the Middle East.Of Texan-Jordanian ancestry, Habjouqa’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is in the collections of MFA Boston, Institut du Monde Arab, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Now based in Jerusalem, her latest project is Occupied Pleasures, a book Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The second exhibition staged by Damien Hirst in his stunning Newport Street Gallery is of work from his collection by the American artist, Jeff Koons. Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths when, in 1987, Charles Saatchi showed Koons and other young Americans at his gallery in St John’s Wood. Hirst was blown away by the freshness and ambition of work that took Warhol’s love affair with consumer culture one stage further. This mini-retrospective can be seen, then, as a tribute both to Saatchi and Koons – inspirational figures in the 1980s. A huge, sugar-pink bowl filled with Read more ...
theartsdesk
In a gallery darkened to evoke the seabed that was its resting place for over a thousand years, the colossal figure of Hapy, the Egyptian god of the Nile flood, greets visitors just as it met sailors entering the busy trading port of Thonis-Heracleion some 2,000 years ago. One of the largest objects ever loaned to the British Museum, Hapy symbolises the prosperity bestowed upon Egypt by the river Nile, but whose waters ultimately brought about the destruction of the ancient cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion, which subsided into the sea in the 8th century AD.They were known about through Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You are a massive cock. A gigantic tool. You are a monumental prick. Grayson Perry did not mince his message as he concluded his portrait of modern maleness with a tour of the City of London. At the end of each programme he has presented the subjects of his study with an artistic response to their world. The men working in so-called financial services inspired him to create a work called Object in Foreground (pictured below) in the shape of a giant penis. Exhibited on an empty floor of the Shard (the most giant penis of them all), its contours mirrored the silhouette of the phalluses Read more ...
Bill Knight
Asking theartsdesk's theatre photographer to review Photo London is like asking a car mechanic to review the London Motor Show. "Remember the big picture!" I kept telling myself as I tried to deconstruct the lighting of a particular shot or measure the depth of field.And big picture it certainly is. Now in its second year at Somerset House, Photo London aims to be the best photographic fair in the world – "the first photographic fair of the smartphone generation" – with over 80 galleries and 480 artists exhibiting. The exhibitors are a selection of London galleries alongside a range of Read more ...