Visual arts
Mark Sheerin
When Ryan Gander’s wife wanted a designer lamp, the versatile artist knocked one up from junk. She was so impressed he sold it as an artwork and by now has made 55 in his garden shed. Three are here in Manchester, made from foil food trays, a guitar stand and concrete. These pieces are quite unrepresentative of the rest of this highly conceptual show, but in a diverse, major survey there appears to be no truly representative way in.What most visitors first come across, in the 19th-century foyer of Manchester Art Gallery, is a short bronze ballerina. Degas, you might think, rather than Read more ...
fisun.guner
This summer, Tate St Ives turned 21. And this makes it as good a time as any for an exhibition repositioning the artists who were associated with St Ives, the small harbour town in Cornwall, where you'll find the gallery on the sea front at Porthmeor Beach. These artists, who moved to St Ives in the late Thirties and who included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Bernard Leach, and Peter Lanyon, were, in terms of ideas and idioms exchanged, part of a wider international community of artists in both Europe and America (Leach, the celebrated ceramicist, spread his net further, having lived Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Digital Revolution begins with an archive section taking you back to the 1970s when Ralph Baer developed a video game allowing punters to play ping pong on TV (below right: poster for the original Pong arcade game) and Steve Jobs worked on Break Out, in which a virtual ball bounces off a bank of horizontal lines. It reminded me of the hours I spent as a child hitting a tennis ball against our garage door; the video equivalent is similarly mesmerising, except the satisfying thwack of the ball thudding against wood is missing along with all other physical sensations.The Quantel Paintbox of 1981 Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The National Gallery has a range of personas it adopts for its exhibitions, and for this one, about colour, it has deployed the po-faced, teachy one. The pompous tone is because it’s not just about art this time, there’s science in it, which makes it extra serious. And we know it’s science, because the posters and promotional material look like the cover of a chemistry textbook, with bursts of colour against a black background reminiscent of an explosion in a laboratory, or something exciting in space. In fact, the gallery has adopted the science book look wholesale, with black walls Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From Apocalypse Now to Blue Velvet to Speed, as a screen presence Dennis Hopper grew ever more scary. Lately gallery-goers have got to know another side of Hopper via his painting. Now there is a belated run-out for his work as a photographer, although work is maybe the wrong word. He spent much of the Sixties with a camera slung round his neck, but didn’t make a dime from any of his pictures. “They cost me money,” he said, “but kept me alive.” Hopper rode out of the decade on a Harley as director of Easy Rider and he didn’t pick up a camera again. What this trip to the Sixties reveals is a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Bridget Riley’s mural for St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, which was unveiled in April this year, is something I’ve seen only in photographs. And on seeing it for the first time my reaction, I’m afraid, was, “Oh no". It obviously didn’t help that the photographer had wildly exaggerated the one-point perspective, so that the parallel lines of two facing walls converging sharply made you feel the vertiginous pull of a rabbit hole. Those zingy pink, green, yellow and white horizontal lines running the length of a long, brightly lit corridor – like a stick of Blackpool Rock – made me a little Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The windows of Hepworth Wakefield command some attractive views, and for the present show looking out the window might even be a valid alternative to looking at the work. Curator Eva Badura-Triska reports that Austrian artist Franz West was a believer in the aura or the atmosphere of an art work. It hardly matters where you look. As if to prove the point there are installations which include chairs facing away from the work, or sofas angled to provide little point of focus. Sit still for as long as you want and soak up this extensive exhibition.Where is My Eight is the gallery’s largest Read more ...
fisun.guner
When a large and ambitious group exhibition is mounted on a particular theme or subject, in this case the human figure in contemporary sculpture, it’s always interesting to note what gets left out as well as what goes in. It’s reasonable to ask what story is being promoted under the heading of a general survey. Here are 25 sculptors, all but one from Europe and America, spanning the past 25 years. You might ask, “But where is our own Antony Gormley?” After all, Gormley has been the “go-to” British sculptor whose subject for the past quarter of a century has been the human figure. His absence Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to reject the emotive clichés and lazy token battles and focus on what matters. In Pain in the Arts, Tusa urges that both sides take personal responsibility for an essential part of human life.His title, beyond the dubious pun, refers to the very real, and feared, pain in the long-established arts world right now, caused by current government pressure Read more ...
Florence Hallett
At the risk of sounding crass, I can’t help feeling that had Winifred Nicholson painted fewer flowers she might be better represented in the annals of art history. Of course, being a woman hasn’t helped, but as a woman flower painter she was ever destined for the footnotes. As is often the way with female artists, Winifred was highly regarded in her lifetime, and at the outset of her career she outsold her husband Ben Nicholson, whose reputation, posthumously, has almost entirely eclipsed her own.Next to the white reliefs and austere abstract paintings that have secured her husband's Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I agreed with some reluctance to review British Folk Art, since I anticipated an overdose of quaint charm, naive whimsy and endearing eccentricity. You know the kind of thing – fire screens embroidered with overblown flowers and paintings of fat porkers, faithful dogs or stallions galloping like rocking horses.I needn’t have worried; some naive paintings are included along with embroidery samplers and patchwork quilts, but predictable items like these are offset by a stunning array of ship’s figureheads and trade signs including a cobbler’s boot (pictured below), a locksmith’s padlock and key Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’ll admit, there's a scene that made me well up during the excellent Marina Abramović biopic The Artist is Present. If you've seen it you’ll know the scene I mean – it’s where Ulay, Abramović’s former partner, in art and in life, takes the seat opposite her on the last day of her MoMA marathon performance. And the tears come, hers and his and then ours, and she takes his hands, and then more tears. Oh god.Abramović and Ulay did some powerful work in the Seventies. As a couple they gave expression, in a highly wrought, often florid fashion, to the psychological violence that often bubbles Read more ...