Visual arts
fisun.guner
Lord, I confess I have never seen Kenneth Clark’s epic 13-part series Civilisation. Not in its entirety at any rate – only snippets on YouTube, and, more recently, excerpts at Tate Britain’s current exhibition, where highlights from his many televisual essays from the Sixties are being screened on multiple monitors, the earlier ones, in black and white, presented rather in the style of a carefully rehearsed, stiffly enacted avuncular chat in front of a favourite painting or sculpture. But having read him, including the book based on that acclaimed 1969 series, I can vouch that his plummy Read more ...
Florence Hallett
John Deakin was lukewarm about his career as a photographer because his heart wasn’t in it. Really, he wanted to be a painter, and so it was in spite of himself that he became a staff photographer at Vogue in 1947, acquiring a reputation for innovative portraiture and fashion work. Vogue’s studio was dangerously close to Soho and Deakin was prey to its temptations, his alcoholism and dubious friendships with many of its most celebrated and notorious characters providing a constant distraction.The tension between Deakin’s life as a talented, salaried photographer, and his role at the heart of Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
On the morning I visited William Forsythe's installation there was a fire truck parked up on Circus Street. Its crew were all in the Old Municipal Market, taking in the art and, like everyone else, interacting with the kinetic sculptural elements. It is the stuff of arts outreach programme fantasies.Forsythe is an American choreographer and sculptor who lives and works in Germany. He made his name at the helm of Ballet Frankfurt and has since proved himself an able visual artist, along with a radical director. Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No 2 previewed in Essen, began life as a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Last year, the German artist Georg Baselitz told Der Spiegel: “Women don't paint very well. It's a fact,” citing as evidence the failure of works by female artists to sell for the massive sums raised by their male counterparts. The amusing punchline to that story is that shortly afterwards a Berthe Morisot painting sold at auction for more than double the amount ever achieved by Baselitz himself. But be honest - come on, use your fingers - how many women artists can you think of? Because however much Baselitz’s misogyny appals you, the prospect of not one, but three programmes dedicated to Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
At the core of Memphis Living by Hernan Bas are five large paintings of equal size that could be blown-up spreads from a fashion magazine. Each features a modellish young man surrounded by statement architecture, iconic design and lush vegetation. But in the way their backgrounds tend toward abstraction, Bas confuses the viewer and confounds the lifestyle imagery. Not a fashion statement then, but a statement about fashion perhaps. There are ghosts in these colourful houses, which accounts for the lost look of their solitary occupants. In one work, Memphis Living (feeling the spirit) ( Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Viewed through an arch designed to evoke a dimly lit chapel, Lorenzo Costa and Gianfrancesco Maineri’s The Virgin and Child with Saints, 1498-1500, is strikingly legible (pictured below right). The Virgin sits on a marble throne beneath a richly decorated arch, the throne’s fictive architecture covered with panels depicting Biblical scenes, the infant Christ standing precariously on his mother’s knee. By mimicking the poor lighting conditions for which this altarpiece was designed, painted architectural features are revealed as so much more than mere scenery, serving instead to punctuate Read more ...
fisun.guner
Maria Lassnig, the Austrian figurative painter best known for her emotionally complex self-portraits, died yesterday aged 94. She was virtually unknown in the UK until her solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2008. In a compact survey which focused on recent work one self-portrait - You or Me, 2005 (main picture) - attracted the greatest attention. Here the artist, aged 86, wears a startled expression while pointing a gun at her temple and one straight at the viewer. It is a promise of mutual destruction utterly alive with the presence of the artist. Lassnig’s self-portraits, in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The lawns, fields, meadows and sheds of the Henry Moore Foundation themselves exemplify the notion of in-and-out, exterior-interior and are thus the ideal setting for exploring the notion of body and void in Moore’s work and the way it is echoed in the sculpture of succeeding generations. Thus we have a subliminally provocative setting for a succinct, even oddly exquisite (however monumental) selection of the contemporary sculptural avant-garde, varyingly echoing in new guises notions of inside-outside which we can now see obsessively preoccupied Moore. Moore himself, although a teacher Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Occasionally, but rarely, great imaginative leaps take place in the progression of art that seem to have come from nowhere. This can be said of Julian Schnabel….In these early paintings Schnabel worked with materials on surfaces that had never been used before....The sheer originality of Schnabel’s vision struck the art world explosively.”So writes curator David Thorp in a catalogue essay for this exhibition. And the solemnly vacuous puff continues: “But as with all momentous changes in art these inevitably created as much criticism as acclaim.”Let me begin by saying this. I’ve come to these Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Yinka Shonibare MBE makes work from a less entrenched position than his many decorations suggest. This Member of the British Empire (he adopted the initials as part of his name after receiving the honour in 2005) is naturally also a Royal Academician, an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths, and has an honorary doctorate from the RCA. Shonibare is one of the most celebrated artists around, a fixture as well received as the ship in a bottle which occupied the Fourth Plinth in 2010 and which now has a permanent home outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.Yet his ambitious new work for year’ Read more ...
fisun.guner
If you’re not already familiar with at least some aspects of Chris Marker’s work, this exhibition will feel overwhelming, if not confusing. You may have to pay a second visit to get the most out of it, or even make sense of it. It’s certainly a demanding retrospective of the influential French filmmaker, and an immersive "surround-screen" gallery survey probably isn’t the best introduction.Still, I feel compelled to commend the ambitions of the Whitechapel Gallery in bringing Marker’s work to wider public attention and doing its best to highlight themes across a life’s work (“career” is a Read more ...
David Nice
In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I thought, irrevocably shut for me 45 minutes and four chords into the first act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha could well open again in two concerts – London is to get three on a UK tour this week - around the musical Minimalist theme from Dennis Russell Davies and the excellent Basel Symphony Orchestra. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if the Read more ...