Visual arts
fisun.guner
Addressing a crowd of journalists gathered at the press launch of her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Yoko Ono begins by telling us how cynical she is. It’s quite a claim considering it’s just about the last thing you’d ever think to call her. Perhaps she’s finally tired of being dismissed as a naive idealist. But no, it’s just a roundabout way for her to express her astonishment at the extraordinary architecture of Frank Gehry’s glinting, titanium-clad masterpiece, which opened 16 years ago in this Basque city of northern Spain. Being “naturally cynical” she hadn’t, she said, Read more ...
Ron Peck
It was very odd, in January this year, to see that Super-8 camera of Derek’s in a glass case and a few open notebooks in his beautiful italic handwriting in some other glass cases in the same room. There were five or six small-scale projections from his films in other rooms, including The Last of England, and some art works, but, somehow, Derek wasn’t there at all for me.The location where all these things were turned into what felt like sacred relics was the Inigo Rooms at Somerset House and the exhibition was Derek Jarman: Pandemonium. Pandemonium didn’t sound so out of place in relation to Read more ...
fisun.guner
Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is enjoying a triple billing in London. His new paintings at the Gagosian Gallery adopt the Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes and bright palette of Willem de Kooning, while the British Museum displays prints from the early Sixties and Seventies, alongside the graphic works of five postwar German contemporaries. The third outing opens this week at Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hito Steyerl is a cool cookie. As well as studying film and television in Munich, she gained a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and her intelligence shines through in every magical frame of her videos. Three are on show at the ICA along with two recorded talks in which she uses words and pictures to spin beguiling tales that – part fact, part fancy – operate in the space between lecture and performance.Water permeates every pixel of her latest video, Liquidity (main picture and below right) which follows the fortunes of financier Jacob Wood. After losing his job Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sadly, the name may not mean much. Jacopo Pontormo is a Florentine painter whose fate it was to come of age in the years after the high tide of the High Renaissance. Its vast shadow has left him languishing in second-division obscurity. Every day in Paris thousands of tourists turn their backs on his Madonna and Child with Saints to gawp at the Mona Lisa. No one visiting Florence lingers in front of his Venus and Cupid, c. 1533 (pictured below) in the same room as the statue of David. The National Gallery has stuck its small stash of Pontormos in a little side room. He has the Mafia to thank Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first room of Ruin Lust is a knockout. Three large-scale pictures indicate the enduring fascination that ruins have held for artists over the centuries. John Martin’s apocalyptic view of Vesuvius smothering Pompeii in a vast cloud of volcanic ash (main picture) is like a vision of Hell. The engulfing dust storm is shaped like a fiery grotto – seductive yet repellent. In its fleshy recesses, the erupting volcano appears like a fire-spurting nipple, while the flames reflected in the water tinge the sea blood red, making it impossible to distinguish the actual waves from the lava swamping Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Whether fingerprint or labyrinth, the swirly logo for Marrakech Biennale 5 feels apt. The festival has left its mark upon the city. It questions Moroccan notions of identity. And, going by the tagline, “Where are we now?” it reflects the ease with which you can get lost in this rich and bewildering land.But the artists in this 10-year-old event, know their way round North Africa. Almost a quarter of the 43 participants are from Morocco. Many more have strong links with the region. And the majority of works are site-specific, that is, fully orientated to the five main venues.Curator Hicham Read more ...
Gareth Williams
The British Museum's exhibition The Vikings: Life and Legend promises to redefine the Viking age for a new generation. First seen at the National Mueum in Copenhagen, it has now travelled - much as the show's subjects once did - across the North Sea. It includes objects from 25 lending institutions spread across nine countries - 10 if you include Scotland, whose national law requires export licence. To celebrate the exhibition, theartsdesk invited Dr Gareth Williams to pick 10 exhibits that walk us through the Viking story.1 Which exhibit says something new and unexpected about the Vikings? Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Telling a story through an exhibition can be a bad idea, partly because it seems a little pedestrian but mainly because it runs the risk of using art as illustration, glibly treating paintings as if they were objective visual records. In its title, The Great War in Portraits makes very plain its use of portraiture as a lens through which to view this earth-shattering conflict, but any anxieties about its handling of such a tricky approach are quickly assuaged.The exhibition begins with Jacob Epstein’s Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill, 1915-16 (pictured right), a sculpture that still shocks Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance finds the National Gallery in curiously reflective mood. Taking as its subject the gallery’s own mixed bag of German Renaissance paintings, the exhibition sets about explaining – and excusing – the inadequacies of its collection, suggesting that it simply reflects the disdain with which German painting was once regarded. Certainly, in 1824, when the gallery was founded, the collection mainly comprised Italian and Netherlandish art, and the only German artists admitted were those who could imitate the jolly rustic scenes of Adriaen van Ostade, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Brutalism brutal? Pugnacious? Uncouth? The name was coined by English academic and architecture writer Reynor Banham – more on him in a moment – as a play on the French béton brut (literally raw concrete) and the English “brute”, and hence was probably doomed from the start. Who, after all, can love an architectural style that sounds like it’s got all the grace of a troglodyte doing a plié before punching you in the face? The civic courtship of Brutalism in its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies (or the “long Sixties”, as Jonathan Meades prefers it) hit the skids long ago, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Britain’s last castle, Drogo, may be only just over a century old, but repair work is going on in a big way – it’s currently the National Trust’s largest-scale restoration project. That provided the excuse for the Time Team special The Edwardian Grand Designer about Drogo's architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, though attention would surely have come round to him anyway this year, as the designer of World War One cemeteries and monuments, from London’s Cenotaph to the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval (pictured, below right). Not to mention the creator of the visual tribute to the Read more ...