Visual arts
fisun.guner
“Repellent” is one word I’ve heard to describe Alastair Adams’ new portrait of Tony Blair, but I don’t know if that’s a reaction to the painting or the subject. In either case, I can’t say I share that gut-reaction. Most of the portraits in the National Portrait Gallery manage to say very little about the subject or their reputation. This one does, so that’s my first positive response to it. In case you were wondering “why?” or “why now?”, the NPG’s commission is in line with their policy of acquiring a painted portrait of all former British prime ministers. I think they chose well in Read more ...
mark.hudson
There’s movement towards a walk after lunch, but by the time everyone’s hummed and hawed about where they might go, rubbed their bellies after one too many forcemeat balls and argued about who put the Guardian Quiz where, it’s already dark and there’s only you and one other still up for it. They cry off – a mercy – and you’re alone, heading out across the garden, along the path towards the headland. As you crest the dark bank you’re hit by freezing wind and the radiance of the moon’s path across the icy sea. Instantly you’re outside the cosy fug of gleaming baubles, leftover turkey and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jan Gossaert’s The Adoration of the Kings, painted in 1510-15, is a sumptuous, richly detailed and even, to us today, slightly hilarious painting. It’s the large central panel of a Flemish altarpiece which includes practically every motif of the subject possible in a heady mix of ingredients.With its meticulous attention to detail, its exquisite rendering of texture and material, it’s a Northern Renaissance painting par excellence. The central figure is the Virgin, unusually all in blue – ultramarine being among the most expensive pigments of the time – with one of those little old babies, so Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The term “snow day” may have been coined with the most recent spate of cold winters in mind, encapsulating the modern-day, not to mention British, consequences of winter weather, but Hendrick Avercamp’s Seventeenth-century “snow day”, painted in around 1615, is a hearty reminder that nothing changes. And just as today we tend to fall into two camps, those determined to enjoy the weather and those irritated by the disruption, Avercamp’s scene on a frozen Dutch river depicts all types, ages and temperaments.Amongst gleeful figures equipped with skates and sledges, tradesmen determined to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The photographs of Henri Matisse at work show, over the years, a sober, suited, bearded and dignified figure; there is also a charming series of Matisse in a white coat, as though he were a doctor, sitting in his studio and thoughtfully examining in close-up a curvaceous naked young woman, his model. In his maturity, he looks almost like the stereotype of the upper middle class professional, the lawyer that he once almost was.Of course, what happened is that he became, against family opposition and with an almost life-long struggle, one of the most dominant and adored artists of the last Read more ...
jillian.edelstein
In 1997 I was in South Africa working on Truth and Lies, my book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when the New York Times Magazine said that they were doing a major feature on Mandela. He’d been in office for three years. The photographs were taken in the presidential house, the former seat of the oppressors. It felt very surreal for me because even the décor was Cape Dutch furniture. It was not what you might imagine for a black president.I had already been told that I was not allowed any flash because his retinas had been damaged by his work on the limestone quarry, chiselling Read more ...
fisun.guner
This exhibition makes me very sad. And not just because the subject of this long overdue survey died at the age of 28, and so left behind a body of work that stretches to only two very small galleries in the current exhibition, but because it does Pauline Boty, Pop artist and a contemporary of Peter Blake, a disservice. Curated by Sue Tate and first shown at Wolverhampton Art Gallery (and so Pallant House insist they were not in a position to change anything), there’s everything wrong with this exhibition except the works that take us from the relative juvenilia of Boty’s short career to her Read more ...
fisun.guner
According to one broadsheet, Laure Prouvost was a “rank outsider” and the money was on comic doodler David Shrigley and the elusive Tino Seghal, he of those ghastly, utterly patronising performances designed to jolt the guileless gallery-goer from his or her imagined complacence.Her narratives are ambiguous, layered, unreliable, fragmentedWell, that’s news to me. For most who have seen the exhibition in Derry, it was the two women, Prouvost and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who made the most favourable and certainly the most enduring impression. And for me, Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings had the edge. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When it comes to a blank page, artists and poets lead different kinds of lives and leave different kinds of marks. One for the eye, one for the ear, but both dependant on the thrill of recognition. The word, like paint, can be worked and reworked until the delight of a new image, a fresh metaphor in its right setting rings from the twisted garbage of lines in a notebook.Back in the days of Surrealism, Revardy and Breton delighted in new images cast from the most disparate material. I understand that thrill. It’s what makes poetry worth reading. Art and poetry are concentrated mediums. Their Read more ...
fisun.guner
Since “puerile” is an accusation often levelled at them, I often wonder what a grown-up Jake and Dinos Chapman would look like. What would they have to do to enact the transformation? And what would emerge on the other side?I shake my head at such questions, for puerility being the essence of their being, I suspect they would simply cease to exist, or at least cease in any convincing sense. You may as well tell Woody Allen to stop being Jewish. (Hey, Woody, if only you were a goy you’d tell better jokes.) Do away with that special Chapman brew that ferments in the dark recesses of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Those French and their grand projects! Not the least of them is the division of the country into 23 areas who acquire their own collections of international contemporary art, supplemented by a national loan collection, all under the rubric of FRAC, Fondation Régionale d’Art Contemporain. This 30-year programme has just opened a massive six-storey gallery as a brand new public face for the regional collection of the Nord-pas-de-Calais in the slightly forlorn city of Dunkirk. Supported by FRAC, it has so far amassed some 1,500 works of contemporary art, French and international.The seaside post Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At first it looked like a joke. But, as each muscle spasm, set off by an electric shock, did appear to produce a pained expression in the performer and a subsequent note, one slowly had to accept that these four string quartet players were indeed being electrocuted into performance. The Wigmore Hall, it wasn’t. Sonica, it certainly was.This was the second year of the four-day festival that, each November, takes over Glasgow's galleries, theatres, warehouses and shop windows and runs amok, stretching the meaning of music to its artistic, intellectual and technological limits. Cross-pollination Read more ...