Visual arts
Claudia Pritchard
All eyes were on the Rijksmuseum when it re-opened in April after a 10-year refurbishment, but across the Museumplein, Amsterdam's gallery of contemporary and modern art, the Stedelijk, was already settling into its new look, unveiled six months before. With its world-beating collection and extended galleries, it is already an attractive destination, but a remarkable exhibition of the art of Kazimir Malevich and his contemporaries makes the Stedelijk reason enough to hop to Amsterdam right now.Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde (until 2 February 2014), gives something of a foretaste Read more ...
David Nice
“Translated Daughter, come down and startle/Composing mortals with immortal fire.” So W H Auden invokes heavenly Cecilia, patron saint of music, and it seems she did just that with Benjamin Britten, who set Auden’s text for unaccompanied choir and happened to be born on the saint’s day 100 years ago.On the day itself, this Hymn to St Cecilia was the one piece that cried out to be heard, so last night I headed up to Islington to hear The Sixteen – in this case The Twenty-Two plus harp and piano - in the atmospheric surroundings of the spooky Union Chapel, commandeered as part of the Barbican Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The precise nature of the photographic portrait has always been contested, and this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize only fuels the debate. While historically photographers have questioned the portrait’s ability to go beyond physical fact to reveal a subject’s character, this exhibition of shortlisted entries challenges the notion that a portrait should tell us about its subject at all, while also raising questions about the ethics of picture-taking.Selected from over 5,000 entries by photographers from around the world, the winner of the Taylor Wessing Prize must convince the judges that it " Read more ...
theartsdesk
On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime defector to the USSR called Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone old enough to remember is said to know where they were when they heard. As America dealt with its trauma, the conspiracy theories started,and spawned well over 1,000 books. The assassination also became the focus for artists in all art forms - in literature, theatre, film and even music. The latest is the movie Parkland, out this week, which reconstructs events in Dallas while steering clear of the main event. Meanwhile the Finborough Read more ...
fisun.guner
The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio.It's one of several light works currently dotted around the city centre, which is known as The Peninsula – the river wraps around the old part of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
A chronological hang of its permanent collection instead of the once so modish thematic one, a show devoted entirely to contemporary painting, which was not at all modish until quite recently – things are definitely astir at Tate Britain. Next week, the gallery will be unveiling its new Millbank entrance, restaurant and café, as part of the final stage of its two-year refurbishment and Painting Now is, I suppose one can say, one of the shows designed to re-establish Tate Britain’s prestige and increase its footfall, since it probably still suffers something of the frumpy sister syndrome next Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Anyway, anyone who's ever been anyone in the great pop and rock malarky has been memorably photographed by Sheehan (or "painted with light," as he might facetiously put it). His work has appeared in Melody Maker, Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times and Sunday Times, Time Out and many other places Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Georgians are in our marrow, and two of them in particular. The dawn of the age gave us Handel, who came over from Hanover with George I. Then at the sunset came the ever-exalted Jane Austen, who dedicated Emma in mock deference to the bloated Prince Regent. And in between there are all those elegant terraces in dark-brown brick, desirable survivors of the Industrial Revolution and the Luftwaffe.As this entertaining exhibition argues, the Georgian age is also the crucible to which the British owe much of their identity. It was in the pre-Victorian century that the middle classes, which Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Stanley Spencer’s painting Map Reading shows us, in dizzying perspectives and changes of scale, a mounted cavalry officer reading a huge unfurled map concerning the now forgotten campaign in Macedonia in World War I, his horse nibbling oats all the while. Clustered all around his giant figure, ordinary soldiers surround their commander, fanned out at oblique angles to his central figure. The men are lying about in various casual poses, resting, or are perhaps out of this world, in more ways than one. The whole is framed by gorgeous outbursts of white blossom. The military uniforms, hats and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 is just what it says: a spectacular collection of nearly 80 banners, handscrolls, hanging scrolls and fans, gathered from major collections in China and Japan – many of which have never travelled west before – as well as the United States and Europe. The status of painting, drawing and poetry was extremely high through millennia of Chinese history until all traditions fractured in the revolutions of the 20th century. The visual arts, often incorporating the finest calligraphy, an art form in itself, (the poems giving further meaning to the Read more ...
caroline.boyle
There’s a giant spider in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. Her trademark spider and the fact that she lived to 98 – working into her final days – are probably two of the best-known things about her. The story spun by the spider and the other exhibits, in an exhibition entitled A Woman Without Secrets, makes a fascinating walk through the final years and lifelong obsessions of the French-born artist who did not come to real prominence until her early 70s in her adopted USA. As the Guerrilla Girls feminist group remarked, with Bourgeois in mind: Read more ...
fisun.guner
This year, if you don’t live in Ireland, you’ll have to take a plane or a boat to see the Turner Prize exhibition. But the effort will be nicely rewarded, for Derry (or Londonderry/Doire – wherever your affiliations take you) is a beautiful city, and it’s also the first UK City of Culture, so there’s plenty going on. And aside from the tempting premise of the exhibition, the building that’s been specially converted to house it is an inspired choice, not only because it makes for a very good exhibition space, but because it carries such symbolic weight. And such things count for a lot if you’ Read more ...