Visual arts
Marina Vaizey
Sex please, we are Japanese. This astonishing collection of about 170 paintings, prints and illustrated books from 300 years of Japanese art, known as “shunga” or spring pictures, come in part from the culture of the “floating world” (ukiyo-e) mostly located in Edo (modern-day Tokyo), from the mid 17th- to mid-19th centuries. But shunga go beyond the world of paid-for pleasure, of courtesans and actors, of that world of pleasure that was allowed, as so many other worlds weren’t in the strict and hierarchical society of Japan. (Ordinary people were not allowed to participate for example Read more ...
Sue Hubbard
A queue of artists, press and glitterati snaked its way through Kensington Gardens waiting to be let into the private view for the opening of the Serpentine’s new Sackler Gallery this week, housed in The Magazine, a former 1805 gunpowder store, located a few minutes’ walk from the Serpentine Gallery on the north side of the Serpentine Bridge. The Serpentine Gallery, supported by the Sackler Foundation, an education charity, along with the Bloomberg Foundation, outbid Damien Hirst who wanted to use the Grade II listed building to show off his private collection by the likes of Jeff Koons and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Gazing out of my window pondering how to start my review of Ana Mendieta, I noticed a creeper engulfing the house at the end of my garden. Having covered the wall, one window and a chimney, the tentacles are spreading along the gutter and over the roof. Meanwhile, my neighbour’s roses have encroached six feet into my territory and, next door the other way, a vine is assiduously working its way along the hedge and into the branches of a tree. Nature, it seems, is quietly overwhelming north London.What struck Mendieta when she visited the archaeological site of Yagul in Mexico, in 1973, was the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tony Ray-Jones is one of the hidden greats of British social documentary photography. A huge influence on photographers working today, he documented the English at play with great empathy and often surreal humour. Touring seaside resorts during the latter half of the Sixties, his acute observations of English social customs and eccentricities were, he says, intended to capture a distinctly English way of life “before it became too Americanised”.Martin Parr cites Ray-Jones as the single biggest influence in his work. Though his images are framed in a far more formal way, there is a great Read more ...
David Nice
What is the extraordinary, crowd-drawing appeal of a picture collection reunited, for a short time only, with its original surroundings? Well, for a start, this is no modest assembly of old masters, and Houghton Hall's elaborately crafted ensemble rooms constitute no conventional stately home. The feat of remarrying them has been so successful that Houghton Revisited has been extended for another two months, until 24 November.Clearly following in the rear of fashionable London, most of which seems already to have zipped to north Norfolk to see the wonders, I arrived from King's Lynn last Read more ...
fisun.guner
You can use a computer to draw, as Hockney does, every day on his iPad, yet, despite all the technological advances the 21st century has thrown our way, the pencil continues to be the artist’s most basic tool. And though there are those who lament, as they have done for decades, the “deskilling” of art, dismissing the art they don’t like or perhaps feel alienated by, drawing not only persists but remains fundamental: just as writers still write novels with plots to recreate the world filtered through their imaginations, artists still put pencil to paper to do the same. And lest we forget, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
While the main gallery is closed for renovation, the Wellcome Collection has taken the opportunity to mount a fascinating upstairs show exploring the way choreographer Wayne McGregor collaborates with scientists.A timeline charting McGregor’s career reveals that it all started back in 1997 when he attended the opening of the Inter Communication Centre in Tokyo and learned that, with their brains wired up to scanners, two people could activate a toy car by accidentally thinking of the same number. This sparked an enduring fascination with the mind and how it acts upon, and interacts with, the Read more ...
Sue Hubbard
In The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895, Oscar Wilde wittily quipped that Algernon must choose between “this world, the next and Australia”. At a time when it took weeks to reach the other side of the globe most Britons, if they thought of it at all, thought of that far-flung continent as a convenient corral for undesirable fellow citizens. Baron Field, the first Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, wondered whether Australia was, in fact, an aberration, calling it a “barren wood” and an “after-birth”. In 1906 an English geologist, J.W. Gregory, wrote a book Read more ...
Toby Saul
In 1970 the American artist Robert Smithson took several tonnes of mud and rock and built a jetty out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Instead of making a single, straight line, Smithson’s jetty curved round on itself and formed a spiral. Since no boat can dock at a spiral jetty, it joined Méret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup and Man Ray’s nail-studded clothes iron as an object whose function was subverted.One man could see a use for it, though. JG Ballard, with characteristic inventiveness, saw it as an invitation and landing place for a giant clock, bringing the gift of time to the desert “ Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is a shock, in this succinct exhibition of two British colossi of the past century, Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992), to be reminded of just how colossal and original are their achievements. We are shown their curiously affecting affinities, in their adherence to the human figure at the core of their work, and reminded through the display of documents and catalogues of their truly international success, both critical and financial. The show is subtitled Flesh and Bone. Bacon is the purveyor of flesh in all kinds of livid and brilliant hues: greens, eerie pale rose Read more ...
fisun.guner
Grayson Perry is sitting pretty amid a swathe of soft-focus pink. Dressed as his alter ego Claire he sits on a pink bed with pink pillows, his pink ruched dress spread about him with its frilly underskirt on view. Placed on his lap are his thickly veined, restless hands, fingers knotted, and he stares out at us from this frosted-pink confection of a canvas wearing a look that might be described as both winsome and quietly content. Two powder puffs that resemble plump macaroons, a perfume bottle and a floppy-brimmed hat are among his accoutrements.An earlier portrait Yeo painted of Perry- Read more ...
Jeremy Eccles
London is by now festooned with images showing the back-end of a horse surmounted by a black figure holding a gun across his chest. The man's head is a square black mask – a rectangular slit in it fails to reveal the expected eyes, instead taking us straight through to the clouds and sky. Sid Nolan was creating an iconic image, especially for his fellow Irish-Australians, which would go on to become shorthand for the rebel, the larrikin spirit of the Aussie outfacing both the land-owning squattocracy and the land, which stretches out, deserted into the flat and boring distance.Ned Kelly – for Read more ...