Visual arts
Markie Robson-Scott
What would Sigmund Freud say to newcomers infiltrating his priceless collection of Greek, Chinese and Egyptian antiquities? His study on the ground floor of 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud and his family lived after fleeing the Nazis in 1938 (he loved the house, saying it was “incomparably better” than his flat in Vienna, but only lived in it for a year before he died in 1939) has always been filled with his Egyptian gods and goddesses, bodhisattvas and buddhas, Eros figures, mummy masks and Greek vases. He was “like a curator in a museum”, said the American poet Hilda Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Neapolitan Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 into a patrician Italian family, the son of a judge. He studied classics in school and architecture in Rome, became a photographer, and then turned, as a fine art autodidact, to painting and drawing. He has spent substantial time over several decades in Madras, where he had a studio, and in Varanasi, with its continual burning pyres for the dead before they are floated off into the Ganges.Now Clemente lives in Santa Fe and New York, where he moved in the 1980s, working at first with the beat poets, and collaborating with Basquiat and Warhol: Read more ...
fisun.guner
Unusually for a Turner Prize, or for contemporary art generally for that matter, it was the year that film outshone other media. Paul Noble may have initially been the popular, and the bookies' favourite, but as technically impressive as his panoramic drawings are they are also quite lifeless, made inert by the process of their meticulous execution.Neither was it to be the year for performance art, for although performance has received a tremendous boost with the opening of Tate Modern’s The Tanks, as well as the recent high profile appearances of veteran practitioner Marina Abramoviç, Read more ...
mark.hudson
An award for artists whose work engages with "social reality, lived experience and the human condition" has been won by a Mexican forensic technician whose works deals intimately with her country’s brutal drug wars. Britain’s most valuable art award to a single artist, the Cardiff-based Artes Mundi Prize, saw nominees this year from Cuba, England, India, Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden. But the winning works by Mexico’s Teresa Margolles were the ones that responded most directly and dramatically to the competition’s challenging premise.One involves water used to wash corpses in a Mexican Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pallant House Gallery is an extraordinary hybrid, an elaborate and magnificent early 18th-century town house on a narrow Chichester street in the heart of the city, with a soberly elegant extension by Colin St John Wilson (2006) which houses one of the finest collections of 20th-century British art anywhere in the country. Nothing could be more powerful and intelligently surprising than its present unusual combination of shows.Several first-floor galleries are filled with a substantial showing of work from the 1960s of that art brut – raw art - pioneer Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985): Read more ...
fisun.guner
Death terrifies and fascinates in equal measure: we fear both the journey and the void, but can’t help but poke and prod its weary carcass. That’ll be us soon, as sure as taxes. The promise of eternal life offers to take out death’s sting, and one wonders whether art, rather than offering a straightforward memento mori, really might have a similar function. Represented by the grinning skull, the dancing skeleton, even the Grim Reaper, we are, in part, invited to laugh in the face of death’s certainty, as much as Death laughs at us in the midst of life. And perhaps we do this to keep the more Read more ...
mark.hudson
William Turnbull was a Dundee shipyard engineer’s son who became a highly respected fixture on the London art scene for over six decades, principally as a sculptor, but also as painter and printmaker. While he never quite became a household name, Turnbull had a reputation as an artist’s artist who worked in highly diverse idioms – from a classically slanted primitivism to the fringes of pop and minimalism – bringing to bear an approach that was distinctively cool, some might argue a touch dry.Born in 1922, Turnbull had the sort of hard-grinding early career that is unimaginable today, but Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A photograph from 1858 shows a feeble and frail octogenarian who happens to be the last Mughal emperor. Bahadur Shah II (pictured below right), reclining in his wretched prison in Delhi, awaiting trial, is about to be exiled to Burma. Many of his family and his retinue would be summarily executed, the civilian population murdered, and a number of the great Mughal monuments of Old Delhi ruined. The British were on the rampage, finally quelling the 1857 Indian mutiny which had spread through the sub-continent. It was both a tragic and a pathetic ending to one of the greatest dynasties the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A Bigger Splash... opens with Hans Namuth’s famous 1951 film of Jackson Pollock balletically dripping, flicking and pouring paint onto the canvas at his feet. Beneath the screen a long, scroll-like painting by Pollock lies on the gallery floor. The arrangement implies that this could be the painting the artist is creating on film while, subliminally, another message is being conveyed. The screen has pride of place, so all eyes are on the heroic artist; he is of prime importance and the work is perceived as a byproduct of his creative drive.Welcome to Action Painting – a phrase coined by Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This compilation of nearly 90 photographs by 30 photographers from 13 different countries of the Middle East is literally and metaphorically illuminating. The Paris-based Iranian photographer Abbas puts it thus: “I write with light.”Framed in three different labelled sections - Recording, Reframing, Resisting – the exhibition is an unusual and welcome collaboration between the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, with support to the tune of £100,000 from the Art Fund. The gift was shared between the two museums who each bought for their own collections. The results, dating from Read more ...
theartsdesk
For the past 10 years Brian David Stevens has been taking photographic portraits of veterans on Remembrance Sunday. The images play on the notion of the unknown soldier. Each subject is portrayed without the distinguishing marks of regiment or rank or even any clue to the part of the Armed Forces in which they served. “Faces, only,” says Stevens. “Each deep-etched with who they are and what they did, that we might look, and think - and thank them.”Brian David Stevens' websiteClick on the images to enlarge.