Visual arts
mark.hudson
I’ve rarely come across an exhibition as loaded with context as this one. Voodoo – or Vodou, as the show has it – is a massively complex and contested phenomenon, from the pin-sticking and zombies of legend and fantasy to the no-less colourful reality. Haitian history is tragic and dramatic, fraught with misinformation stemming from the country’s creation in an 18th century slave revolt. The religion, the history and the art produced from them feed in and out of each other in fascinating ways which the exhibition’s promotional material presents as a great slab of facts and ideas that have to Read more ...
fisun.guner
Has there ever been a successful portrait of the Queen? Not a photograph - there are been plenty of those (with its delicious air of ambivalence, Thomas Struth’s portrait of the Queen with Prince Philip stiffly occupying two ends of a sofa at Windsor Castle, is among the best) but a painted portrait. Or rather, since we have Warhol’s screen prints which cannot be bettered in the age of incessant reproduction – not to speak of the air of decadent Hollywood glamour she acquired in the process – an official painted portrait?Let’s cast our minds back. There’s Pietro Annigoni’s full-length Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Going to the movies will never be quite the same again, as the Victoria & Albert illuminates the work of the costume designers for anybody who has ever been seduced by the world of the cinema, which I guess means all of us. This anthology is a trip down memory lane, from Charlie Chaplin’s tramp to John Wayne’s cowboys and gunslingers. And we’re brought bang up to date with Keira Knightly’s green evening gown from Atonement, a ball gown from Anna Karenina, and then into digital with Avatar – a complex technique called motion capture – and animation.There are three chapters: Deconstruction Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This small, posthumous exhibition illuminates Richard Hamilton’s life-long engagement with both the art of the past and the latest techniques and technological possibilities available to visual artists in the 21st century. He played with photography, computers, notably digital manipulation, and even built several of his own computers. And he was as fascinated with print media – utilising found imagery from all kinds of publications - as with pencil and paint. He was a polymath.Hamilton has been long credited – although he did not appreciate the label - with inventing British pop art Read more ...
josh.spero
Things have come to a pretty pass when the old is a breath of fresh air and the new just old hat, but the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent's Park, which closes this weekend, is just that. New sister to Frieze London, which features art since 2000, Frieze Masters is about the best of what came before. And boy is that good.If you've ever been around Frieze London, with its shiny artworks and 170 galleries and thousands of connoisseurs, collectors, rubberneckers and art-world hangers-on committing visual and aural assault on the innocent art-lover, you'll probably fear Frieze Masters as a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
William Klein’s exhibition opens with Broadway by Light (1958), a celluloid elegy to advertising made in the days before neon. Myriad bulbs flash the names of brands like Coca Cola, Camel, Budweiser and Pepsi across New York’s night sky. Silhouetted against vast hoardings, men perch on ladders to hang letters outside Broadway theatres or screw in brightly coloured bulbs that create gaudy, syncopated patterns which, when reflected in rainwater puddles, ripple and shimmer with the subtlety of abstract paintings.Dubbed the first pop art film, it has a celebratory mood that is in stark contrast Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Half-way through Death in Venice, Thomas Mann's tragic hero, Aschenbach, settles down on a beach to gaze out to the sea to "take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity". Aschenbach is suddenly returned to earthly complications when the horizon is intersected by the boy he desires. The passage is evoked on entering Pace’s new and enormous Chipperfield-renovated gallery as suited attendants walk among Rothko's hard-edged late paintings and Sugimoto's seascape photographs. It’s a fitting quote given not only the bisected format of all the works, Read more ...
Charles Saumarez Smith
Since becoming Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts almost exactly five years ago, I have become increasingly interested in why it was established. In particular, I almost inevitably got interested in the so-called Laws which govern its operation as a binding constitution. When I started in post, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, the then President, told me to sleep with the Laws under my pillow. At the time, I thought it was a joke. But, as time went by, I realised that he was deadly serious. At every meeting of the so-called General Assembly, which is when the Read more ...
fisun.guner
There are two films in the Turner Prize exhibition and taken together and watched end-to-end they last just under three hours. That sounds gruelling for an art exhibition, but they’re from the strongest two candidates on this year’s shortlist. And since neither is one of those poorly filmed and edited pieces that are best viewed as moving wallpaper as you drift in and out of the gallery, both are worth devoting time to.The first is by Elizabeth Price, which is 20-minutes long. The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (image below left) is a beautifully constructed and rather captivating, as well as Read more ...