Visual arts
josh.spero
There are two exhibitions of Cy Twombly's work at Gagosian Gallery right now. One is fine and will detain you for a few minutes. The other is exactly the revelation we want to refresh and enhance Twombly for his afterlife.In its main gallery are Twombly's Last Paintings (Untitled, pictured below), given the titular terminal reverence of something like Strauss' Four Last Songs. The mere title suggests the paintings have a life-summing profundity, that last works are last works because the artist uses them as the deliberate culmination of a lifetime's thought, not because the artist happens to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the Hayward Gallery a young woman falls over backwards; her flight is magically arrested at a gravity-defying point of imbalance. Since she is blinking, one can safely assume that she is alive, present, and human rather than a waxwork or an illusion. How, though, does she sustain such an impossible position? No wires are visible, so she can’t be suspended, but look carefully and you can detect a rigid frame of some sort, hidden beneath her clothing to prevent her from crashing to the ground.The perfect embodiment of ongoing instability, this glorious piece by Shangai-based artist Xu Zhen Read more ...
mark.hudson
John Berger isn’t a man who has suffered through appearing to take himself massively seriously. His way of phrasing his most modest utterance as though the fate of the world’s dispossessed hangs on his trenchancy is insufferable to some. But generally the world takes this mountain-dwelling Marxist sage pretty much at his own estimation: as a great alternative voice crying out amid the crassness of our market-driven culture.This pompously titled but intriguing trawl through Berger’s personal archive – recently donated to the British Library – takes us through the multi-talented octagenarian’s Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The wide eyed little girl is sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, clutching her large soft toy, her head encased in a voluminous bandage. Eileen Dunne, aged three, was injured by shrapnel during the London bombing in 1940, and Cecil Beaton’s Ministry of Information photograph of the bewildered child travelled the world, graced the cover of Life magazine and silently pleaded the British cause. The title Life gave his photo essay was simply “Cecil Beaton’s camera records tragic look of his England bombed.”Seven tow-headed school children solemnly clustered round a table, not a smile to be Read more ...
Olivia Weinberg
Lindsay Seers is one of the most exciting artists to have emerged in Britain over the last 10 years. Preoccupied with big philosophical questions, her work explores notions of truth, memory, imagination and history. Nowhere Less Now, commissioned by Artangel, is her first new work in London since Extramission was shown at Tate Britain in 2009. It is no ordinary work.Skilfully combining photography, video, performance and animation, Seers takes us on a journey - one that begins inside a rusty corrugated iron chapel off the Kilburn High Road in north-west London. The Tin Tabernacle, built in Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last night, someone who’s never professionally held a camera won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery. John Stezaker is a collagist. Since the Seventies he’s been slicing found photographic images, often of Hollywood stars, to make new composite images. His work, pleasingly old-fashioned both technically and aesthetically, harks back to the Dada/Surrealist collages and photomontages of figures such as Hannah Höch and Joseph Cornell. After decades working in relative obscurity Stezaker finally achieved wide recognition with his exhibition at the Read more ...