thu 22/05/2025

Visual arts

Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters, Serpentine Gallery

Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work...

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The Culture Show: Henry Moore, BBC Two

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1951)

What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity. Rather than a simple programme...

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From Floor to Sky: British Sculpture and the Studio Experience, Ambika P3

Foreground: Clone Installation (1980-1982) by Keith Brown. Background film: Communion (2010) by Nina Danino

From Floor to Sky looks at a relatively little known, but pivotal, moment in the development of British sculpture: the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when tutors and students at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College worked...

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Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield St

An abandoned classroom in a school in Chernobyl

A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of...

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English Journey Revisited, AV Festival, Newcastle

Alan Moore performing at the Southbank Centre, London 2007

The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the...

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theartsdesk in Newcastle: The AV Festival

At seven o'clock on a Friday night, with the first spring twilight of the year as a backdrop, Newcastle’s Civic Centre reverberated to a new composition for its Carillon bells. Mingling eerily with birdsong, it marked a rather different start to the...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Sarnath Banerjee

Sarnath Banerjee: 'Everybody has his own aesthetics; but mine are a bit… wonky.'

When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public...

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Art Gallery: Sarnath Banerjee

The subversive artist and film-maker Sarnath Banerjee, credited with introducing the graphic novel to India, features in a London show, Royale With Cheese, at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1, where his eight-scene graphic narrative Che in...

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Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain, ICA

Billy Childish: honouring the tradition of the outsider artist

Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry....

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Irving Penn: Small Trades, Hamiltons Gallery/ Portraits, NPG

Irving Penn's Le Chevrier 'holds his box as proudly as an artist with his paints'

This week I discovered Irving Penn’s little-known portraits of anonymous street traders, taken in Paris, London and New York between 1950 and 1951. Previously unseen in the UK, they are now appearing at Hamiltons’ Mayfair gallery: 33 examples from a...

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Photographic Gallery: John Angerson's English Journey

Anna Baranovska, single mother, Birmingham. Originally from Lativa, she was shortlisted for Miss England

“Being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England.” Upon its publication 75 years ago, J B Priestley’s English Journey became an important influence for writers, photographers...

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Art Gallery: Henry Moore's Reclining Figures

Henry Moore is said to have first encountered the image of the reclining figure in Paris in 1925 in a plaster cast of an ancient Mexican Toltec-Maya figure in the Trocadero Museum. It was to become probably his most frequently explored theme,...

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