Visual arts
The The Things Is (For Three), Milton Keynes GalleryMonday, 12 July 2010
It’s not often you find yourself in an art gallery with the business end of a bullwhip whizzing inches from your nose. Wielded by a disconcertingly slight, black-haired woman who can barely be half its length, the terrifying instrument defines the... Read more... |
Alice Neel: Painted Truths, Whitechapel GalleryFriday, 09 July 2010
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a... Read more... |
Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries, National GalleryTuesday, 06 July 2010
When is a fake a forgery? When is it a mistake? And when is it simply not what it appears? The National Gallery’s second summer exhibition to focus on its own collection here examines the questions of attribution, using the latest scientific... Read more... |
TAD art writer shortlisted for book awardSaturday, 03 July 2010One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist,... Read more... |
BP Portrait Award 2010, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 01 July 2010
Last month, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a huge, new portrait of Anna Wintour. Painted by Alex Katz, the celebrated New York Pop portraitist, American Vogue’s scary editor-in-chief is shown with famous helmet bob intact, but minus her... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Terry Setch - LavernockWednesday, 30 June 2010
Terry Setch can lay claim to being the most underrated artist in Britain. Not that the Cardiff-based Londoner has been entirely neglected: acclaimed as one of Britain’s most powerful painters by his contemporary John Hoyland, he’s been garlanded... Read more... |
Sally Mann: The Family and the Land, Photographers' GalleryMonday, 28 June 2010
Last week I watched a tiny tot being photographed by her father, on a beach in southern Turkey. There was no girlish giggling or splashing about in the sea; rather than a show of carefree happiness, she delivered a studied pose. She assumed an... Read more... |
Wolfgang Tillmans, Serpentine GalleryFriday, 25 June 2010
It takes a lot of work to make a show look as unconsidered and chaotic as this one: thought and care and time and attention all have to be paid before something so random can be achieved. But as so often with Tillmans, the nagging questions persist... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Howard Hodgkin - Time and PlaceThursday, 24 June 2010
Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and... Read more... |
'Sale of the Century' falls flatThursday, 24 June 2010
This time, the hype was perhaps deserved: Christie's did have a claim to be putting on, last night, the sale of the century.The Impressionist and Modern works were of a distinctly high calibre: Picasso's high Blue Period Portrait of Angel Fernandez... Read more... |
Imagine: Art is Child's Play, BBC OneWednesday, 23 June 2010
It took Picasso four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but it took him a lifetime to paint like a child, or so he said. For Brancusi it wasn‘t a case of relearning childhood, but of being careful not to lose it in the first place. “When we are... Read more... |
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, Tate ModernTuesday, 22 June 2010
In 1994, Francis Alÿs joined the regular hiring-line in the central square in Mexico City. Standing next to plumbers and carpenters with their hand-lettered signs touting their skills, his sign read "Turista", as he offered his ability to be an... Read more... |
