wed 21/05/2025

Visual arts

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, Tate Modern

From Nan Goldin's series 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency': definitions start dissolving because of her presence as voyeur and participant

In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the...

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Picasso Special - Picasso: Peace and Freedom, Tate Liverpool

Picasso the genius, the sensualist, the womaniser, the priapic beast. This much we think we know of the great Spanish artist. But how about Picasso the political activist? Picasso the supporter of women’s causes? Picasso the… feminist? Oh, yes, that...

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Art Gallery: Picasso Special - The Mediterranean Years

The war was over, Picasso was finally free to leave the privations of Paris behind him and to spend more time in the South of France, marking a return to his Mediterranean heritage. The Gagosian Gallery’s exhibition, curated by Picasso’s...

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Victory on the Fourth Plinth

From his tall column in Trafalgar Square, Admiral Lord Nelson won’t be able to glimpse the new work on the Fourth Plinth, since he faces the other way. But of all the works that have occupied this space – from Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, to...

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Fashion pop ups in unlikely places

The first floor at Browns: 40 Years of Fashion Innovation

While wandering back from a meeting with a hedgie on Haymarket, I noticed a banner emblazoned with the logo of Browns, clothes shop to the well heeled (to mix metaphors), above the entrance to what appeared to be a building site. It was indeed a...

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Bridget Riley: From Life, National Portrait Gallery

Bridget Riley: 'Boy with curly hair', early 1950s (red conté crayon on paper)

Forget about art “being about the idea” for a moment. Drawing from life is still considered by many to be the litmus test for proper artistic skill, or at least the foundation from which great art can arise. And so the enquiry, “But can he really...

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the Artes Mundi Award goes to...

Yael Bartana accepting her award

Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two...

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The Genius of Design: Designs for Living, BBC Two

Are you sitting comfortably? A Bauhaus Marcel Breuer chair

Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young...

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Tate Modern celebrates independents

There'll be art, film, music and performance in a weekend of organised mayhem

Since its millennium opening, Tate Modern has managed to transform the landscape for the contemporary visual arts in Britain. This week it celebrates its 10th anniversary by inviting 70 of the world’s most innovative, independent art spaces to take...

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The Printed Image in China, British Museum

The British Museum’s current exhibition of 15th-century works on paper, Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, explores the increasing importance of the preparatory sketch in the development of western art. Central to that...

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Photo Gallery: A Landscape of Wales

The Welsh landscape promoted by the tourist board is a known entity. Postcard photographers patrol its contours waiting for the rains to desist and the sun to peer out so that they can snap splendid estuaries, meadowed shores patrolled by a lone...

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LUX-ICO Artists Cinema Commissions

A still from 'Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright' by Akram Zaatari

In my parents’ day, apparently, one just turned up at the cinema whenever one felt like it, even if that meant the first thing you heard on entering the auditorium was Bogart signalling the start of a beautiful friendship. That doesn’t wash these...

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