wed 21/05/2025

Visual arts

Marc Quinn moves White Cube into the green

'Archaeology of Desire' by Mark Quinn

Thanks to the wonders of council applications, theartsdesk can bring you an exclusive preview of Marc Quinn's new sculptures to be placed outside the White Cube gallery on the grass of Hoxton Square.Quinn will be putting two colossal orchids (over...

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theartsdesk in Glasgow: Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art

Douglas Gordon: a faster 24 Hour Psycho than ever before

During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips

Born in 1954, Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst, literary critic and author. For 17 years he worked as a child psychotherapist in the NHS before moving into private practice to work with adults. As well as being a self-confessed "sceptical"...

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Goldsmiths: But is it Art? BBC Four

Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking...

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Anthony Caro: Upright Sculptures, Annely Juda

Anthony Caro makes works with the human figure in mind. The venerated sculptor, who, at 86, remains seemingly unstoppable, came to prominence in the early Sixties with his brightly coloured abstract steel sculptures. These, such as his seminal 1962...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon: Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe, 1996

Since winning the Turner Prize in 1996 with Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) has lived in Germany, France, New York and Germany again. But in accent and attitude, he remains a Glaswegian. Those roots are being reaffirmed...

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Angela de la Cruz/ Anna Maria Maiolino, Camden Arts Centre

Angela de la Cruz: destruction is an artform

Acts of wanton destruction appear to have taken place at Camden Arts Centre, as canvases lie crushed, ripped, crumpled and broken. Monochrome and minimalist works have had their stretchers, their very backbones, ripped and cracked in two, and their...

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The Art Nouveau Dacha, Russia's wooden weekend houses

"Russia has a remarkable and ancient tradition of wooden buildings that dates back to the tenth century, with the remains of Medieval fortresses demonstrating the sophistication of the Nordic wooden construction methods employed across Russia and...

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Design Gallery: The Art Nouveau Dacha

Vladimir Story's 1917 brochure for patterns for building Russia's traditional wooden country houses - called dachas - has been rescued from oblivion by the chance discovery of an ancient copy of it in Georgia. Now reprinted, The Art Nouveau Dacha:...

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Nightwatching

How might a portraitist, working in oils, describe Martin Freeman's face? If one were a novelist, heavy with description, perhaps the following: fleshy, boneless features; pasty Northern European pallor; flesh the texture of sweaty suet pudding. Not...

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Quilts 1700-2010, Victoria & Albert Museum

This 18th-century bedcover was probably a professional commission, yet amateur examples are just as impressive

The notion of women’s work has undergone a revolution, and yet that revolution has, in many ways, come comfortably full circle. We may now celebrate the work of generations of women who, limited to the domestic realm, were perhaps also liberated by...

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Tinie Tempah and the rise and rise of black British pop

A little revolution is taking place at the top of the pop charts. UK artist Tinie Tempah's rap track “Pass Out” has had two weeks at number one, and at the time of writing looks very much like it may successfully fight off Lady Gaga & Beyonce's...

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