thu 22/05/2025

Visual arts

Candy Gothic: Tim Burton, MoMA, New York

Though he has yet to make a perfect film, the director Tim Burton’s choice of Gothic and fantasy subjects and his deadpan, post-expressionist approach to them rightfully designate him an auteur of considerable genius. His 14 movies to date have...

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Art Gallery: Tim Burton, MoMA, New York

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and other stories (1998), pen and ink, watercolour on paper

To accompany our review of the spectacular and extensive exhibition dedicated to Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, we present a tiny selection of the 700-plus works on display there until 26 April 2010. Click on any of the images...

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Mutate Britain: One Foot in the Grove

The site by night

A 15ft aardvark constructed from raw timber with a light-up robotic face and gigantic hands is climbing up one of the support pillars of the Westway, next to the body of a full-sized helicopter the front of which has been shaped into a grinning...

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theartsdesk in the Emirates: A Cultural Arms Race

Water featured: I.M. Pei's Museum of Islamic Art

Rising spectacularly from the warm turquoise waters of Doha Bay, the building which is probably I.M. Pei’s final and perhaps his greatest work, the iconic Museum of Islamic Art, symbolises the cultural arms race among the Islamic Emirates strung out...

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theartsdesk in Rome: Building the Future, Slowly

The rapturous reception for Zaha Hadid’s groundbreaking, breathtaking new confection in Rome, Il Museo dell’Arte del XXIesimo Secolo - the 21st-Century Art Museum (MAXXI for short) - has reopened for the umpteenth time one of Italy’s favourite...

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Kienholz: The Hoerengracht, National Gallery

The National Gallery is on a roll. Having enjoyed the surprise hit of the autumn with The Sacred Made Real, an exhibition of 17th-century Spanish religious art, the gallery now makes its first foray into installation art with by far the grungiest...

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David Hockney, Nottingham Contemporary

Nottingham Contemporary is Britain’s newest art gallery. Built deep into a sandstone cliff in the city’s oldest site, its sturdy, squat exterior is clad in scalloped gold and pale green panels. Resembling your granny’s old net curtains, the green...

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What Is Beauty?, BBC Two

As questions go, "What is beauty?" is quite possibly only second to "What do women want?" in the frequency of its asking and in the difficulty of its answer. As the first programme in BBC Two and BBC Four’s Modern Beauty season, What Is Beauty?...

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Points of View: Capturing the 19th century in photographs, British Library

Printing Kodak, 1890: female staff mass-producing albumen prints made using eggwhites from 100 chickens in the yard

“Photography is a refuge for failed painters,” declared the French poet, Charles Baudelaire around 1862. Yet photography took over a century to become a genuine family member of the art world. The British Library was slow to capitalise on the...

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Photographic Gallery: Points of View, British Library

William Henry Fox Talbot, 1839, Photogenic Drawing of Flower Specimens: the delicate first step on the path to a major visual art

The British Library has for the first time created an exhibition from its unique photography archive of some 300,000 items, dating back to the first days of the process. Sue Steward reviews this major exhibition elsewhere, while here we present a...

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Graffiti Gallery: Crack & Shine

Graffiti is the only form of artistic self-expression that can get you both arrested and exhibited. Its most celebrated exponent, Banksy, is the subject of tabloid news speculation. The faces and names of most graffiti artists are even more of a...

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Tim Davies, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea

Cadet: Running at Preston (DVD installation): 'the artist runs in circles, filming the poppies, the grey uniforms, and gold lettering on the plinth'

Wales doesn’t figure high on the UK charts of art awareness, but one of its leading contemporary artists, 43-year-old Tim Davies, represents a generation who are producing significant, original work without approbation from the Hoxton or Shoreditch...

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