painters
fisun.guner
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 places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink.While visiting the Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where art historian Dr Black (Bill Nighy) was holding forth about the marvels of the tormented Dutch genius, the Read more ...
fisun.guner
These days, it seems that approaching any new Saatchi exhibition, especially one that promises to be even bigger than all the previous ones held at the multi-galleried, three-storey Chelsea venue, makes the heart fairly sink. How much bigger, you want to ask, and why use size as a measure of anything? Surely there isn’t enough headspace to accommodate all those loud, clamorous, “look-at-me” artworks favoured by Saatchi all in one go? And this is just Part One. Part Two will be something to look forward to in late October. I’m probably not alone in feeling this. After all, this isn’t the Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 Picasso. In a landmark Liverpool exhibition focusing on the years 1944 to his death in 1973, and bringing together 150 works from around the globe, Picasso becomes all of these things. And having meticulously gone through the Picasso archives, curator Lynda Morris reveals an interpretative layer that has previously been ignored – or rather, the Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 distinguished biographer John Richardson and the artist’s grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, focuses on those Mediterranean years, between 1945 to 1962, when the artist was moving easily between styles. Organised around the works from the private collection of the Picasso family, it features paintings, sculptures, linocuts and ceramics that have come to be known Read more ...
josh.spero
Sincerity is not a quality the contemporary art world seems to value: the masking of emotions under layers of irony is where we stand. But while Damien Hirst paints from a cynical palette, British Pop Artist Stuart Semple's Nineties-inflected paintings have sincerity to spare.The Happy House, his new show at Morton Metropolis and his first in London for three years, combines the commercial tropes of Pop Art as refracted through a certain naffness with self-portraits both visual and emotional. This is clear in the show’s outstanding picture, A Pounding Outside Poundland, where Semple recreates Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Next week sees the opening of an exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art of new work by Maggi Hambling, one of the most innovative and prolific - not to mention flamboyant - artists working in Britain today, which neatly coincides with a show of sea paintings at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. You can see a selection in theartsdesk's gallery. Born in 1945, she has a reputation for being fierce and she’s certainly imposing – had she opted for a career in the performing arts she’d have given Edith Evan’s Lady Bracknell a run for her money – but she’s also Read more ...
hilary.whitney
To accompany theartsdesk Q&A with artist Maggi Hambling by Hilary Whitney, this is a selection of pieces from two new exhibitions of her latest work opening in London and Cambridge. Maggi Hambling: New Sea Sculptures at Marlborough Fine Art coincides with The Wave, an exhibition of Hambling’s wave paintings at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. These paintings, sculptures, etchings and reliefs (a new departure for Hambling) energetically capture the restless motion of the sea and demonstrate Hambling’s increasingly bold way of working.
Click on the images to view them in a slideshow Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I’ve seen raping Popes, I’ve seen more naked guys dancing with waggling penises than I can count, I’ve seen naked breasts on dancing girls for what feels like all my adult life. But a man with a blood-stained prosthetic cock that looks like a baby’s bottle? A teacher munching a testicle off his pupil? Well, lor' love a duck.Daniel Kramer’s florid, lurid production of Pictures from an Exhibition, a collaboration with the Young Vic last year, made it to its partner theatre, Sadler’s Wells, this weekend, a creation where theatre, music and dance elaborately combine in a lustily gory trip into Read more ...
fisun.guner
Arshile Gorky found it almost impossible to finish a painting. Something would always call him back. So he would go back and would add and retouch and tinker around over several years - sometimes over the course of a decade or two. “When something is finished,” he once said, “that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for a while. The thing to do is... never finish a painting.”His early paintings, his figurative still-lifes, particularly - not the late, softly fluid, lyrical abstractions that would profoundly influence the course of American art - Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Richard Wright's work celebrates impermanence but his election last night as the 2009 Turner Prize winner - an award which brings with it a purse of £25,000 - has guaranteed it a sort of immortality. The Glasgow-based painter's major piece currently on display at Tate Britain is an enormous, luxuriant and ornate symmetrical fresco painted in shimmering gold leaf which commands the otherwise virtually empty room it occupies. Wright's is the most traditional of the four shortlisted shows at the Tate Britain. Conceived in response to the parameters of each individual space (a video on view at Read more ...
sheila.johnston
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 below to open the full view.
The entrance to the MOMA exhibition (photograph: Michael Locasiano)
The Green Man (1996-1998), oil and acrylic on canvas
Creature Series (1992), acrylic on canvas
Picasso Woman (1980-1990), pen and ink and watercolour on paper
The Nightmare Before Christmas: Sally (1993), Polaroid
Ramone (1980-1990), pen and ink, marker Read more ...