abstract art
The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium, Parasol UnitMonday, 14 September 2015From its title, you could be misled into dismissing this show as narrow and self-referential: a small exhibition in a small gallery curated by a Belgian artist concerned only with his own countrymen. In fact, it is something of a survey, featuring... Read more... |
Barbara Hepworth, Tate BritainWednesday, 24 June 2015One of the earliest surviving sculptures by Barbara Hepworth is a toad made from a khaki-coloured, translucent stone; you can imagine it cool and heavy in your hand, not so very different from the animal itself, in fact. Made nearly 30 years later,... Read more... |
Philip Guston, Timothy Taylor GallerySunday, 21 June 2015Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his... Read more... |
Sonia Delaunay, Tate ModernWednesday, 15 April 2015In 1967 when she produced Syncopated Rhythm (main picture), Sonia Delaunay was 82; far from any decline in energy or ambition, the abstract painting shows her in a relaxed and playful mood. Known as The Black Snake for the sinuous black and white... Read more... |
YZ Kami, Gagosian GalleryTuesday, 14 April 2015The Iranian-born New York resident painter YZ Kami, now in his mid-fifties, continually plays with our hunger to look at “reality” while being seduced by abstraction and repetition. In 17 canvases, painted over the past two years, Kami explores two... Read more... |
Sotto Voce, Dominique LévySaturday, 14 February 2015Sotto Voce is a collection of white paintings, sculptures and reliefs made by European, British and North and South American artists from the 1930s to 1970s. An accompanying book explains why this non-colour has appealed to so many artists in so... Read more... |
Kraftwerk: Pop Art, BBC FourSaturday, 31 January 2015Some documentaries can feel like trying to view a desert landscape through a telescope. The need for tight focus on too large a subject can leave you constantly aware that there’s important stuff going on out of eyeshot. The stuff you can’t see... Read more... |
Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, Whitechapel GalleryFriday, 16 January 2015From an apparently simple idea stems a very confusing exhibition. Here’s the idea: taking the seminal black square painted by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich as its starting point – in fact, a rectangle, with the small and undated Black... Read more... |
Anthony Caro: The Last Sculptures, Annely JudaMonday, 22 September 2014Late Titian, Late Rembrandt, Late Picasso, Late Matisse…. What is it with Late that seems to give some artists a Golden Age irradiated by a kind of sublime carelessness, a genuine sense of anything goes? A life spent learning means that in the end... Read more... |
The Rules of Abstraction with Matthew Collings, BBC FourTuesday, 09 September 2014Artist and critic Matthew Collings purported to set out the rules of abstraction through taking the viewer on a very bumpy ride through 20th century painting, with a nod to Cézanne to get us started. He set the scene by telling us that abstraction... Read more... |
Mondrian, Turner Contemporary/ Tate LiverpoolSunday, 13 July 2014It’s 70 years since Mondrian died in New York, leaving unfinished his last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie, an ebullient title quite at odds with the buttoned-up asceticism we normally associate with this artist. The Courtauld Gallery showed a small... Read more... |
Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings, David ZwirnerFriday, 27 June 2014Bridget Riley’s mural for St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, which was unveiled in April this year, is something I’ve seen only in photographs. And on seeing it for the first time my reaction, I’m afraid, was, “Oh no". It obviously didn’t help that... Read more... |