sun 06/10/2024

contemporary art

Taryn Simon: An Occupation of Loss, Islington Green review - divine lamentation

What a superb location for a performance! The flats on the north-east corner of Islington Green back onto a crummy atrium from which a staircase leads down to a vaulted, concrete pit (pictured below). A cross between a car park and a bull ring, or a...

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'There's a poetry in painting that gives endless possibilities'

It was always my dream to be an artist but I never expected to be a curator. Graduates considering vocations in critical and curatorial practice went to the Royal College of Art or studied art history at university. Not me: I trained at Chelsea...

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Tacita Dean: Portrait, National Portrait Gallery / Still Life, National Gallery review - film as a fine art

Sometimes you come across an artwork that changes the way you see the world. Tacita Dean’s film portrait of the American choreographer Merce Cunningham (main picture) is one such encounter. Occupying a whole room at the National Portrait...

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DVD/Blu-ray: The Mystery of Picasso

What a gallimaufry! The polymath Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prolific, obsessed and best-known artists in the history; in fact, without qualification, he remains the best-known, for his genius, his mastery of so many media, his public...

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Out from the Darkness: painting out prison

When I was sent to an adult high security prison aged 14 all the normal colour, shapes and movement that I saw around me each and every day as a child disappeared. It wasn’t there. Prison does that; it’s all straight lines, hard on the eye, hard to...

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Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Tate Modern review – funny, moving and revelatory

The Kabakovs' exhibition made me thank my lucky stars I was not born in the Soviet Union. A recurring theme of their work is the desire to escape – from the hunger and poverty caused by incompetence and poor planning, and the doublethink required to...

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Jasper Johns, Royal Academy review - a master of 50 shades

The Royal Academy has a winning line in spectacular exhibitions that have become essentials in London, theatrically and dramatically revelatory presentations in themselves. Here is another winner, the American star Jasper Johns, a collaboration with...

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Rachel Whiteread, Tate Britain review – exceptional beauty

The gallery walls of Tate Britain have been taken down so turning a warren of interlinking rooms into a large, uncluttered space in which Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are arranged as a single installation. What a challenge! And curators Ann...

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DVD: Every Picture Tells a Story

James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions. But these documentaries, several...

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h.Club 100 Awards: Art, Design and Craft - weaving magic at Dovecot Tapestry Studio

Art, design and craft is such a broad category that it is no surprise – even less a criticism – that most of the nominees comfortably inhabit just one of these areas of endeavour. Nominated principally in recognition of The Caged Bird’s Song, made...

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Rose Finn-Kelcey: Life, Belief and Beyond, Modern Art Oxford review - revelation and delight

Rose Finn-Kelcey was one of the most interesting and original artists of her generation. Yet when she died in 2014 at the age of 69, she could have disappeared from view if she not spent the last few years of her life assembling a monograph about...

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Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! Serpentine Gallery

The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors. If Grayson Perry is to top that, as the title of his Serpentine Gallery show optimistically predicts,...

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