fri 04/04/2025

drawing

Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton

'They Teach us Nothing': The Chapman children gather round an artwork

It begins in a so-so fashion. The ground-floor gallery at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard features a sea of Constructivist sculptures on plinths. These are made from bits of torn cardboard and loo rolls, sloppily painted. Jake and Dinos Chapman love corny...

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Art Gallery: The Worlds of Mervyn Peake

Peake's 'The Mad Hatter's Tea Party', 1945

Best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968 and whose centenary is celebrated this year, was also an artist, an illustrator and a poet. As well as illustrating his own fiction (images 5-9), some of his finest drawings were...

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Marcel van Eeden, Sprueth Magers London

An article in this week's New Yorker bemoans the death of drawing in art. Why has the emphasis on craft, Adam Gopnik writes, been replaced by concept? He has evidently not seen the fantastic noirish drawings of Marcel van Eeden at Sprueth Magers in...

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Egon Schiele, Richard Nagy Gallery

Egon Schiele, 'Woman With Homunculus', 1910

Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls....

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Max Bill, Annely Juda Fine Art

'green square with migrated pythagorean triangles' (1982) by Max Bill, the missing link in modern art

Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at...

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Ivor Abrahams, Mystery and Imagination, Royal Academy

Ivor Abrahams' 'A Dream Within a Dream' has a Magritte-ish sense of illusionism

In this month of royal weddings, endless bank holidays and (possibly?) equally endless good weather, it can be hard to focus, so perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to catch up with a show that nearly got away. Instead of winsome blockbusters...

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Antoine Watteau, Royal Academy and Wallace Collection

As a young man searching for a way to make a living in Paris, Antoine Watteau briefly tried his hand at engraving fashion plates. He seems to have had a natural affinity for cloth and drew its folds and creases with such apparent ease that you can...

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Gabriel Orozco, Tate Modern

The show opens with his iconic 1991 piece, My Hands are My Heart, a double photograph of Orozco’s naked torso. In the first photograph his hands clutch a hidden object at chest-height; in the second the hands splay open to present to the viewer a...

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Ben Johnson: Modern Perspectives, National Gallery

Johnson working on 'Looking Back to Richmond House'

Oh dearie, dearie me. Modern Perspectives sounded like it had such promise. Running alongside the big Canaletto show in the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, two finished works and one work in progress by Ben Johnson are on show in Room One...

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Norman Rockwell's America, Dulwich Picture Gallery

'Tender Years - Treating a Cold', 1957 is typical of Norman Rockwell's gentle humour

Norman Rockwell’s America. What did it look like? At the height of Rockwell’s incredible fame as an illustrator, you might say it looked a lot like a movie still. Think of the films of Frank Capra, for instance: heartwarming scenes of family life...

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Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele, Royal Academy

'Sleeping Girl': 'A smile plays on her lips as if she is dreaming of a lover, whose scent, perhaps, she can still smell'

Treasures from Budapest – phew! It’s overwhelming. One staggers out quite cross-eyed and wobbly-kneed. There are over 200 works, for heaven’s sake. And so many Virgins: sweet-faced Italian Madonnas, austere Eastern European Madonnas, pallid German...

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The Body in Women’s Art Now: Flux, Rollo Contemporary Art

'Squiggles of paint energising the canvas seem to embody her sexual excitement': Cecily Brown's 'New Louboutin Pumps'

Flux, the second in a trio of exhibitions devoted to images of women by women, immediately grabs your attention with an in-your-face animation by Swedish artist Natalie Djurberg. Clay figures enact grotesque stories that have a nasty, fairytale edge...

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