thu 28/03/2024

London galleries

LS Lowry, Richard Green Gallery

How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully...

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Artist-run spaces enjoy the fun of the fair

Whilst acknowledging the huge impact the Frieze Art Fair has made on the cultural landscape of the capital since its inception in 2003, the frenzied annual event definitely doesn’t float every art lover’s boat. With about 170 – mainly blue-chip...

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 40 Years, 12 Exhibitions, Annely Juda Fine Art

A retrospective of an artist’s work is not usually a history of a working relationship, but in the case of Christo, this impressive exhibition of works from the past 40 years also marks two crucial partnerships: with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who was...

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Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual Arts

'Francis Bacon's Studio' by Charles Matton

There is nothing new, nor inherently artistic, about making miniature models. Otherwise everyone who's ever stuffed a small ship into a glass bottle would be in the National Gallery. (Yes, Yinka Shonibare's fourth plinth ship-in-a-bottle outside the...

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Power of Making, Victoria and Albert Museum

Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the most surprising and exciting collections of contemporary stuff on view for many a while. Some is functional, from coffins to bicycles, wine caskets, guns, bespoke shoes. Some would not be out of...

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Phyllida Barlow: RIG, Hauser & Wirth, London

Every surface in my house is covered in plaster and brick dust, and wood, sand, cement, plaster and wire mesh are strewn all over the place. Furniture, carpets and pictures are covered in dust sheets and piled into two sealed rooms. You’ve guessed...

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Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario, Artangel in Hoxton, N1

Will a crumpled piece of paper unlock the mystery of 'Locked Room Scenario'?

What are the most common responses to a work of contemporary art? I can think of two: “A six-year-old could have done that” (feel free to substitute “I” or “anyone”) and “But what does it actually mean?” Ryan Gander is an artist who is rather...

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Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead..., Tate Modern

Nezir Nukic, Zumra Mehic and the remains of Bajazit and Ahmedin Mehic

For her latest project, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, American photographer Taryn Simon spent four years searching out families the world over whose lives have been defined by circumstances largely beyond their control – not...

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Thomas Struth: Photography 1978-2010, Whitechapel Gallery

In Düsseldorf in the 1970s there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers – and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a proud art city, and published at the time a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The...

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Art for the Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake, National Gallery

We are still acknowledging our 21st-century debts to the energy, curiosity, determination and passion for discovery of a host of Victorian polymaths, and here is another. Sir Charles Eastlake (1793-1865) was a painter, scholar, author, collector and...

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The Jameel Prize, Victoria & Albert Museum

Hadie Shafdie's '26000 Pages' echoes the physical act of ecstatic recitation

Hadie Shafdie, Iranian-born and now living in America, uses phrases and words taken from mystical Sufi poetry, incantations of sequences of the names of the divine. She handwrites and prints the devotions, usually spoken or chanted, on thousands...

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Forests, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes, National Gallery

The National Gallery has in recent years made a speciality of examining the hitherto unexamined. Just for starters, a surprise hit some years ago was Spanish Still Lifes, 2007 saw Renoir Landscapes (who knew?), last year there was the ravishing...

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