painting
Sarah Kent
It’s been a long time since an exhibition made me feel physically sick. The Hayward Gallery is currently hosting a retrospective of the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara and the combination of turquoise walls and oversized paintings of cute kids turned my stomach over. Kitsch has that kind of power.It can also command high prices on the international market and Nara’s pictures sell for vast sums. In 2019 Knife Behind Back, a slick rendition of a grumpy girl in a red dress, sold at auction for £20 million. Since then, his prices have shrunk to a mere £9 million – still not bad for a product that Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Botanical forms, lurid and bright, now tower above a footpath on a moor otherwise famed for darkness and frankly terrible weather. But the trio of 5m-high contemporary sculptures grow in place here, drawing life from limestone soil. These metallic buds, blooms and supersize tubers reflect a deep, tropical past that predates the very English landscape we now associate with this part of the world.So artist Vanessa da Silva invites you to reconnect with 300 million years of history by sitting here a while. When the sun is out, as it was on the opening weekend of Bradford 2025, you might reflect Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On walking into Mikalene Thomas’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery my first reaction was “get me out of here”. To someone brought up on the paired down, less-is-more aesthetic of minimalism her giant, rhinestone-encrusted portraits are like a kick in the solar plexus – much too big and bright to stomach. Could I be expected to even consider accepting these gaudy monstrosities as art?A brash assault on the senses, they seemed to be daring me to turn away. Then came two installations – recreations of the living room in the terraced house in Camden, New Jersey where the artist grew up in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Donald Rodney’s most moving work is a photograph titled In the House of My Father, 1997 (main picture). Nestling in the palm of his hand is a fragile dwelling whose flimsy walls are held together by pins. This tiny model is made from pieces of the artist’s skin removed during one of the many operations he underwent during his short life; sadly he died the following year, aged only 37.His body was crumbling under the onslaught of sickle cell anaemia, a disease that almost exclusively affects people of African descent and for which there is no known cure. In one of his notebooks, beside a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping has frequently attracted more attention than the artworks they produced. But in their Vanessa Bell retrospective, the MK Gallery has steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle. Thankfully, this allows one to focus on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.The first picture you encounter was painted during a family holiday in Cornwall and dates back to 1900, the year before Bell became a student at the Royal Academy. Two thatched cottages cling to a steep slope by the sea. Punctuated only by the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...
Art, Theatre Royal Bath review - Yasmina Reza's smash hit back on tour 30 years after Paris premiere
Gary Naylor
For men, navigating through life whilst maintaining strong friendships is not easy (I’m sure the same can be said for women, but Yasmina Reza’s multi-award winning play, revived on its 30th anniversary, is most definitely about men). What brings blokes together – work, sports, pubs – is seldom founded on deep emotional connections, though it can be and sometimes does morph into that. Consequently in most cases, it doesn’t need much to upset the applecart, with a trivial contretemps blowing up unexpectedly.For longstanding pals, Serge, Marc and Yvan, that ‘not much’ is a painting Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Whether you believe that Ellen Brammar’s play, Modest, newly arrived in London from Hull Truck Theatre, succeeds or not, rather depends on your criteria for evaluating theatre. On storytelling, character development and nuance, it is two and a half hours that goes nowhere. On representation, audience appeal and addressing past injustices, well, the reaction in the house to this Middle Child and Milk Presents collaboration will confirm that the job is done.Elizabeth Thompson’s The Roll Call was the sensation of the Royal Academy’s 1874 Summer Exhibition. Owing something to Gustave Courbet and Read more ...
Paul Rider
Donna Fleming’s exhibition at the Pie Factory Gallery in Margate is called Apocalypse, which is confusing because it has nothing to do with the end of the world. Fleming does not even watch the news because she “does not want to think about miserable things”. Instead the title refers back to the Greek word that apocalypse is derived from, apokalypsis, which means uncovering.At first it’s not exactly clear what is being uncovered. There’s a lot to take in. There is six years’ worth of work in the show and Fleming is prolific, working in a wild array of different media. She trained at the RCA Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This rather disappointing documentary about the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has such a dry parade of experts and such a slow linear narrative that it leaves plenty of time to be frustrated by all that’s been left out.Made by the veteran arts documentarian Phil Grabsky for the Exhibition on Screen series, the film features undated on-camera interviews with Hopper and his wife. How difficult would it have been to caption them with a date and a source? And despite following a conventional chronological structure – birth to death – we don’t get much sense of when Hopper Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There stands Lucian Freud in Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait), 1965 (main picture) towering over you, peering mercilessly down. Is that a look of scorn on his face or merely one of detachment? His two kids seem to be squirming and giggling beneath their father’s unblinking stare. Who wouldn’t be, especially when the huge lamps hanging overhead are reminiscent of an interrogation chamber? All the better to see you with, my dear.Portraits, or rather paintings of people, were Lucian Freud’s speciality. He spent 70 years relentlessly scrutinising his own and his sitter’s faces and Read more ...