painting
YZ Kami, Gagosian GalleryTuesday, 14 April 2015![]() The 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... |
Jo Baer, Camden Arts CentreSunday, 12 April 2015![]() At 86, Jo Baer is still painting vigorously. In the mid 1960s, she was an established New York Minimalist along with artists like Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt; but while they continued to explore abstraction, she changed tack – dramatically, or so it... Read more... |
Ellen Altfest, MK GalleryFriday, 10 April 2015![]() MK Gallery has a knack for showcasing mid-career artists before any other public space and this is Ellen Altfest’s first survey in the UK. There are 22 paintings here which, given their demands on her time, represent a significant proportion of the... Read more... |
Ravilious, Dulwich Picture GalleryMonday, 06 April 2015![]() Look at me, and think of England. This marvellous array of quirky, idiosyncratic watercolours by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) from the 1930s until his premature death during wartime when his plane, on an air sea rescue mission for which he had... Read more... |
Mikhail Rudy, Kings PlaceSaturday, 28 March 2015![]() Opening It’s All About Piano!, a short but packed festival shared between Kings Place and the Institut français in Kensington, Mikhail Rudy made a rare appearance in the UK. The premise was unusual if hardly revolutionary, a meeting of music and... Read more... |
Joshua Reynolds, Wallace CollectionSaturday, 21 March 2015![]() The grand but domestic setting of Hertford House, home of the Wallace Collection, makes a fitting backdrop to an exhibition of paintings by Joshua Reynolds. The Marquesses of Hertford acquired some 25 paintings by Reynolds in the artist's lifetime,... Read more... |
Richard Diebenkorn, Royal AcademyMonday, 16 March 2015![]() Made an Honorary Royal Academician just a few months before he died, in 1993, it’s taken till now for a posthumous Royal Academy survey to finally bring one of the absolute greats of American postwar painting to a UK audience. Of course, for those... Read more... |
Picasso: Love, Sex and Art, BBC FourThursday, 26 February 2015![]() So, Picasso’s last words turned out not to be, “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore” – yes, those famous last words that inspired a Paul McCartney dirge – but were, according to this TV biography looking at Picasso’s... Read more... |
Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, Tate ModernTuesday, 03 February 2015![]() "My fatherland is South Africa, my mother tongue is Afrikaans, my surname is French, I don’t speak French. My mother always wanted me to go to Paris. She thought art was French because of Picasso. I thought art was American because of Artforum... I... Read more... |
Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, Whitechapel GalleryFriday, 16 January 2015![]() From 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... |
Rubens: An Extra Large Story, BBC TwoSaturday, 03 January 2015![]() The ebullient presenter, writer and director Waldemar Januszczak opens his enthusiastic and proselytising hour-long film on Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) by reading out a series of disparaging quotes from other artists. William Blake thought... Read more... |
Best of 2014: ArtTuesday, 30 December 2014![]() We commemorated the centenary of the start of the First World War and we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year also marked a 70th anniversary for the D-Day landings. So it was oddly fitting that the London art... Read more... |
