pop art
Christian Marclay, White CubeThursday, 05 February 2015Christian Marclay is best known as the author of Video Quartet, 2002 the most exciting artist’s video ever made. The four-screen extravaganza juxtaposes more than 700 clips from Hollywood movies of people singing, dancing and playing instruments not... Read more... |
DVD: HockneyTuesday, 16 December 2014Since David Hockney entered his eighth decade (he is now 77), we seem to have witnessed an accelerated output of major exhibitions, biographies and documentaries. The public appetite has never tired of this most tireless of artists, but it’s an... Read more... |
Sci-Fi Week: Through the eyes of JG BallardFriday, 28 November 2014A sci-fi special would be incomplete without the profoundly influential figure of JG Ballard, a writer who, when he began his career in the late Fifties, fully subscribed to the notion that “sci-fi is the literature of the 20th century.”... Read more... |
HockneyFriday, 28 November 2014David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital... Read more... |
Allen Jones, Royal AcademyThursday, 13 November 2014There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the... Read more... |
Richard Tuttle, Tate Modern / Whitechapel GalleryThursday, 16 October 2014It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its... Read more... |
Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern /ICAWednesday, 12 February 2014Some artists are diminished by major retrospectives, including those artists we consider great. A gap opens up between what you see and what you hear, which is why you can never judge work with your ears, or at least your ears and nothing else. The... Read more... |
Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman, Pallant House GalleryWednesday, 04 December 2013This exhibition makes me very sad. And not just because the subject of this long overdue survey died at the age of 28, and so left behind a body of work that stretches to only two very small galleries in the current exhibition, but because it does... Read more... |
CD: Julia Holter - Loud City SongSaturday, 24 August 2013This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of... Read more... |
Patrick Caulfield/Gary Hume, Tate BritainWednesday, 05 June 2013Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) is the greatest late 20th-century British painter the international art world has never heard of. This quietly magnificent exhibition of about 35 paintings, most of them very large, may at last bring about a... Read more... |
Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, Tate ModernTuesday, 19 February 2013Towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, there is a small abstract painting, Untitled, 1959, executed just before the artist found himself at the heart of the Pop Art movement. The painting is, by any measure, a failure.... Read more... |
Andy Warhol: The Portfolios, Dulwich Picture GalleryMonday, 25 June 2012The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in... Read more... |