fri 29/03/2024

Serpentine Gallery

Barbara Kruger, Serpentine Gallery review - clever, funny and chilling installations

American artist Barbara Kruger started out as a graphic designer working in advertising, and it shows. Her sharp design skills and acute visual intelligence now produce funny, clever and thought provoking installations in which words and pictures...

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Grenfell by Steve McQueen, Serpentine Gallery review - a stirring memorial for the tower block inferno

The fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington on 14 June, 2017, with a death toll of 72, is still under investigation. The dead were largely recent immigrants to the UK. The tragedy, it’s clear now, was caused by an unholy...

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Rose Wylie: Quack Quack, Serpentine Gallery - anarchy at 83

Three years ago Rose Wylie won the prestigious John Moore’s Painting Prize. She was 80 years old and had been painting away in relative obscurity for many decades. You might suppose, then, that the prize was given in recognition of past...

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Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! Serpentine Gallery

The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors. If Grayson Perry is to top that, as the title of his Serpentine Gallery show optimistically predicts,...

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Zaha Hadid, Serpentine Gallery

It is appropriate that this exhibition of Zaha Hadid’s early drawings and paintings should be shown at the Serpentine’s Sackler Gallery, which adjoins the restaurant she designed in 2013. The white, curvilinear extension was one of the first...

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Alex Katz, Serpentine Gallery

Black Brook, 2014, is sublime. Two bands of acid-green grass frame a horizontal band of deep-violet water that appears to have hidden depths. Dotted randomly over the darkness are clusters of light blobs; they could be floating leaves or reflections...

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Hilma Af Klint, Serpentine Gallery

Celebrating the four ages of man, eight huge, semi-abstract paintings create a carnival atmosphere in the Serpentine’s central gallery. The freshness of Childhood is characterised by flowers, petals and stamens floating on a blue ground. The...

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Jimmie Durham, Serpentine Gallery

The first thing you encounter is a ballot box bolted to the lid of a school desk; what or whom you might be voting for – apart from the hope of change – is not specified. In the eyes of Jimmie Durham, change is badly needed; in fact, most of the...

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Marina Abramović: 512 Hours, Serpentine Gallery

I’ll admit, there's a scene that made me well up during the excellent Marina Abramović biopic The Artist is Present. If you've seen it you’ll know the scene I mean – it’s where Ulay, Abramović’s former partner, in art and in life, takes the seat...

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Sturtevant: Leaps, Jumps and Bumps, Serpentine Gallery

Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries. Borrowed from the BBC’s...

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Thomas Schütte: Faces and Figures, Serpentine Gallery

On the evidence of this Serpentine exhibition of huge sculptures, small sculptures, photographs, drawings, watercolours and prints, the German artist Thomas Schütte is obsessed, but obsessed, with faces. It is billed as the first show to focus...

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Hans-Peter Feldmann, Serpentine Gallery

Oh yes, I remember it well. Luise Kimme, a German sculptor who shared my flat in the early 1970s, used to buy plaster copies of Michelangelo’s David, paint them garish colours and give them to friend as presents. More a conceptualist than a lover of...

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