Visual arts
Renaissance Impressions, Royal AcademyTuesday, 18 March 2014
Georg Baselitz might seem an unlikely connoisseur of 16th-century prints, but since the Sixties the controversial German artist has amassed a collection of chiaroscuro woodcuts to rival that of any museum. His interest in Renaissance prints emerged... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Bilbao: Yoko Ono at the Guggenheim MuseumSunday, 16 March 2014
Addressing a crowd of journalists gathered at the press launch of her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Yoko Ono begins by telling us how cynical she is. It’s quite a claim considering it’s just about the last thing you’d ever think to... Read more... |
Remembering Derek JarmanSunday, 16 March 2014
It was very odd, in January this year, to see that Super-8 camera of Derek’s in a glass case and a few open notebooks in his beautiful italic handwriting in some other glass cases in the same room. There were five or six small-scale projections from... Read more... |
Georg Baselitz, Gagosian Gallery/British MuseumWednesday, 12 March 2014
Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is... Read more... |
Hito Steyerl, ICAMonday, 10 March 2014
Hito Steyerl is a cool cookie. As well as studying film and television in Munich, she gained a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and her intelligence shines through in every magical frame of her videos. Three are on show at... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Florence: Pontormo and Rosso FiorentinoSunday, 09 March 2014
Sadly, the name may not mean much. Jacopo Pontormo is a Florentine painter whose fate it was to come of age in the years after the high tide of the High Renaissance. Its vast shadow has left him languishing in second-division obscurity. Every day in... Read more... |
Ruin Lust, Tate BritainWednesday, 05 March 2014
The first room of Ruin Lust is a knockout. Three large-scale pictures indicate the enduring fascination that ruins have held for artists over the centuries. John Martin’s apocalyptic view of Vesuvius smothering Pompeii in a vast cloud of volcanic... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Marrakech Biennale: "Where Are We Now?"Wednesday, 05 March 2014
Whether fingerprint or labyrinth, the swirly logo for Marrakech Biennale 5 feels apt. The festival has left its mark upon the city. It questions Moroccan notions of identity. And, going by the tagline, “Where are we now?” it reflects the ease with... Read more... |
Listed: The Vikings - Life and LegendTuesday, 04 March 2014
The British Museum's exhibition The Vikings: Life and Legend promises to redefine the Viking age for a new generation. First seen at the National Mueum in Copenhagen, it has now travelled - much as the show's subjects once did - across the North Sea... Read more... |
The Great War in Portraits, National Portrait GallerySunday, 02 March 2014
Telling a story through an exhibition can be a bad idea, partly because it seems a little pedestrian but mainly because it runs the risk of using art as illustration, glibly treating paintings as if they were objective visual records. In its title,... Read more... |
Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance, National GalleryWednesday, 26 February 2014
Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance finds the National Gallery in curiously reflective mood. Taking as its subject the gallery’s own mixed bag of German Renaissance paintings, the exhibition sets about explaining – and excusing – the... Read more... |
Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry, BBC FourMonday, 24 February 2014
Is Brutalism brutal? Pugnacious? Uncouth? The name was coined by English academic and architecture writer Reynor Banham – more on him in a moment – as a play on the French béton brut (literally raw concrete) and the English “brute”, and hence... Read more... |
