sat 15/03/2025

Visual Arts reviews, news & interviews

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Theartsdesk

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic team of arts and culture writers went ahead with an ambitious plan – to launch a dedicated internet site devoted to coverage of the UK arts scene.

Echoes: Stone Circles, Community and Heritage, Stonehenge Visitor Centre review - young photographers explore ancient resonances

Mark Sheerin

Stonehenge is about 5,000 years old; three photographic artists currently exhibiting in the visitor centre are all under the age of 25. The juxtaposition of 21st century and the ancient world has been facilitated by Shout Out Loud, a youth engagement programme from English Heritage, custodians of this historic monument. In collaboration with Photoworks, this gives rise to the first ever exhibition of new photography at the site.

Hylozoic/Desires: Salt Cosmologies, Somerset...

Sarah Kent

The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across...

Mickalene Thomas, All About Love, Hayward Gallery...

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...

Interview: Polar photographer Sebastian Copeland...

Rachel Halliburton

Sebastian Copeland’s images of the Arctic may look otherworldly – with their tilting cathedrals of ice, hypnotic light, and fractured seascapes that...

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Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, Whitechapel Gallery review - absence made powerfully present

Sarah Kent

Illness as a drive to creativity

Noah Davis, Barbican review - the ordinary made strangely compelling

Sarah Kent

A voice from the margins

Best of 2024: Visual Arts

Sarah Kent

A great year for women artists

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review - an exhaustive and exhausting show

Sarah Kent

Flashing lights, beeps and buzzes are diverting, but quickly pall

ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetime

Sarah Kent

Despite anticipating disaster, this mesmerising voyage is full of hope

Vanessa Bell, MK Gallery review - diving into and out of abstraction

Sarah Kent

A variation of styles as the Bloomsbury artist breaks free from Victorian mores

Lygia Clark: The I and the You, Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation, Whitechapel Gallery review - breaking boundaries

Sarah Kent

Two artists, 50 years apart, invite audience participation

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, Tate Modern review - adolescent angst indefinitely extended

Sarah Kent

The artist who refused to grow up

Monet and London, Courtauld Gallery review - utterly sublime smog

Sarah Kent

Never has pollution looked so compellingly beautiful

Michael Craig-Martin, Royal Academy review - from clever conceptual art to digital decor

Sarah Kent

A career in art that starts high and ends low

Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers, National Gallery review - passions translated into paint

Sarah Kent

Turmoil made manifest

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent, Whitechapel Gallery review - photomontages sizzling with rage

Sarah Kent

Fifty years of political protest by a master craftsman

Dominique White: Deadweight, Whitechapel Gallery review - sculptures that seem freighted with history

Sarah Kent

Dunked in the sea to give them a patina of age, sculptures that feel timeless

Bill Viola (1951-2024) - a personal tribute

Mark Kidel

Video art and the transcendent

In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s, Royal Academy review - famous avant-garde Russian artists who weren't Russian after all

Sarah Kent

A glimpse of important Ukrainian artists

Francis Alÿs: Ricochets, Barbican review - fun for the kids, yet I was moved to tears

Sarah Kent

How to be serious and light hearted at the same time

Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free, Whitechapel Gallery review - a sweet and sour response to horrific circumstances

Sarah Kent

Seething anger is cradled within beautiful images

Laura Aldridge / Andrew Sim, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh review - lightness and joy

Mark Sheerin

Two Scottish artists explore childhood and play

Judy Chicago: Revelations, Serpentine Gallery review - art designed to change the world

Sarah Kent

At 84, the American pioneer is a force to be reckoned with

Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920, Tate Britain review - a triumph

Sarah Kent

Rescued from obscurity, 100 women artists prove just how good they can be

Brancusi, Pompidou Centre, Paris review - a sculptor's spiritual quest for form and essence

Mark Kidel

The Paris landmark signs off with a historic survey

Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, Tate Modern review - a missed opportunity

Sarah Kent

Wonderful paintings, but only half the story

Eye to Eye: Homage to Ernst Scheidegger, MASI Lugano review - era-defining artist portraits

Mark Sheerin

One of Switzerland's greatest photographers celebrated with a major retrospective

Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a multi-media artist

Sarah Kent

Melanie Manchot's debut is strikingly intelligent and compelling

Footnote: A brief history of british art

The National Gallery, the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Collection - Britain's art galleries and museums are world-renowned, not only for the finest of British visual arts but core collections of antiquities and artworks from great world civilisations.

Holbein_Ambasssadors_1533The glory of British medieval art lay first in her magnificent cathedrals and manuscripts, but kings, aristocrats, scientists and explorers became the vital forces in British art, commissioning Holbein or Gainsborough portraits, founding museums of science or photography, or building palatial country mansions where architecture, craft and art united in a luxuriously cultured way of life (pictured, Holbein's The Ambassadors, 1533 © National Gallery). A rich physician Sir Hans Sloane launched the British Museum with his collection in 1753, and private collections were the basis in the 19th century for the National Gallery, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the original Tate gallery and the Wallace Collections.

British art tendencies have long passionately divided between romantic abstraction and a deep-rooted love of narrative and reality. While 19th-century movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian Gothic architects paid homage to decorative medieval traditions, individualists such as George Stubbs, William Hogarth, John Constable, J M W Turner and William Blake were radicals in their time.

In the 20th century sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers embody the contrasts between fantasy and observation. More recently another key patron, Charles Saatchi, championed the sensational Britart conceptual art explosion, typified by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The Arts Desk reviews all the major exhibitions of art and photography as well as interviewing leading creative figures in depth about their careers and working practices. Our writers include Fisun Guner, Judith Flanders, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Sue Steward and Josh Spero.

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