Visual arts
caroline.boyle
The highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is undoubtedly Peter Doig’s No Foreign Lands. As you enter the beautifully proportioned and wonderfully hung rooms of the Scottish National Gallery (until 3 November) the spirit of last year’s Festival exhibition of European Symbolist Landscape seems still to linger and has found its modern echo.The rooms are flooded with colour and dramatic atmosphere. On large canvases the layers of colour appear to billow, bleed, swirl, drift and fade into one another, tonally quivering and shimmering. They awake spectral memories of other paintings from Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last time I encountered a work by Conrad Shawcross, it made me feel sick. His kinetic light sculpture, Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV, occupied a room the size of a broom cupboard at the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show. Inside a dense metal cage on spindly legs was a metal armature on which a high-wattage bulb was fixed. It looped the air at speed and the room, which was marked by lines that warped one’s sense of perspective, appeared to shrink and expand at a dizzying rate, or perhaps as if you yourself were growing and shrinking. It was hugely disorientating, but also – in between the waves of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Richard Rogers is addicted to colour. His wardrobe dazzles, and this biographical anthology opens with a selection of Rogers’ aphorisms and statements in bold black on a wall painted a coruscating knock-out fuschia. And then there are the buildings. Rogers, 80 this month, is now a world-famous multi-honoured “starchitect”. He has successfully practised for over 50 years. He is a leader in collaborative high-tech designs, some of them painfully expensive and difficult to maintain, and simultaneously a passionate ecologist. Throughout the show there is an emphasis on the life as well as Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s a huge cock! The Brits love double entendres. Maybe the Germans do too, but the Brits have cornered the market. Katharina Fritsch, the German artist behind the huge cock on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, has certainly played to our humour, but says she didn’t give a thought to the idea that the cockerel is a symbol of France. Hence, one giving the eye to Nelson, in the square that’s named after his decisive victory in 1805, might give it a double frisson, and perhaps even ruffle a few feathers – though you’ve got to be an incredibly stuffy bore not to enjoy that sense of friction Read more ...
fisun.guner
Undines, mermaids, selkies, nixies, kraken. You’ll encounter such imaginary creatures in Aquatopia, an exhibition which delves into the myths of the ocean deep, and thereby to the murky, fathomless depths of our subconscious. But more often than imaginary beings you’ll encounter real ones who’ve touched our imaginations by their unearthly appearance and tapped into our deepest fears and desires, which means, naturally, our sexual desires. There’s a lot of octopus love going on.Katsushika Hokusai’s famous erotic print of 1814, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (pictured below), shows a woman Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
The capital of Mozambique pulls no punches. Parked at the old airport among sheaves of wild grass are old MiG fighter planes, as sculpturally beautiful as the massive monument made from decommissioned weapons a few hundred metres away. The new airport, a multi-million pound effort completed last year with significant Chinese help, has Dom Perignon champagne for $230 a bottle. That’s twice the national annual wage. Sculptures made from decommissioned weaponry are known as war art. Mozambique’s most famous son is the war artist Gonzalo Mabunda, a sculptor in his thirties who has exhibited Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Laura Knight’s wartime masterpiece Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring (1943) is a subtly glamorous picture, strikingly composed. A frieze of blue-clad women at an armament factory workbench are in the background, highlighting the profiled figure of Ruby tending her elaborately complex machine, at an oblique angle to the picture plane. Unashamedly a celebration of a positive triumph over inescapable necessity, the image emphasises achievement, and doesn’t indicate the inescapable monotony, noise and general rough hub-bub of the working conditions.Ruby is beautifully made up with bright red Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Some artists seem to need a reality check. The Spirit of Utopia is billed as a show of artists “who speculate on alternative futures for society, the economy and the environment”; but anyone anticipating cogent analysis or visionary ideas will be disappointed. The exhibition consists of a bunch of dreamers who imagine that an art context gives social significance to weak or wacky ideas. It doesn’t.Theaster Gates believes a gallery “should be an open space that questions modes of production, systems of power, and access to the imagination for everyone” – a laudable goal that should inspire Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’m watching someone with a mic pacing the linking bridge on the second floor of the Arndale Shopping Centre. He’s repeating the same phrase over and over again, which he’ll do for the next 20 or so minutes. “We’re souls refreshed,” I think it is. Nearby, sitting cross-legged, Lotus fashion, is a girl who, like the man with the mic, is wearing white cotton gloves. In front of her are three stones, painted white, on a white handkerchief, and two hymnals. These props play a small part in the action, such as it is.Watching him, pacing, intoning imperfectly, catching his breath and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A one-room display at the Courtauld of seven paintings, a wall of woodcuts, some drawings and a sculpture by the passionate and volatile Gauguin: for all its modesty, this is a staggeringly powerful show, replete with exotic dreams and embodying the power of the artist’s lasting influence.Exotic landscapes and primitive interiors are infiltrated by scenes of languorous naked women, the colour of milk chocolate, cross-legged on the floor, stretched on a couch, bathing in a pool, awkward odalisques, impassive goddesses or acquiescent mistresses. Gauguin was one of the ultimate escape artists, Read more ...
Sue Hubbard
Artists love a good revolution. The social upheaval, the bubbling up of new ideas and the breaking down of old ones, attracts them like flies to fly paper. The Mexican revolution was no exception. During the years 1910-1940, Mexico attracted large numbers of international intellectuals and artists, seduced by the political maelstrom and apparent freedoms that beckoned in this culturally diverse and varied land.For many European artists Mexico seemed like a primitive (if somewhat fictional) Nirvana, with its stunning scenery, indigenous culture and mysticism that fed the modernist appetite for Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society at all levels than the Golden Age of Dutch culture in the 17th century.Music is emblematic of time passing and its accompaniment, mortalityMusic was part of the entertainment in brothels, bawdy houses, taverns, inns, part of the energetic goings-on of the working classes, and also profoundly integrated into the life and mores of the burgeoning Read more ...