Visual Arts Features

'I photographed Nelson Mandela'

Jillian Edelstein Friday, 06 December 2013

In 1997 I was in South Africa working on Truth and Lies, my book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when the New York Times Magazine said that they were doing a major feature on Mandela. He’d been in office for three years. The photographs were taken in the presidential house, the former seat of the oppressors. It felt very surreal for me because even the décor was Cape Dutch furniture. It was not what you might imagine for a black president.

Turner Prize 2013: Laure Prouvost's work is visually seductive, funny and clever

Fisun Güner Tuesday, 03 December 2013

According to one broadsheet, Laure Prouvost was a “rank outsider” and the money was on comic doodler David Shrigley and the elusive Tino Seghal, he of those ghastly, utterly patronising performances designed to jolt the guileless gallery-goer from his or her imagined complacence.

Her narratives are ambiguous, layered, unreliable, fragmented

Art and poetry: the image makers

Tim Cumming Sunday, 01 December 2013

When it comes to a blank page, artists and poets lead different kinds of lives and leave different kinds of marks. One for the eye, one for the ear, but both dependant on the thrill of recognition. The word, like paint, can be worked and reworked until the delight of a new image, a fresh metaphor in its right setting rings from the twisted garbage of lines in a notebook.

theartsdesk in Dunkirk: The spirit of FRAC

Marina Vaizey Wednesday, 27 November 2013

Those French and their grand projects! Not the least of them is the division of the country into 23 areas who acquire their own collections of international contemporary art, supplemented by a national loan collection, all under the rubric of FRAC, Fondation Régionale d’Art Contemporain. This 30-year programme has just opened a massive six-storey gallery as a brand new public face for the regional collection of the Nord-pas-de-Calais in the slightly forlorn city of Dunkirk.

Comment

theartsdesk in Amsterdam: Being Kazimir Malevich

Claudia Pritchard Saturday, 23 November 2013

All eyes were on the Rijksmuseum when it re-opened in April after a 10-year refurbishment, but across the Museumplein, Amsterdam's gallery of contemporary and modern art, the Stedelijk, was already settling into its new look, unveiled six months before.

Listed: Who shot/staged/fictionalised JFK?

theartsdesk Saturday, 16 November 2013

On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime defector to the USSR called Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone old enough to remember is said to know where they were when they heard. As America dealt with its trauma, the conspiracy theories started,and spawned well over 1,000 books. The assassination also became the focus for artists in all art forms - in literature, theatre, film and even music.

Lumiere Festival 2013, Durham

Fisun Güner Saturday, 16 November 2013

The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio.

Analogue - Rock Portraits by Tom Sheehan, Lomography Gallery Store East

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 13 November 2013

I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields.

Anthony Caro, 1924-2013

Fisun Güner Thursday, 24 October 2013

Sir Anthony Caro, who died on Wednesday of a heart attack aged 89, was an artist who remained not only active but inventive to the last.

Gallery: Derwent Art Prize

Fisun Güner Friday, 20 September 2013

You can use a computer to draw, as Hockney does, every day on his iPad, yet, despite all the technological advances the 21^st century has thrown our way, the pencil continues to be the artist’s most basic tool.