Visual Arts Galleries
Art Gallery: Fourth Plinth CommissionFriday, 20 August 2010![]() A playful, subversive mood dominates the shortlist for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Most of the six proposals, in what is a very strong shortlist, play on notions of British identity, probing themes of heroism, heritage and conquest. The models, which include a cock (the winged variety), a cake and a kid on a rocking horse, were unveiled yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson. Two winners will be selected next spring, with the first appearing on the Plinth at the end of next year. The six are:... Read more...
|
Photo Gallery: A Century Apart, James Ravilious & John Wheeley GutchSaturday, 14 August 2010![]()
Life changes at such speed in cities that it seems as if all the world must move at the same pace. Photographs prove otherwise. Looking at the two portfolios of West Country photographs below, you could surely not readily believe that more than a century separates them. Read more... |
Photo Gallery: Bolshoi Ballet class by Charlotte MacMillanTuesday, 27 July 2010![]()
Charlotte MacMillan took these exclusive pictures last week of the Bolshoi corps de ballet in class. The pictures brought back memories of his training to English National Ballet's Kirov-trained principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev, as he prepares to perform Michael Corder's Cinderella at the Coliseum next month. Read more... |
Art Gallery: Terry Setch - LavernockWednesday, 30 June 2010![]() Terry Setch can lay claim to being the most underrated artist in Britain. Not that the Cardiff-based Londoner has been entirely neglected: acclaimed as one of Britain’s most powerful painters by his contemporary John Hoyland, he’s been garlanded with awards, granted a retrospective at The Serpentine and was recently made an RA. Yet Setch (born 1936) has still had nothing like the recognition he deserves as one of Britain’s most intelligent and inventive painters. And the crime for which he’s... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Howard Hodgkin - Time and PlaceThursday, 24 June 2010![]() Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Ray Lowry - London CallingWednesday, 16 June 2010![]()
It’s hard to believe that it’s 30 years since the release of The Clash's London Calling, an album that sounds as vital, immediate and relevant today as it did then. Yet there are probably people who remain more familiar with London Calling’s iconic cover than the music contained on the two discs of shiny black vinyl that came with it. Read more... |
Art Gallery: Rude Britannia - British Comic ArtThursday, 10 June 2010![]()
There’s a rich vein of comic and satirical humour that runs through British art. Hogarth set the trend in the mid-1700s and heralded a golden age of graphic satirists. These included the three masters of the form: Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruickshank. Read more... |
Art Gallery: Picasso Special - The Mediterranean YearsMonday, 24 May 2010![]()
The war was over, Picasso was finally free to leave the privations of Paris behind him and to spend more time in the South of France, marking a return to his Mediterranean heritage. Read more... |
Photo Gallery: A Landscape of WalesTuesday, 11 May 2010![]()
The Welsh landscape promoted by the tourist board is a known entity. Postcard photographers patrol its contours waiting for the rains to desist and the sun to peer out so that they can snap splendid estuaries, meadowed shores patrolled by a lone diesel train, elegant county towns hibernating in the fold of a loafy hill, aqueducts and crumbling abbeys, beetling peaks and labyrinthine ravines. Read more... |
Art Gallery: Maggi Hambling - Sea Sculptures and PaintingsSaturday, 01 May 2010![]() To accompany theartsdesk Q&A with artist Maggi Hambling by Hilary Whitney, this is a selection of pieces from two new exhibitions of her latest work opening in London and Cambridge. Maggi Hambling: New Sea Sculptures at Marlborough Fine Art coincides with The Wave, an exhibition of Hambling’s wave paintings at the Fitzwilliam Museum... Read more... |
Pages
latest in today

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...

The slightly overwrought subtitle gives a good indication how computer enthusiast Sam Arbesman treats his subject. Software, written...

Although Mary Halvorson leads the sextet Amaryllis on About Ghosts, instrumentally, she does not place her guitar to the fore. The first...

It’s a sign of the inroads that the term “immersive” has made in theatreland that it now gets jokily namedropped at the...

This thrilling production of Saul takes Handel’s dramatisation of the Bible’s first Book of Samuel and paints it in...

If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in...

The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-...

Eva Quartet are four outstanding Bulgarian voices of polyphonic purity and depth, drawn from the legendary choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, who...

In those seemingly long-ago times of loneliness and lockdown, artists around the world invited us into their kitchens and living rooms as they...