Visual Arts Reviews
Picasso 1932: Love Fame Tragedy, Tate Modern review - a diary in paint?Thursday, 22 March 2018
Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection. Read more... |
Joan Jonas, Tate Modern review - work as elusive as it is beautifulWednesday, 21 March 2018
The American artist, Joan Jonas is one of the pioneers of performance art. Now 82, she is being honoured with a Tate Modern retrospective and Ten Days Six Nights, a festival of live art in which many of her performances are being recreated. Read more... |
Tacita Dean: Portrait, National Portrait Gallery / Still Life, National Gallery review - film as a fine artFriday, 16 March 2018
Sometimes you come across an artwork that changes the way you see the world. Tacita Dean’s film portrait of the American choreographer Merce Cunningham (main picture) is one such encounter. Read more... |
Victorian Giants, National Portrait Gallery review - pioneers of photographyThursday, 15 March 2018
It is a very human crowd at Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography. There are the slightly melancholic portraits of authoritative and bearded male Victorian eminences, among them Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle and Sir John Herschel. Read more... |
Murillo: The Self-Portraits, National Gallery review - edged with darknessTuesday, 06 March 2018
Mortality inflects commemoration. So it is with portraiture: the likeness – particularly those which celebrate lives of status and accomplishment – will always be limned with death. Read more... |
All Too Human, Tate Britain review - life in the rawSaturday, 03 March 2018
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray far from the brutal and disturbing. Read more... |
Another Kind of Life, Barbican review - intense encounters with marginal livesFriday, 02 March 2018
“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. Read more... |
Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World, Whitechapel Gallery review - handsome installationsFriday, 16 February 2018
On entering the gallery, you are greeted by the cheeping of birds. Read more... |
Emil Nolde: Colour Is Life, National Gallery of Ireland review - boats, dancers, flowersThursday, 15 February 2018
Colours had meanings for Emil Nolde. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.” As the son of a German-Frisian father and a Schleswig-Dane mother, Nolde was raised in a pious household on the windswept flat land on the border on Germany and Denmark that his family farmed. Read more... |
Andreas Gursky, Hayward Gallery review - staggering scale, personal perspectiveTuesday, 06 February 2018
“Let the light in” has been the fundraising slogan for the two-year project to revamp and modernise the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, and adjacent Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. And that is just what has happened, with two triumphs at the Hayward. Read more... |
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