Visual Arts Reviews
National Gallery of Ireland review - bigger and betterThursday, 22 June 2017
The marvellous National Gallery of Ireland, founded in the 1860s, has opened its doors to its brilliantly revamped, updated and expanded galleries. As a spectacular bonus in its opening summer, Vermeer and Masters of Genre Painting reposes in the enfilade of the newly re-done permanent galleries for temporary exhibitions. Read more... |
Fahrelnissa Zeid, Tate Modern review - rediscovering a forgotten geniusFriday, 16 June 2017
I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a prominent Ottoman family, many of whom were involved in the arts, she died in 1991. Read more... |
A Handful of Dust, Whitechapel Gallery review - grime does payWednesday, 14 June 2017
Why is dust so fascinating yet, at the same time, so repellent? Maybe the fear of choking to death in a dust storm or being buried alive in fine sand provokes a visceral response to it. My current obsession with dust comes from having builders in my home over the last seven months. Read more... |
Michelangelo: Love and Death review - how to diminish a colossusTuesday, 13 June 2017
As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Read more... |
Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! Serpentine GalleryFriday, 09 June 2017
The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors. Read more... |
The Discovery of Mondrian review - the most comprehensive survey everMonday, 05 June 2017
Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved. Read more... |
Jean Arp: Poetry of Forms review - subversive pioneer honoured in HollandThursday, 01 June 2017
This summer the wonderful Kröller-Möller museum in Otterlo hosts the first major Dutch retrospective of the works of Hans (Jean) Arp since 1960 – an exhibition that will travel in a marginally smaller version to Margate’s Turner Contemporary later this year. Read more... |
Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, British MuseumTuesday, 30 May 2017
With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art. Read more... |
Highlights from Photo London 2017 - virtual reality meets vintage treasureSaturday, 20 May 2017
At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography. Read more... |
Visual art at Brighton Festival - disturbing, playful, but ultimately rudderlessThursday, 18 May 2017
As befits a festival with a spoken word artist as its guest curator, storytelling is at the heart of the visual arts offer in the 2017 Brighton Festival. It is not known if performance poet Kate Tempest had a hand in commissioning these four shows, but she can probably relate to the four artists in town right now. Read more... |
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