thu 30/10/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Points of Departure, Brighton Festival 2021 review - Ray Lee's harbour-based sound art impresses

Thomas H Green

They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by conical horns that emanate a gentle angelic howling or lower end drone-hums.

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Rachel Whiteread: Internal Objects, Gagosian Gallery review - apocalyptic sheds

Markie Robson-Scott

Sheds have flourished in lockdown: they’ve always been places to escape to and in the past year, when spruced up as home offices, even more so. They’re also emblems of isolation.

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This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist, Netflix - the last word (for now)

Florence Hallett

It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age.

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Prix Pictet: Confinement review - a year in photographs

Florence Hallett

Sustainability and the environment are watchwords for the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize now in its ninth cycle.

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Pioneering Women, Oxford Ceramics Gallery online review - domestic pleasures

Marina Vaizey

Pioneering is an attractive adjective in this context, alerting the spectator to what has been, over the past half century, an extraordinary body of contemporary ceramics produced by women.

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Best of 2020: Visual Arts

theartsdesk

Unhappy as it is to be ending the year with museums and galleries closed, 2020 has had its triumphs, and there is plenty to look forward to in 2021.

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tate Britain review - enigmatic figures full of life

Sarah Kent

A person in a brown polo neck turns away, looking down (pictured below right). The encounter feels really intimate; we are almost breathing down this beautiful neck and exquisitely painted ear. Yet the subject retains their privacy; you can’t even be sure if this is a man or a woman.

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Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch, Royal Academy review - juxtapositions that confuse rather than clarify

Sarah Kent

Even before going to art school, Tracey Emin discovered the work of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. And even though he was born 100 years before her, she embraced him as a kindred spirit. One can see why.

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Zanele Muholi, Tate Modern review - photography as protest

Sarah Kent

Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is a powerful celebration of black identity. These dramatic assertions of selfhood are more than just striking self portraits, though.

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Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, Barbican Art Gallery review - mould-breaker, ground-shaker

Jenny Gilbert

It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment strand in Britain’s recent history but who is virtually unknown to today’s under-40s. Michael who?

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