Visual Arts Reviews
Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life, Tate Modern review – beautiful ideas badly installedSaturday, 13 July 2019
At their best, Olafur Eliasson’s installations change the way you see, think and feel. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Londoners would take off their togs to bask in the glow of an artificial sun at Tate Modern. That was in 2003, when The weather project transformed the Turbine Hall into an indoor park suffused with yellow light. Read more...
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Takis, Tate Modern review - science and art collideFriday, 12 July 2019
Half organic, half high-tech, a bank of magnet-flowers sways not in response to a breeze, but to a magnetic field. Their uncannily naturalistic movements are coupled with a form that is blatantly functional: an unseen, elemental force masquerades as nature at its most benignly pastoral (Pictured below right: Magnetic Fields, l969). Read more... |
Les Rencontres d’Arles 2019 review - strength in traditionThursday, 11 July 2019
With 50 curated exhibitions spread across the town, there is much to see at Arles. In an effort to whittle it down I asked the man in the press office what was hot. "The weather," he replied deadpan. Read more... |
BP Portrait Award 2019, National Portrait Gallery review - a story for everyoneWednesday, 10 July 2019
Once a year, the National Portrait Gallery gives us a slice of immediate social history presented in an array of contemporary painted portraits of the young, the old, and the inbetween. Read more... |
Never Look Away review - the healing potential of artWednesday, 03 July 2019
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing. Read more... |
Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy review – strange and intriguingSaturday, 29 June 2019
Félix Vallotton is best known for his satirical woodcuts, printed in the radical newspapers and journals of turn-of-the-century Paris. He earned a steady income, for instance, as chief illustrator for La Revue blanche, which carried articles and reviews by leading lights such as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie. You can see the influence of Japanese prints in the flattened spaces, simplified shapes and unusual viewpoints that give a comic slant to scenes of Parisian life. Read more... |
Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, Dulwich Picture Gallery review - a cut aboveWednesday, 19 June 2019
Under a turbulent sky racked with jagged clouds suggesting bolts of lightning, pale figures hurl themselves into a spitting expanse of water. Swathed in white towels, other figures mingle with the pink bodies, seeming to process along the pier as if towards a baptism. Swimmers’ vigorous arms overtop their submerged heads; on land, no individual face is distinguished. As if exuberance could tip at any time into anarchy, a sense of threat pervades the depiction of communal leisure. Read more... |
Francis Bacon: Couplings, Gagosian Gallery review - sex and power in double figuresFriday, 14 June 2019
Forthright and often disturbing, Francis Bacon’s “male couplings” are also ambiguous, and it is this disjunction that gives them their power.
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Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery review – a shamblesThursday, 13 June 2019
Kiss My Genders may not claim to be a survey, yet it seems perverse to mount an exhibition of work by LGBTQ artists who address issues of gender identity without including some of the best known names. Read more... |
Edouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday, Holburne Museum, Bath review - dizzying pattern and colourTuesday, 11 June 2019
A beguiling collection of small paintings by Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) forms an exhibition from his early career. It is a vanished world of domesticity in a Parisian flat, where Vuillard lived with his mother, a seamstress, for almost all his life. In his fifties, he told a friend that his mother was his muse. Read more... |
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