Visual Arts Reviews
Highlights from the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2017 - raw emotion, not always humanThursday, 16 November 2017
What does it take to be included in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition? This year 2,423 photographers entered 5,717 images: 2,373 of those photographers are left wondering what it takes to make the grade. Read more... |
Red Star Over Russia, Tate Modern review – fascinating history in a nutshellWednesday, 08 November 2017
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Tate Modern exhibition features an installation made in 1985 of a Moscow bedsit, its walls lined with political posters. Read more... |
Impressionists in London, Tate Britain review - from the stodgy to the sublimeTuesday, 07 November 2017
Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Read more... |
Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11, Imperial War Museum review - affecting but incoherentWednesday, 01 November 2017
The Imperial War Museum’s Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 brings together art made in response to the immediate events and long-term consequences of the events of 11 September. Read more... |
Monochrome, National Gallery review - colourless but not drearyTuesday, 31 October 2017
Might a painting ever achieve the veracity of a sculpture, a "real" object in space that we can walk around and view from every angle? Could the documentary quality of an engraving ever be equalled by a painting? And how could painting respond to photography – drawing with light – an invention that in the 19th century prompted a thorough reconsideration of painting’s purpose. Read more... |
Cézanne Portraits, National Portrait Gallery review - eye-opening and heart-breakingMonday, 30 October 2017
Some 50 portraits by Paul Cézanne – almost a third of all those the artist painted that have survived – are on view in this quietly sensational exhibition. Read more... |
Tove Jansson (1914-2001), Dulwich Picture Gallery review – more than MoominvalleyFriday, 27 October 2017
Born into an artistic Swedish-speaking household in Helsinki, Tove Jansson’s first, and most enduring, ambition was to be a painter. Although best known as the illustrator behind the creatures of Moominvalley, those plump white hippopotamus-like folk with an existential longing for adventure, Jansson came to regard her widely successful creations as a distraction from what she considered to be her “real work”. Read more... |
Soutine's Portraits, Courtauld Gallery review - a superb, unsettling showMonday, 23 October 2017
This is the latest in a line of beautifully curated, closely focused exhibitions that the Courtauld Gallery does so well. Its subject is the great Russian-French painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) who, remarkably, has not had a UK exhibition devoted to his work for 35 years. Read more... |
David Bomberg, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester review - a reputation restoredSaturday, 21 October 2017
During his time at the Slade David Bomberg — the subject of a major new retrospective at Pallant House Gallery — was described as a "disturbing influence". The fifth son of Polish-Jewish parents who fled the pogroms, he grew up at the turn of the 20th century in the East End of London where neighbours lived on top of one another and space was scarce. Read more... |
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Tate Modern review – funny, moving and revelatoryWednesday, 18 October 2017
The Kabakovs' exhibition made me thank my lucky stars I was not born in the Soviet Union. A recurring theme of their work is the desire to escape – from the hunger and poverty caused by incompetence and poor planning, and the doublethink required to survive under a regime that became ever more repressive the greater and more obvious its failings. Read more... |
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