Visual Arts Reviews
Jasper Johns, Royal Academy review - a master of 50 shadesSaturday, 23 September 2017
The Royal Academy has a winning line in spectacular exhibitions that have become essentials in London, theatrically and dramatically revelatory presentations in themselves. Here is another winner, the American star Jasper Johns, a collaboration with the world’s newest gallery of contemporary art, the Broad in Los Angeles. Read more... |
Basquiat: Boom for Real, Barbican review - the myth exploredFriday, 22 September 2017
Beautiful, shy, charming and talented, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a shining star who streaked across the New York skyline for a few brief years in the early 1980s before a heroin overdose claimed his life at the age of only 27. Read more... |
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell Collection review - guilty pleasures at the National GalleryMonday, 18 September 2017
If only a modest fuss is being made about the rare and prestigious loan currently residing in Trafalgar Square, it could be that the National Gallery is keen to forget the role of its former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, in a row about art transportation that centred on the very collection to which these objects belong. Read more... |
Rachel Whiteread, Tate Britain review – exceptional beautyWednesday, 13 September 2017
The gallery walls of Tate Britain have been taken down so turning a warren of interlinking rooms into a large, uncluttered space in which Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are arranged as a single installation. What a challenge! And curators Ann Gallagher and Linsey Young are to be congratulated for pulling off this difficult feat so seamlessly. Read more... |
James Hamilton: Gainsborough - A Portrait review - an artistic life told with verve and enthusiasmSunday, 06 August 2017
James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of art historical study that often surrounds such a major figure as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Read more... |
Matisse in the Studio, Royal Academy review - a fascinating compilationFriday, 04 August 2017
A 19th-century silver and wood pot in which to make chocolate, pertly graceful; 17th-century blue and white Delftware; a Chinese calligraphy panel; a 19th-century carved wooden god from the Ivory Coast; a bronze and gold earth goddess from South-East Asia. These are but a tiny sampling from the multitude of objects with which Matisse surrounded himself in his studio(s). Read more... |
Trajal Harrell: Hoochie Koochie, Barbican review - flamboyant and mesmerisingSaturday, 22 July 2017
Two performers rush down the stairs and sweep through the audience, their designer outfits splaying out as they speed elegantly around the gallery and disappear as quickly as they came. Thus begins a series of performances that are an intriguing mix of flamboyant narcissism and minimalist restraint. Read more... |
Rose Finn-Kelcey: Life, Belief and Beyond, Modern Art Oxford review - revelation and delightWednesday, 19 July 2017
Rose Finn-Kelcey was one of the most interesting and original artists of her generation. Yet when she died in 2014 at the age of 69, she could have disappeared from view if she not spent the last few years of her life assembling a monograph about her work. Read more... |
The Encounter, National Portrait Gallery review - dazzlingly evocative drawingsFriday, 14 July 2017
As a line flows or falters, registering each slight change in pressure, pause, or occasional reworking, it seems to offer a glimpse into the mind of the artist at work. The line is the instrument of the artist’s eye, the often unpolished, provisional nature of a drawing offering a spark and freshness that tends to gradually lessen as a composition is rethought and worked up in paint. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Antwerp: Richard Deacon says nothingTuesday, 11 July 2017
Something like a parked zeppelin sits on three mirrored legs on a museum lawn in Belgium. It’s a cigar-shaped steel fabrication that, were it to float free of its three legs, could also pass for a UFO. But given the context - a sculpture park outside Antwerp - we can rest easy. Never Mind is a work of art by Richard Deacon. Read more... |
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