tue 24/06/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Jean Arp: Poetry of Forms review - subversive pioneer honoured in Holland

Alison Cole

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.

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Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, British Museum

Florence Hallett

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.

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Highlights from Photo London 2017 - virtual reality meets vintage treasure

Bill Knight

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.

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Visual art at Brighton Festival - disturbing, playful, but ultimately rudderless

Mark Sheerin

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.

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57th Venice Biennale review - riveting and bewildering

Alison Cole

Riveting and bewildering, the 57th Venice Biennale has just opened its myriad doors to the public with several thousand exhibits spread across Venice and its islands.

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Alberto Giacometti, Tate Modern

Marina Vaizey

Chain-smoking and charismatic, the painter, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived much of his life in Paris from his arrival there in his twenties. He was just in time for post-war cubism and pre-war surrealism, the energetic noisiness of the avant garde.

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Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors, Gagosian

Alison Cole

At 93, Picasso’s revered biographer, Sir John Richardson, has curated a vital new celebration of the artist’s life and work, focusing on one of his most enduring and delightful subjects, the Minotaur.

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Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains, V&A review – from innocence to experience and beyond

Adam Sweeting

The title of this exhibition is typical of Pink Floyd’s mordant view of the world, not to mention their sepulchral sense of humour.

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Richard Long: Earth Sky, Houghton Hall

Florence Hallett

“I’m a great opportunist,” says Richard Long, a statement that for all its economy brims with contradictions and possibilities. While his sculptures made in wild and far-flung places often look stumbled-upon, incidental, his method is so careful and considered, each gesture so meticulously planned, that opportunism seems hardly the word for it.

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Chris Ofili, National Gallery

Florence Hallett

Flashes of intense colour pulse rhythmically across the piece, contrasting with delicate washes and pools of watery pigment that seem to quiver plumply, set to run uncontrollably at any moment. Lines drawn fast and bold describe four figures, while more tentative, carefully made marks barely delineate a foot, and a bird in a cage.

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