Visual Arts Reviews
Mapplethorpe: Look at the PicturesMonday, 18 April 2016
“Look at the pictures”, yells apoplectic Senator Jesse Helms as he brandishes a clutch of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, “a known homosexual who died of AIDS”. It's 1989 and Senator Helms is doing his level best to close down an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati and have its director, Dennis Barrie, indicted for obscenity. Read more... |
James McNeill Whistler: Prints, The Fine Art SocietySunday, 17 April 2016
It can be given to few commercial galleries to have sustained a relationship with the same artist for over 130 years, but such is the link between The Fine Art Society and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Read more... |
Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979, Tate BritainSaturday, 16 April 2016
The exhibition starts promisingly. You can help yourself to an orange from Roelof Louw’s pyramid of golden fruit. Its a reminder that, for the conceptualists, art was a verb not a noun. Focusing on activity rather than outcome, these artists were committed to the creative process rather than the end product. The idea was what mattered, and if it led to an open-ended exploration, so much the better. Read more... |
Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography, Parasol UnitThursday, 14 April 2016
Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography focuses on two contrasting generations. Beginning in the 1970s, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld travelled America photographing things that are so ordinary, yet so odd, that they transcend the familiar to become surreal. And alongside them are five Europeans, 20 or so years younger who, by and large, seem glued to their computers. Read more... |
Dutch Flowers, National GallerySaturday, 09 April 2016
This exquisite exhibition reminds one of the sheer pleasure of looking. It is small – just 22 works in all – but it presents UK audiences, for the first time in almost a generation, with an opportunity to explore the art of Dutch flower painting, spanning nearly 200 years. In our everyday lives we enjoy flowers for their prettiness, their freshness and graceful fragility, but here we can be exhilarated and enraptured by them as well. Read more... |
Franciszka & Stefan Themerson, Camden Arts CentreThursday, 07 April 2016
Bertrand Russell’s History of the World is a charming little booklet that carries a chilling message: “Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he is capable.” A line drawing shows Adam and Eve sharing a neatly sliced apple followed by a comic depiction of medieval warfare. Next comes “The End” printed opposite a photo of a mushroom cloud. Read more... |
Strange and Familiar, BarbicanSunday, 03 April 2016
The Barbican has built a steady reputation for almost unclassifiable large-scale art exhibitions, particularly in architecture, design and photography: they have been underestimated pioneers, often working in areas themselves under-scrutinised. Thus they often manage to surprise, and so it is here. Read more... |
Highlights from the Portland Collection, Harley Gallery, WelbeckWednesday, 30 March 2016
Here be two modestly scaled masterpieces from the 1760s by George Stubbs, highlights of a centuries-old tradition of painting the horses owned by the Dukes of Newcastle and their lateral descendants the Dukes of Portland (the Devonshires are also connected in a grand web of aristocratic marriages). Stubbs was commissioned by the third Duke of Portland (1738-1809), William Cavendish-Bentinck, indisputably one of the grandest in the land: a politician and a multi-billionaire in today’s terms... Read more... |
Des canyons aux étoiles, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, BarbicanThursday, 24 March 2016
Art can inspire music, and vice versa. When concert (as opposed to theatre or film) scores are accompanied by images, however, the effect dilutes the impact of both; above all, the imagination stops working on the visual dimension created in the mind's eye. Read more... |
Russia and the Arts, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 21 March 2016
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of orientation for those approaching Russian culture, and with it the country’s history and character, without particular advance knowledge. Read more... |
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