Visual Arts Reviews
Fabio Mauri: Oscuramento, Hauser & WirthSaturday, 12 December 2015
Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an international reputation for work which features non-art materials in a raw state (hence the name "Poor Art"), Mauri has languished in relative obscurity – until now, that is. Read more... |
Secrets of the Mona Lisa, BBC TwoThursday, 10 December 2015
There’s a lot of breathless frontloading in television documentaries. The headlines promising shock and awe coming up are posted in the opening edit as a way of hooking in the remote-wielding viewer. Very often as presenters stump around history’s muddy digs or leaf through dusty old tomes, the revelations vouchsafed turn out to be a bit iffy, a bit yeah but no but so what? The hyperventilation is often a precursory guarantee of bathos. You’d be better off reading the book. Read more... |
Peggy Guggenheim: Art AddictTuesday, 08 December 2015
The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern and contemporary western art. Read more... |
The Amazing World of MC Escher, Dulwich Picture GalleryTuesday, 08 December 2015
Walls that are floors, floors that are walls, and stairs that go up to go down: in the brain-befuddling art of MC Escher (1898-1972) the mundane everyday meets a world of paradox in which the rules of gravity, space and material reality are thrown into disarray. Read more... |
Julia Margaret Cameron, Victoria & Albert Museum / Science MuseumMonday, 30 November 2015
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual and physical energy, and stamina. Stubborn and ambitious, for her class and gender she was unusually interested in business. Read more... |
Goya: Visions of Flesh and BloodMonday, 30 November 2015
"Exhibition on Screen" is a logical extension of the recent phenomenon of screenings of live performances of opera and theatre. Initiated with the Leonardo exhibition of 2012 at London’s National Gallery, this is its third season, and the format remains unchanged: a specific show provides the pretext for a bespoke film that goes beyond the gallery walls. Read more... |
Artist and Empire, Tate BritainFriday, 27 November 2015
There are some wonderful things in this exhibition, and that’s no surprise: the British Empire endured for over 500 years and at its peak extended across a quarter of the world’s land mass. Preparing an exhibition of corresponding reach must have involved considering a vast range of objects, but choosing well is another matter entirely. Read more... |
Visions of Paradise: Botticini's Palmieri Altarpiece, National GalleryTuesday, 24 November 2015
The strikingly architectural space that forms the upper portion of Botticini’s Palmieri altarpiece is well-suited to an entrance, forming as it does a sort of triumphal arch heralding great things beyond. And so it is that for years this painting hung over the entrance to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, oddly well-placed, but in truth of course, entirely out of place. Read more... |
Susan Philipsz: War Damaged Musical Instruments, Tate BritainSunday, 22 November 2015
Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries are currently filled with a hauntingly beautiful sound installation by Susan Philipsz (main picture). The Scottish artist won the Turner Prize in 2010 for a sound piece that didn’t really work at the Tate. Intended to be heard under the bridges spanning the River Clyde in Glasgow, the recording of Philipsz's fragile voice singing sad folk songs was largely drowned out by ambient noise. Read more... |
High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson, The Queen’s GalleryFriday, 20 November 2015
“High Spirits” is a multi-layered title: the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) was himself a heavy gambler and a heavy drinker, continually using up his material assets in such pursuits. His high spirits extended to the Georgian society he satirised with such robust good humour; high society and even low society attracted his interests, while he also expended enormous energy detailing political and sexual intrigues. Read more... |
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