wed 28/05/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Ben Rivers: Earth Needs More Magicians, Camden Arts Centre

Sarah Kent

Filmmaker Ben Rivers is drawn to outsiders and misfits, people who prefer solitude over society and live in shacks in the sticks rather than bungalows in the suburbs. Living in the Kent cottage she shared with her painter husband Roy Oxlade until his death last year, Rose Wylie hardly fits the bill; yet one can see why Rivers was drawn to her.

Read more...

Ai Weiwei, Royal Academy

Fisun Güner

Ai Weiwei’s first major survey in the UK is a better looking exhibition than I had anticipated, but what it gains in looks it sadly lacks in substance – backstory and information not being quite the same.

Read more...

The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern

Florence Hallett

There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the comforting bright colours and clean, supermarket-aisle lines blackened, singed and fragmented as if salvaged from some unimaginable disaster.

Read more...

Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, British Museum

Fisun Güner

Unlike Venice, where colour reigned supreme among artists such as Titian and Veronese, Florence was the city where drawing – disegno – was held up as the cornerstone of the artist’s education. Think of the well-defined musculature of Michelangelo’s figures. Florentine artists of the Renaissance practiced an art of detailed precision, mastering clarity of line and structural rigour.

Read more...

The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium, Parasol Unit

Florence Hallett

From its title, you could be misled into dismissing this show as narrow and self-referential: a small exhibition in a small gallery curated by a Belgian artist concerned only with his own countrymen. In fact, it is something of a survey, featuring works with influences that range from Piet Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt and Lucio Fontana, to the Color Field painters.

Read more...

Soup Cans and Superstars, BBC Four

Marina Vaizey

Pop went the easel, and more, as we were offered a worldwide tour – New York, LA, London, Paris, Shanghai – of the art phenomenon of the past 50 years (still going strong worldwide). We were led by a wide-eyed interlocutor, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Alastair Sooke, to the throbbing beat of – what else? – pop music, Elvis and much else besides.

Read more...

Shirley Baker, Photographers' Gallery

Florence Hallett

When a photographer is as little known as Shirley Baker, it is probably only natural that we scour her work for clues to the personality behind the camera. Certainly, Baker’s photographs of inner city Salford and Manchester, taken over a period of 20 years, seem to offer as full and intriguing a picture of Baker herself as of the disappearing communities she was committed to recording.

Read more...

Alice Anderson, Wellcome Collection

Sarah Kent

A flight of golden stairs gleams seductively under the spot lights; free of architectural constraints, it serves no practical purpose other than to encourage the mind to wander and perhaps to imagine it as the stairway to heaven. The beauty, simplicity and purity of the structure promise a trouble free ascent to astral spheres; one can almost hear the strings of angelic harps twanging celestial harmonies up above. 

Read more...

Out of Chaos: Ben Uri - 100 Years in London, Somerset House

Marina Vaizey

The exhibition Out of Chaos is a powerful dose of specific human experience, here presented almost exclusively in the form of portraits and group scenes. The selection comes almost entirely from the more than 1,300 works of art owned by Ben Uri Gallery, whose centenary commemoration this is; the gallery was founded in 1915, primarily to explore the work of Jewish artists in Britain.

Read more...

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, Royal Academy

Fisun Güner

Whimsical, twee, sentimental. For those who love Joseph Cornell’s boxes, it’s hard to imagine that there are those who just don’t. “What? You mean you don’t like Cornell’s boxes because you think they’re whimsical? Twee? Sentimental?”

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park review - into the st...

Thankfully, Julia Burbach’s version of The Flying Dutchman for Opera Holland Park doesn’t try to be one of those concept-laden...

The Frogs, Southwark Playhouse review - great songs save upd...

As a regular theatregoer, you learn pretty quickly that there’s no story too bizarre to work as a...

Album: Sally Shapiro - Ready to Live a Lie

Ready to Live a Lie is so sonically vaporous it almost isn’t there. While the album’s 11 tracks draw from continental European musical...

Il Trittico, Opéra de Paris review - reordered Puccini works...

So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico”. Which would be...

When the Light Breaks review - only lovers left alive

Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic...

Marwood, Crabb, Wigmore Hall review - tangos, laments and an...

James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a...

Dennis, RSNO, Dunedin Consort, Søndergård, Usher Hall, Edinb...

"How long is Wagner’s Ring Cycle?" That’s not the opening to a joke, it’s a genuine question asked by a friend who I’d met up with before heading...