Visual Arts Reviews
Brian Clarke - A Great Light, Newport Street Gallery review - a British master proves his worthWednesday, 28 June 2023
The artist Brian Clarke, surely one of the leading British artists of our time, has been all too readily dismissed as a mere craftsman. So much for being an outstanding and highly original painter who’s also done more for contemporary stained glass than any other artist in the world. Read more... |
Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now, Barbican review - going from strength to strength on an epic journeyMonday, 26 June 2023
Carrie Mae Weems is the first live black artist to have a solo show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, yet she is hardly known here at all. So the Barbican’s retrospective is timely, especially since, at 70, Weems is making her best work yet. Read more... |
Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, Hayward Gallery review - hope is what we need, but inspiration is a rarityThursday, 22 June 2023
Dear Earth, Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis is a mixed show of artists who address the parlous plight of our planet. The issue obsesses me, so anyone who braves the pitfalls of exploring this difficult subject has my sympathy. Read more... |
Life is More Important than Art, Whitechapel Gallery review - themes of arrival, belonging and departure unite fascinating mixed showWednesday, 21 June 2023
Standing just inside the door of the Whitechapel’s downstairs gallery is a luggage trolley laden with parcels (pictured below, right). Read more... |
Capturing the Moment, Tate Modern review - the glorious power of paintingThursday, 15 June 2023
Billed as “a journey through painting and photography”, Capturing the Moment reveals many ways in which artists have responded to photography – either by taking up the camera themselves, as did Candida Höffer, Andreas Gursky, Louise Lawler and Thomas Struth, or by making some superb paintings. Read more... |
Carey Young: Appearance, Modern Art Oxford review - in the eyes of the lawThursday, 15 June 2023
A visitor to the city wishes to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper blocks his entrance. The man petitions this imposing figure, who is only one of a series of legal bouncers. He is told there is gate after gate. He sits, he waits, he lies down, and eventually he expires. But not before making a close study of this implacable representative of the law. He even notes the fleas in the gatekeeper’s collar. Read more... |
Matter as Actor, Lisson Gallery review - living in a material worldFriday, 09 June 2023
It is fitting that I watch Otobong Nkanga’s performance on a stranger’s smartphone screen. Solid Maneuvers, 2015, is about the extraction of precious resources from the Namibian landscape. It is about the long-term devastation humans wreak on the natural world and the equally devastating consequences nature revisits on us.
Read more...
|
Moon Is the Oldest TV review - a fitting tribute to a visionary modern artistSaturday, 20 May 2023
Who created the term “electronic superhighway”? First described a system of linked communication that would become the internet? Envisioned a multichannel TV system where viewers chose for themselves what to tune into? Watch Amanda Kim’s excellent documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV and you find that the correct answer to all those questions is Nam June Paik. Read more... |
Sarah Sze: Metronome, Artangel at Peckham Rye station review - an installation of visual complexity and physical simplicityThursday, 18 May 2023
One of the great things about Artangel is the interesting sites which they seek out for the artworks they commission. The latest find is the disused waiting room at Peckham Rye station, a once gracious space with a vaulted ceiling, arched windows and two fireplaces, now ripped out. The space was later converted into a billiard hall, the sign for which is still visible on the staircase wall, but when that closed down in 1962, the room was left to rot. Read more... |
Isaac Julien: What Freedom is to Me, Tate Britain review - a journey from making documentaries to making artThursday, 04 May 2023
Isaac Julien was a student at St Martin’s School of Art when the Brixton riots broke out. Black youths took to the streets, frustrated by high rates of unemployment, police harassment, far-right intimidation and media hostility, and all hell was let loose. 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...
Album: Hifi Sean & David McAlmont - Twilight
It was only six months ago that Hifi Sean and David McAlmont released their Daylight album. A fine disc of summery dance pop that was...
The Marriage of Figaro, English National Opera review - long...
Who’s in and who’s not – on the secret, the joke, the relationship, the family, the club? That’s the fulcrum of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ ingeniously...
Second Best, Riverside Studios review - Asa Butterfield brin...
Your response to Barney Norris’s one-...
theartsdesk Radio Show 36 - legendary producer Joe Boyd disc...
The latest in Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic radio...
Mrs President, Charing Cross Theatre review - Mary Todd Linc...
The phenomenal global success of Six began when two young writers decided to give voices to the wives of a...
Album: Biig Piig - 11:11
Is there such a thing as a boundary between pop and alternative any more? The presence of strange characters like Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish and...
Onegin, Royal Ballet review - a poignant lesson about the pe...
It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of...
… Blackbird Hour, Bush Theatre review - an unrelentingly tou...
In a world tainted with racism and homophobia, the ...
Blu-ray: Stray Dog
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing...