Visual Arts Reviews
Cathedrals of CultureMonday, 13 October 2014
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”. Read more... |
Listening, BALTIC 39, Hayward TouringFriday, 10 October 2014
Traditionally, art exhibitions have been about looking, but as more and more artists cross boundaries to engage with sound, touch and movement or to use film and video, work that is static and silent is becoming the exception rather than the rule. Read more... |
Sigmar Polke: Alibis, Tate ModernThursday, 09 October 2014
England is in the throes of an unusual Teutonic love fest, and in 2014 no doubt deliberately. Music of course has always been omnipresent: Bach to Wagner, and a passion for Beethoven and Schubert that knows no bounds. But there has been a love-hate relationship with the visual arts. We are somewhat uncomfortable with the Northern Renaissance, preferring the Italian, and as for expressionism, that was, for a long time, far too blatantly emotionally strident and in your face. Read more... |
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, British LibraryWednesday, 08 October 2014
We all romanticise the olden times. Those we think of as belonging to them are no different. The Castle of Otranto – by common consent, the first Gothic novel – was published a quarter of a millennium ago. “Otranto ‘lost its maidenhead’ today,” wrote its author Horace Walpole. To him, if not to us, the 1760s reeked of modernity so he claimed that this was a true story plucked from a cobwebbed Neapolitan library in 1529 – that is, a quarter of a millennium before. Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer, Royal AcademySunday, 05 October 2014
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. Read more... |
Constructing Worlds, Barbican Art GalleryThursday, 02 October 2014
“The minute I touched New York,” wrote Berenice Abbott, “I had a burning desire to photograph the city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same but always changing.” Read more... |
Turner Prize 2014, Tate BritainTuesday, 30 September 2014
When did Big Ideas make a comeback at the Turner Prize? Did they ever go away? In its 30-year history it seems that everything that wasn’t painting has been labelled “conceptual art”. But we know that labels can be very misleading, and the “conceptual” in “conceptual art” obviously need not apply. Read more... |
Ming: 50 Years That Changed China, British MuseumMonday, 29 September 2014
Here be dragons, and plum blossoms in moonlight, model chariots, 15th-century paper money, weaponry and armour, embroidered robes, blue and white porcelain, vivid portraits of the court eunuchs, obese emperors and impassive empresses. There is many an unexpected subject, too: the most tenderly rendered depiction of a giraffe, a gift from the ruler of Bengal for the Imperial menagerie, with the animal dwarfing his devoted attendant. Read more... |
Constable: The Making of a Master, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 27 September 2014
This revelatory exhibition goes in search of the revolutionary magnificence which infused Constable’s compelling landscapes through an unusual prism. The narrative spine is clear. It follows Constable’s intense work playing upon as profound a knowledge of the Old Masters as was possible at the time, and reconciling it with, as he phrased it, the greatness of nature from which all originality must spring. We see nothing, he said, until we fully understand it. Read more... |
Was it right to censor Exhibit B?Wednesday, 24 September 2014
So, Exhibit B, the controversial “human zoo” using black actors to re-enact the role of ethnographic exhibits – semi-naked, chained, silenced by metal masks and degraded in metal collars – has been cancelled, due to the presence of protesters. Read more... |
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