Visual Arts Reviews
Berlinale 2014: Cathedrals of CultureFriday, 14 February 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... |
Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern /ICAWednesday, 12 February 2014
Some artists are diminished by major retrospectives, including those artists we consider great. A gap opens up between what you see and what you hear, which is why you can never judge work with your ears, or at least your ears and nothing else. Read more... |
Hockney: Printmaker, Dulwich Picture GallerySunday, 09 February 2014
David Hockney has been a printmaker for almost as long as he’s been a painter. Read more... |
Bailey's Stardust, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 08 February 2014
Several hundred photographs, of varying scales and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints in superb tones of greys blacks and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years. Read more... |
Richard Deacon, Tate BritainWednesday, 05 February 2014
A retrospective is often a daunting prospect for all concerned, not least the poor visitor who must prepare for a gruelling marathon, visiting every forgotten cul-de-sac of an artist’s career. Read more... |
Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner, Turner ContemporarySunday, 02 February 2014
Helen Frankenthaler is often presented as being both a stepping stone between art movements and as an artist who fell – because such things matter in the tidy narratives of art history – between the cracks of various American isms. Frankenthaler, who made her name in the fertile New York art scene of the early Fifties and who died in 2011, found success and fame early, but then had the possible misfortune to be seen as a “transitional figure”. Read more... |
Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? Hayward GalleryWednesday, 29 January 2014
If you're suffering from the January blues, hurry to the Southbank Centre where Martin Creed’s exhibition is bound to make you smile. The man best known for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 by switching the lights on and off at Tate Britain has filled both floors of the Hayward Gallery with things that not only lift the spirits but reveal how to make magic from virtually nothing. Read more... |
Derek Jarman: Pandemonium, Somerset HouseSunday, 26 January 2014
It is 20 year since Derek Jarman died of an AIDs-related illness. To commemorate the event King’s College London, where he studied English and History, is staging Pandemonium – an exhibition, a symposium, a 24-hour installation in the ornate chapel and coach trips to Prospect Cottage in Dungeness where Jarman retreated after discovering he was HIV positive and created an idiosyncratic desert garden in the shingle. Read more... |
Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness, BBC FourWednesday, 22 January 2014
If you’re going to make a programme about the Rococo, that ornate and playful decorative arts movement that began in France at the start of the 18th century and flourished under the French king Louis XV, naturally you’d want to start in Bavaria. Or perhaps not. But Waldemar Januszczak does, heading off with his bag-on-a-stick and his lolloping gait in the nature of a weary pilgrim to visit a German Rococo splendour or two in stone and pastel-coloured stucco. Read more... |
Giorgio de Chirico: Myth and Mystery, Estorick CollectionWednesday, 22 January 2014
An exhibition of work by a giant of 20th-century painting cannot reasonably be expected to turn up too many surprises; the most we can usually hope for is a good proportion of lesser-known works to temper the “masterpieces”. To reveal a whole body of work hitherto ignored by art historians is something of a coup, but the Estorick Collection’s new show does just this, introducing over 20 sculptures that will be unknown to all but the most committed fans of Giorgio de Chirico. Read more... |
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