Visual Arts Reviews

theartsdesk at the Edinburgh Art Festival

Caroline Boyle Wednesday, 07 August 2013

The highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is undoubtedly Peter Doig’s No Foreign Lands. As you enter the beautifully proportioned and wonderfully hung rooms of the Scottish National Gallery (until 3 November) the spirit of last year’s Festival exhibition of European Symbolist Landscape seems still to linger and has found its modern echo.

Conrad Shawcross: Timepiece, Roundhouse

Fisun Güner Saturday, 03 August 2013

Last time I encountered a work by Conrad Shawcross, it made me feel sick. His kinetic light sculpture, Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV, occupied a room the size of a broom cupboard at the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show. Inside a dense metal cage on spindly legs was a metal armature on which a high-wattage bulb was fixed.

Richard Rogers: Inside Out, Royal Academy, Burlington Gardens

Marina Vaizey Friday, 26 July 2013

Richard Rogers is addicted to colour. His wardrobe dazzles, and this biographical anthology opens with a selection of Rogers’ aphorisms and statements in bold black on a wall painted a coruscating knock-out fuschia. And then there are the buildings. Rogers, 80 this month, is now a world-famous multi-honoured “starchitect”. He has successfully practised for over 50 years.

Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth

Fisun Güner Thursday, 25 July 2013

It’s a huge cock! The Brits love double entendres. Maybe the Germans do too, but the Brits have cornered the market. Katharina Fritsch, the German artist behind the huge cock on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, has certainly played to our humour, but says she didn’t give a thought to the idea that the cockerel is a symbol of France.

Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, Nottingham Contemporary

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Undines, mermaids, selkies, nixies, kraken. You’ll encounter such imaginary creatures in Aquatopia, an exhibition which delves into the myths of the ocean deep, and thereby to the murky, fathomless depths of our subconscious. But more often than imaginary beings you’ll encounter real ones who’ve touched our imaginations by their unearthly appearance and tapped into our deepest fears and desires, which means, naturally, our sexual desires. There’s a lot of octopus love going on.

Laura Knight: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Marina Vaizey Monday, 15 July 2013

Laura Knight’s wartime masterpiece Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring (1943) is a subtly glamorous picture, strikingly composed. A frieze of blue-clad women at an armament factory workbench are in the background, highlighting the profiled figure of Ruby tending her elaborately complex machine, at an oblique angle to the picture plane.

The Spirit of Utopia, Whitechapel Gallery

Sarah Kent Friday, 12 July 2013

Some artists seem to need a reality check. The Spirit of Utopia is billed as a show of artists “who speculate on alternative futures for society, the economy and the environment”; but anyone anticipating cogent analysis or visionary ideas will be disappointed. The exhibition consists of a bunch of dreamers who imagine that an art context gives social significance to weak or wacky ideas. It doesn’t.

Comment

Collecting Gauguin, Courtauld Gallery

Marina Vaizey Sunday, 07 July 2013

A one-room display at the Courtauld of seven paintings, a wall of woodcuts, some drawings and a sculpture by the passionate and volatile Gauguin: for all its modesty, this is a staggeringly powerful show, replete with exotic dreams and embodying the power of the artist’s lasting influence.

Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910-1940, Royal Academy

Sue Hubbard Thursday, 04 July 2013

Artists love a good revolution. The social upheaval, the bubbling up of new ideas and the breaking down of old ones, attracts them like flies to fly paper. The Mexican revolution was no exception. During the years 1910-1940, Mexico attracted large numbers of international intellectuals and artists, seduced by the political maelstrom and apparent freedoms that beckoned in this culturally diverse and varied land.

Vermeer & Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, National Gallery

Marina Vaizey Wednesday, 03 July 2013

Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society at all levels than the Golden Age of Dutch culture in the 17^th century.

Music is emblematic of time passing and its accompaniment, mortality