sun 15/06/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Artes Mundi Prize, National Museum Wales, Cardiff

Mark Hudson

An award for artists whose work engages with "social reality, lived experience and the human condition" has been won by a Mexican forensic technician whose works deals intimately with her country’s brutal drug wars. Britain’s most valuable art award to a single artist, the Cardiff-based Artes Mundi Prize, saw nominees this year from Cuba, England, India, Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden.

Read more...

Jean Dubuffet/ Gwen John and Celia Paul, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Marina Vaizey

Pallant House Gallery is an extraordinary hybrid, an elaborate and magnificent early 18th-century town house on a narrow Chichester street in the heart of the city, with a soberly elegant extension by Colin St John Wilson (2006) which houses one of the finest collections of 20th-century British art anywhere in the country. Nothing could be more powerful and intelligently surprising than its present unusual combination of shows.

Read more...

Death: A Self-Portrait, Wellcome Collection

Fisun Güner

Death terrifies and fascinates in equal measure: we fear both the journey and the void, but can’t help but poke and prod its weary carcass. That’ll be us soon, as sure as taxes. The promise of eternal life offers to take out death’s sting, and one wonders whether art, rather than offering a straightforward memento mori, really might have a similar function.

Read more...

Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, British Library

Marina Vaizey

A photograph from 1858 shows a feeble and frail octogenarian who happens to be the last Mughal emperor. Bahadur Shah II (pictured below right), reclining in his wretched prison in Delhi, awaiting trial, is about to be exiled to Burma.  Many of his family and his retinue would be summarily executed, the civilian population murdered, and a number of the great Mughal monuments of Old Delhi ruined.

Read more...

A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance, Tate Modern

Sarah Kent

A Bigger Splash... opens with Hans Namuth’s famous 1951 film of Jackson Pollock balletically dripping, flicking and pouring paint onto the canvas at his feet. Beneath the screen a long, scroll-like painting by Pollock lies on the gallery floor. The arrangement implies that this could be the painting the artist is creating on film while, subliminally, another message is being conveyed.

Read more...

Light from the Middle East: New Photography, Victoria & Albert Museum

Marina Vaizey

This compilation of nearly 90 photographs by 30 photographers from 13 different countries of the Middle East is literally and metaphorically illuminating. The Paris-based Iranian photographer Abbas puts it thus: “I write with light.”

Read more...

The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein, The Queen's Gallery

Fisun Güner

In what ways was the Northern Renaissance distinct from the Italian one? When we look at a painting by Holbein we’re struck by the painting’s rich surface: we admire the finely delineated weave of a Turkish rug, the individual hairs of fur lining a heavy coat, the intricate calligraphy of musical notation in an open hymn book. Since all is sumptuous surface and detail, our eyes feast upon the mass, weight and texture of objects firmly rooting us to the material world.

Read more...

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012, National Portrait Gallery

Marina Vaizey

The Taylor Wessing Photographic… well, you get the drift. It's quite a long title for what is now one of the most fascinating and wide-ranging exhibitions of photographs mounted in London, and which goes out on tour nationally next year.

Read more...

Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, National Gallery

Sarah Kent

"From today, painting is dead" was the forlorn conclusion of French painter Paul Delaroche on seeing a photograph for the first time in 1839. His gloomy prediction was premature, of course; more than 170 years on, the battle for supremacy is still raging.

Read more...

Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision, Courtauld Gallery

Marina Vaizey

Sensing economic opportunity, the Dutch artist Peter Lely (1618-1680) emigrated in his early twenties to London, and was thus the right man in the right place. After the early death of Sir Anthony van Dyck, followed by the Englishman William Dobson, Lely cleverly and charmingly utilised disarming ambition to open up a career for himself and become in due course the most successful painter of his time.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Music Reissues Weekly: Pilot - The Singles Collection

"It was really strange. Really quite conflicting, the sort of thing most bands didn't have to deal with. At the front, we'd have the kids who'd...

Tornado review - samurai swordswoman takes Scotland by storm

The opening images of Tornado are striking. A wild-haired young woman in Japanese peasant garb runs for her life through a barren forest...

Hamlet Hail to the Thief, RSC, Stratford review - Radiohead...

The safe transfer of power in post-war Western democracies was once a given. The homely Pickfords Removals van outside Number Ten...

Lollipop review - a family torn apart

On leaving prison, Lollipop’s thirtyish single mum Molly discovers that reclaiming her kids from social care is akin to doing lengths in...

Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons, Dulwich Picture Gallery review...

I first came across Rachel Jones in 2021 at the Hayward Gallery’s painting show Mixing it Up: Painting Today. I was blown away by the...

Album: The Young Gods - Appear Disappear

Swiss electro-rockers, Young Gods have been around for 40 years, but this in no way should suggest that they’ve gone soft in their old age. These...

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life review - persuading us that the...

Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the...

The King of Pangea, King's Head Theatre review - grief...

There’s an old theatre joke. “The electric chair is too good for a monster like that. They should send him out of town with a new...

Album: Sam Binga - Sam Binga Presents Club Orthodontics

When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which...