fri 29/03/2024

Visual Arts Reviews

Edmund de Waal, Waddesdon Manor

Marina Vaizey

From Caro at Chatsworth and now de Waal at Waddesdon, the grandest of the stately homes are invigorating their historic collections with seasonings of the contemporary. Like Chatsworth, Waddesdon also has a growing permanent collection of contemporary sculpture housed in its famous gardens, from Michael Craig-Martin to Richard Long, as well as a small group of Lucian Freud indoors, including a portrait of the current Lord Rothschild.

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Picasso Prints: The Vollard Suite, British Museum

Fisun Güner

The Vollard Suite is Picasso’s most celebrated series of etchings. Named after Ambroise Vollard, the influential avant-garde art dealer who gave the 19-year-old Picasso his first exhibition in Paris in 1901, the series was commissioned by the dealer in 1930. For the next seven years Picasso worked on it in creative bursts, completing a series of 100 etchings.

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Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican

Sarah Kent

As an art school the Bauhaus has a reputation for being the cradle of modernism, famous for establishing an alliance between art and industry which produced enduring design classics such as Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs, Josef Albers’ silver and glass fruit bowl and Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe lamps. But that is only part of the story.

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Out of Focus: Photography, Saatchi Gallery

Sarah Kent

Exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery tend to start with a bang and end with a whimper; so to avoid the experience of diminishing returns, I started upstairs – hoping to save the best until last. The stratagem worked perfectly; my final encounter was with 20 portraits by American photographer Katy Grannan, undoubtedly the star of the show, that fill the first gallery to knock-out effect.

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Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2012

Caroline Boyle

If you choose to walk between the venues of the 2012 Glagow InternationaI Festival of Visual Art, the incredible energy of the place engulfs you and you begin to understand why so many artists have made it their home.  All eras of architecture and layers of the City’s history seem to be represented: you gawp at monolithic buildings which seem to rise and fall almost before your eyes, with gems from the past sandwiched as improbable survivors.

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Cotton: Global Threads, Whitworth Art Gallery

Fisun Güner

Manchester was once  known as Cottonopolis, since the city was once at the centre of the vast global industry reponsible for its growth and prosperity.The Whitworth Art Gallery, which is part of Manchester University, has in its collection a wealth of textiles, providing not just a colourful history of local cotton manufacture, but tracing the trade’s international links.

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Liza Lou, White Cube Hoxton

Steven Gambardella

There was something perverse about the opening of Liza Lou’s show at White Cube in Hoxton Square on a wet Thursday evening. It was as quiet as I’ve ever known it inside, while outside, barred from drinking among Lou’s fragile works, a throng of people guzzled free beer on the other side of the street in the rain.

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Ron Mueck, Hauser & Wirth

Sarah Kent

Yesterday I fell in love with a black boy less than half my age and half my size – or, rather, a sculpture of a black boy. At just over two feet tall, Ron Mueck’s Youth is utterly beguiling. His silken skin, slender fingers, low-slung jeans and paisley patterned underpants are seductive enough; what made me lose my head, though, was the suggestion of dirt under his neatly clipped toenails.

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Jamie Shovlin: Various Arrangements, Haunch of Venison

Josh Spero

I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics, intellectuals, paint applied by the artist himself.

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Hans-Peter Feldmann, Serpentine Gallery

Sarah Kent

Oh yes, I remember it well. Luise Kimme, a German sculptor who shared my flat in the early 1970s, used to buy plaster copies of Michelangelo’s David, paint them garish colours and give them to friend as presents. More a conceptualist than a lover of kitsch, I meanwhile set projects for my students requiring them to photograph every item of clothing in their wardrobes or to empty their bags and present the contents as self-portraits.

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