Visual Arts Reviews
Punk on Show: Was England Dreaming?Monday, 17 September 2012
On the 35th anniversary of the year punk met the mainstream, it’s to be expected that retrospection and nostalgia are in the air. Television has had a go, albums are being reissued and old soldiers are telling their stories. By its very nature an anniversary suggests that things were cut and dried, that 1977 was a beginning or a marker in the sand. Read more... |
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, Tate BritainWednesday, 12 September 2012
The vividly dramatic story of Isabella, from a poem by Keats (in turn from Boccacio’s Decameron,) crying over her lover Lorenzo, who, base born, was murdered by her brothers, was much admired by the Victorians. The tale is not for the squeamish: the widowed mistress resolutely dug up the corpse and detached the head, which she then buried in a pot of basil. Read more... |
Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings/A Survey of Photographs, Gagosian GalleryTuesday, 11 September 2012
There are two exhibitions of Cy Twombly's work at Gagosian Gallery right now. One is fine and will detain you for a few minutes. The other is exactly the revelation we want to refresh and enhance Twombly for his afterlife. Read more... |
Art of Change: New Directions from China, Hayward GallerySunday, 09 September 2012
At the Hayward Gallery a young woman falls over backwards; her flight is magically arrested at a gravity-defying point of imbalance. Since she is blinking, one can safely assume that she is alive, present, and human rather than a waxwork or an illusion. How, though, does she sustain such an impossible position? Read more... |
John Berger: Art and Property Now, Somerset HouseSaturday, 08 September 2012
John Berger isn’t a man who has suffered through appearing to take himself massively seriously. His way of phrasing his most modest utterance as though the fate of the world’s dispossessed hangs on his trenchancy is insufferable to some. But generally the world takes this mountain-dwelling Marxist sage pretty much at his own estimation: as a great alternative voice crying out amid the crassness of our market-driven culture. Read more... |
Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War, Imperial War MuseumFriday, 07 September 2012
The wide eyed little girl is sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, clutching her large soft toy, her head encased in a voluminous bandage. Eileen Dunne, aged three, was injured by shrapnel during the London bombing in 1940, and Cecil Beaton’s Ministry of Information photograph of the bewildered child travelled the world, graced the cover of Life magazine and silently pleaded the British cause. Read more... |
Lindsay Seers: Nowhere Less NowThursday, 06 September 2012
Lindsay Seers is one of the most exciting artists to have emerged in Britain over the last 10 years. Preoccupied with big philosophical questions, her work explores notions of truth, memory, imagination and history. Nowhere Less Now, commissioned by Artangel, is her first new work in London since Extramission was shown at Tate Britain in 2009. It is no ordinary work. Read more... |
Ai Weiwei: Never SorryFriday, 10 August 2012
Every year, FHM produces its 100 sexiest women of the year list. It follows a simple formula, since sexiness, as determined by the magazine’s readers, is predicated on fame – a particular type of fleeting, red-top tabloid fame. So this year, top of that list is Tulisa of the sex tapes. Likewise, every year Art Review does its 100 most powerful people in the art world list. So what is it to be the most powerful person in the art world? Read more... |
Edinburgh Art Festival: From Symbolists to ColouristsWednesday, 08 August 2012
East coast haar seeping into sun-drenched streets – familiar Edinburgh monuments disappearing dreamlike under blankets of mist, vibrant colour draining from the landscape as the city transformed into its more usual symphony in grey. The dramatic change in weather during the first weekend of the Edinburgh Art Festival has mirrored the overwhelming experience of one of this year’s major exhibitions. Read more... |
Eames: The Architect and the PainterThursday, 02 August 2012
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. Read more... |
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