Visual Arts Reviews
Sally Mann: The Family and the Land, Photographers' GalleryMonday, 28 June 2010
Last week I watched a tiny tot being photographed by her father, on a beach in southern Turkey. There was no girlish giggling or splashing about in the sea; rather than a show of carefree happiness, she delivered a studied pose. She assumed an expression of supreme indifference and, with hand on hip and weight on one leg, twisted her body into a seductive coil. The four-year-old was imitating a supermodel! I didn’t see the pictures, of course, but I would still classify this kind of premature... Read more... |
Wolfgang Tillmans, Serpentine GalleryFriday, 25 June 2010
It takes a lot of work to make a show look as unconsidered and chaotic as this one: thought and care and time and attention all have to be paid before something so random can be achieved. But as so often with Tillmans, the nagging questions persist: is randomness, are the offhand and the casual, valid as ends in themselves? Because Tillman’s über-hip affectless cool has become very tiresome indeed. Even worse, it’s becoming predictable and dull. Read more... |
Imagine: Art is Child's Play, BBC OneWednesday, 23 June 2010
It took Picasso four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but it took him a lifetime to paint like a child, or so he said. For Brancusi it wasn‘t a case of relearning childhood, but of being careful not to lose it in the first place. “When we are no longer children we are already dead,” he said. Read more... |
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, Tate ModernTuesday, 22 June 2010
In 1994, Francis Alÿs joined the regular hiring-line in the central square in Mexico City. Standing next to plumbers and carpenters with their hand-lettered signs touting their skills, his sign read "Turista", as he offered his ability to be an outsider looking in. Read more... |
Joseph Cornell & Karen Kilimnik, Sprüth Magers LondonSunday, 20 June 2010
The gallery has been turned into a little girl’s dressing-up closet. The walls are painted midnight blue and dusted with glitter. Ballet shoes, made for small feet, and a discarded tutu are to be found in a decorous pile on the floor. There are shiny trinkets and princessy things and pictures of ballerinas in bright, pastel shades. Read more... |
Ernesto Neto / The New Décor, The Hayward GalleryFriday, 18 June 2010
The Hayward has been closed for the past six months for "housekeeping": those boring cleaning and repair jobs we all do. It's entirely suitable, therefore, that the two exhibitions that reopen the gallery showcase ideas of how we live both physically and emotionally. Ernesto Neto has become one of Brazil’s most successful exports, a powerhouse of an artist whose minimalist biomorphic shapes, created from stretchy, opaque nylon in sharply acid colours, alternately mould, mask, shade... Read more... |
The Surreal House, Barbican Art GalleryFriday, 11 June 2010
Surrealism, it occurred to me while looking round this fine exhibition, is like pornography: it is hard to define, but everyone knows it when they see it. Read more... |
Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, Tate BritainWednesday, 09 June 2010
Satire, like roast beef, is what Brits are famous for and this exhibition takes us right back to its earliest days in graphic print. In the 1600s, Dutch allegorical prints were adapted by British printmakers to comment on contemporary issues and one of the first examples in this exhibition is a print that illustrates the purportedly cruel and barbarous treatment meted out by the Dutch to the English at the outset of the Anglo-Dutch war - so it’s hardly rib-tickling stuff. Read more... |
Antony Gormley: Test Sites, White CubeFriday, 04 June 2010
Many people use that weaselly phrase about Antony Gormley, saying he “divides the critics”. For the most part this is not true: for the most part the critics loathe Gormley’s work. They suggest he is either a bad figurative sculptor masquerading as a conceptual artist, or a bad conceptual artist masquerading as a figurative sculptor. This is really just a whinge that he doesn’t fit in a box, but so what? Read more... |
Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi GalleryWednesday, 02 June 2010
These days, it seems that approaching any new Saatchi exhibition, especially one that promises to be even bigger than all the previous ones held at the multi-galleried, three-storey Chelsea venue, makes the heart fairly sink. How much bigger, you want to ask, and why use size as a measure of anything? Surely there isn’t enough headspace to accommodate all those loud, clamorous, “look-at-me” artworks favoured by Saatchi all in one go? And this is just Part One. Part Two will be... Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 10,000 pieces, we're asking for £3.95 per month or £30 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take an annual subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
latest in today
Cate Haste: Passionate Spirit - The Life of Alma Mahler revi...
Charismatic, full of vital elan to the end, inconsistent, fitfully creative, a casually anti-semitic Conservative Catholic married to two of the...
Reissue CDs Weekly: R.E.M.
In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988–2003 was issued by Warner Bros. in October 2003. Hitting shops in time for Xmas, it...
CD: Willie Nelson – Ride Me Back Home
Willie’s new album opens with the singer calling out to all the tired old horses saved from the knackers and put out to pasture. It’s...
Franco Zeffirelli: 'I had this feeling that I was speci...
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.”...
Diego Maradona review - entertaining but skin-deep
There's something unsatisfying about the fact that Asif Kapadia's new...
Men in Black: International review - lacklustre sequel missi...
The best joke in Men in Black: International happens before the film starts, when the iconic Columbia Pictures lady in a toga whips out a...
Roger Wright on Oliver Knussen: ‘his challenge to us all to...
The composition course founded more than 25 years ago at Snape by composers Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews is in full swing. The scene is the...
Francis Bacon: Couplings, Gagosian Gallery review - sex and...
Forthright and often disturbing, Francis Bacon’s...