Visual Arts Reviews
Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario, Artangel in Hoxton, N1Wednesday, 07 September 2011
What are the most common responses to a work of contemporary art? I can think of two: “A six-year-old could have done that” (feel free to substitute “I” or “anyone”) and “But what does it actually mean?” Ryan Gander is an artist who is rather exercised by the latter. He is interested in the way we piece together scraps of evidence – overlooked details, context, history – in order to create meaning. We try to fill in the gaps. And when meaning eludes us we are often dismissive, even rather... Read more... |
Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum, New YorkMonday, 29 August 2011
If one comes away with any certainty from the New York exhibition Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum (until 10 October) it is that the Golden Age Dutch master (1582/3-1666) keenly understood and sympathised with his fellow human beings. Whether Hals (beloved of Courbet, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Whistler and Sargent) was painting drunks and prostitutes in tavern scenes, humble fisher folk, or burghers and intellectuals and their wives, he unerringly captured the essence of his... Read more... |
Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, LondonTuesday, 23 August 2011
The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and her expression intense and concentrated as she screws a breech ring as part of the manufacture of the Bofors gun at a factory in Newport, is a famously captivating image of the Home Front in the last world war. Read more... |
Stanley Spencer and The English Garden, Compton VerneyThursday, 18 August 2011
In his later years, Stanley Spencer cut quite a figure in his native village of Cookham in Berkshire: he would often be seen pushing his rickety pram, with its battered umbrella, paints and canvas, and a hand-painted sign requesting all curious onlookers to desist from disturbing the artist at work. He spent most of his life in the village - even acquiring the nickname “Cookham” at the Slade, since he’d rush back by train after lessons every evening, presumably in time for tea. Read more... |
Don McCullin, Tate BritainTuesday, 16 August 2011
Photography isn’t looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. Thus Don McCullin, quoted on the information board of a new display at Tate Britain of around 50 black-and-white silver gelatin photographs, chosen and printed by the artist himself. No digital here, the process of the darkroom is under his control. Read more... |
Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead..., Tate ModernFriday, 05 August 2011
For her latest project, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, American photographer Taryn Simon spent four years searching out families the world over whose lives have been defined by circumstances largely beyond their control – not natural calamities like floods, fires or earthquakes, but events orchestrated by other people. The stories are extraordinary. Read more... |
Thomas Struth: Photography 1978-2010, Whitechapel GalleryWednesday, 03 August 2011
In Düsseldorf in the 1970s there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers – and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a proud art city, and published at the time a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great messianic leader Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter (and Gotthard Graubner among others) taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography and photographed anonymous... Read more... |
Homage to Fokine, Mariinsky Ballet, Royal Opera HouseSaturday, 30 July 2011
Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both West and East, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the 20th century before and after the Revolution. The Mariinsky, once his home, is a premier exponent of his multifaceted styles. Read more... |
Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, Tate LiverpoolThursday, 28 July 2011
Dalí may have the edge on Magritte for instant recognition and popularity, but how easily the Belgian beats the Spaniard as the more interesting Surrealist. Armed with his small repertoire of images – the nude, the shrouded head, the bowler hat, the apple and the pipe, to name a few – and painted in that precise, pictogram way of his, Magritte is an artist who holds back more than he gives away. Next to his restrained, meticulously tidy offerings,... Read more... |
Alina Ibragimova, Quay Brothers, Wilton's Music HallWednesday, 27 July 2011
Nine out of 10 attempts to feed an audience's visual responses to abstract music are doomed to failure; a great communicator will always conjure stronger pictures in the listener's mind. And there's no doubt that young violinist Alina Ibragimova communicates at the highest level. But here she simply held her own to work in shadowplay with both the mysterious spaces of... Read more... |
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