As the National Portrait Gallery prepares for its long sleep – three years with its doors firmly shut – it is not surprising to find it playing host to a major show of work by David Hockney.
25 February 2020
After a plethora of exhibitions featuring women, women’s art, women’s attitudes of the world, it comes as a relief to find a big London show that is all about men.
20 February 2020
I am just back from a quick trip to Los Angeles, which gave me a lot to consider – chiefly about how different the LA art world is from the one we have here in London, though it is also in some respects very much the same.
18 February 2020
Most great artistic movements begin as a reaction to the art and times that precede them. Impressionism in the 19th century. Surrealism, Dadaism and the YBAs in the 20th c. Baroque began in Rome around 1600 in response to the austere 17th-century Protestant culture of the Netherlands.
15 February 2020
Entering the new British Baroque show (as one does) from Tate Britain’s central upstairs space, currently, home to a multitude of group photographs of pupils in London primary schools is to enter a different world. Different socially, different aesthetically. Above all, different, in the attitudes, the event expresses concerning what visual art is about.
9 February 2020
A new exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield features two very British artists with crossover interests. The photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983) and sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) first crossed paths during the Second World War when they both created images of civilians sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz.
7 February 2020
The rather splendid show of new figurative painting, now on view at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, boasts that it is the first event of its kind since the New Spirit in Painting exhibition that made such an impact here in London in the now long-ago 1980s.
5 February 2020
‘We Will Walk—Art and Resistance in the American South’ is one of the most powerful and important shows I’ve seen. It is co-curated by the artist Hannah Collins, who initiated the project, and curator Paul Goodwin. The exhibition traces the history of African-American artists in the Deep South during the second half of the 20th century, a time of racial terror so savage, so traumatic but yet so recent.
5 February 2020
Rose Wylie has become one of the leading British contemporary artists of her generation. In the last decade, her work has come to the forefront both domestically and internationally, with a practice that is youthful, playful and fresh.
4 February 2020
The new American Pastoral exhibition at Gagosian’s Britannia Street space is of museum quality, even if what’s on show doesn’t always seem to relate to the title.
29 January 2020
Being asked to write about an art fair is a bit like being commissioned to write about Waitrose and compare tins of baked beans with sardines or chocolate biscuits.
22 January 2020
Wow! This show is a real blockbuster! Spread out in the main exhibition galleries of the Royal Academy. It gives an excellent idea of who Picasso was, what he did, and why he is so centrally important to the story of Modern and Contemporary art.
22 January 2020
The 2020 art world is coming sluggishly to life and some early offerings are, it must be said, a bit disappointing.
21 January 2020
Ilka Scobie takes a look at the first New York exhibitions for 2020 and discovers a few surprises along the way.
19 January 2020
On 7th October 1943, Charlotte Salomon was deported to Auschwitz. She was 26 years old and five months pregnant. She probably died the day she arrived, one of the estimated 1.1 million people who did not make it out of that concentration camp alive.
2 January 2020
The exhibition, AMALGAM by Theaster Gates, now showing at Tate Liverpool is an experience not to be missed with a poignant message for our times.
18 December 2019
Walking into the Simone Subal Gallery on the lower east side, which was once ironically a hub for immigrants, I am taken aback by the beautiful work in front of me. From an aesthetic point of view alone, the sculptures of “Snake Skin,” an installation by Baseera Khan, an artist and a visiting faculty member at Bennington College in Vermont (my alma mater), holds one’s gaze in observation.
15 December 2019
Nan Goldin is an American photographer who has chronicled her life for art gallery-goers. Her themes include intimacy, moments from an encounter with the HIV crisis, living on the urban edge, the LGBT community, youth and love. She is called the voice of a generation.
12 December 2019
At Hamilton’s, London’s premier commercial gallery specialising in photography, it offers a series of images by Mario Testino
12 December 2019
The Eco-Visionaries show just opened at the Royal Academy, in its new set of galleries (easiest entry via Burlington Gardens) embraces the current fashion for moralistic participation. You don’t just visit an exhibition of this kind – wandering around, taking a look, liking or not liking what you see. You are instead invited to embrace a cause or even a series of causes.
5 December 2019
Vienna knows how to produce a blockbuster, and this Autumn/Winter season they have mounted two. For the first time in nearly twenty years, a new exhibition of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) has opened at Vienna’s Albertina Museum, while a beautifully curated show bookends this at the Kunsthistorisches Museum entitled Caravaggio and Bernini.
4 December 2019
The noted writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives us his rolling ten recommended Contemporary and Modern art exhibitions in London now (December 2019).
3 December 2019
The Queen’s Gallery, behind Buckingham Palace, is the place where the British Royal Collection Trust displays its treasures. The latest exhibition there – George IV: Art and Spectacle – is a particularly splendid example. George IV, alias the Prince Regent, was, next to Charles I, the greatest collector of art in the history of the British monarchy.
28 November 2019
Fog was rising over the Wiltshire fields and the majestic beeches of Roche Court Sculpture Park dripping with November rain when we arrived for the opening of Tess Traeger’s photographs.
26 November 2019
Kiki Smith creates an embodied art. She chose the human body as her subject because it is the one form that we all share; something with which each one of us has our own authentic experience. Her choice was informed by undertaking training to become an Emergency Medical Technician and also by the Catholicism of her upbringing.
26 November 2019
White Cube, in this instance, seems the perfect place for this exhibition. So perfect I feel it is over-designed. The perspex boxes of wires, cables are too perfectly matching, autumnal; this could be a fashion collection doesn’t Vogue recommend this kind of palette at this time of year, in tweed? Browns, rusts with a splash of turquoise? Nothing vulgar. Nothing synthetic. Organic colours.
25 November 2019
In 1998 the first sales of the Dora Maar collection were put on sale in Paris. They revealed a life dedicated to photography, painting and poetry, executed in the city’s avant-garde milieu of the 1930s.
20 November 2019
I increasingly get the feeling that the two London Tates are struggling to know what to do with the huge central spaces that are a characteristic feature of both buildings. The new show at Tate Britain – Steve McQueen: Year 3 – is symptomatic of this, though it is in many ways a more successful solution to the problem than some of the previous ones.
19 November 2019
As the nation plunges towards Brexit, and, as the official galleries – specifically the two big London Tates – grow more and more self-satisfied and increasingly inclined to offer displays of civic virtue as substitutes for anything you can actually describe as art, one turns towards the commercial galleries for solace.
19 November 2019
The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize has come round once again, just as the announcement went out that the NPG will very soon close its doors for a much-needed update, and won’t be accessible again for three years. It’s hard to be entirely regretful about the hiatus.
8 November 2019
I found this latest exhibition at FACT Liverpool thought-provoking. It challenges the way we view the world and what we are being taught to believe. It encourages you to think about the possibilities of changing the limitations and constrictions imposed upon us through a contrived system of power and incivility that has been spoon-fed to us throughout our lives.
4 November 2019
At a time when there is a continual fuss about giving ‘fair representation’ to women artists, many of whom were not, in fact, central to the major art movements to which they, often peripherally, belonged, the Bridget Riley show at the Hayward comes as a major relief.
29 October 2019
