Lucian Freud / Antony Gormley Two RA Autumn Shows – Edward Lucie-Smith
Lucian Freud / Antony Gormley, two shows at the RA, both by contemporary British artists. Apparently very different from one another
28 October 2019
Reviews
Nam June Paik Outstripped By Technology Tate Modern – Edward Lucie-Smith
Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a Korean-born artist who lived and worked in Japan, Germany and the United States. He played a considerable role in the international avant-garde. His first solo show, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, was staged in Wuppertal Germany in 1963.
24 October 2019
Sterling Ruby: Gagosian – Britannia Street – Edward Lucie-Smith
The main items in Sterling Ruby’s exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street (his first solo show with the gallery here in London) are huge works from a series called ACTS (2006-2018). In this case, the word has no direct reference to Holy Scripture.
20 October 2019
Victoria Crowe: Half Century Of Painting – Edinburgh – Clare Henry
Beauty. Not a word used much today. Not a popular concept. Not necessarily an accolade. Yet Victoria Crowe creates beauty with her every brushstroke, line, smudge, highlight, shadow. Superb draughtsmanship combined with a perfect painterly touch and humane sensitivity produces overarchingly intelligent pictures, rarely encountered in 21st-century art galleries.
20 October 2019
The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Re-evaluated – Edward Lucie-Smith
All too often, when there is a sudden enthusiasm for a particular cause, those promoting it achieve the opposite of what they intend. This is the case with the exhibition entitled Pre-Raphaelite Women, which has just opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
17 October 2019
The Turner: An Exhibition of Past Turner Prize Nominees – Clare Henry
Glasgow: Love it or loathe it, the Tate Turner prize is here to stay. It’s a huge accolade. And you don’t need to win. Being nominated (4 each year since 1984) is almost as good.
14 October 2019
Cabarets, Clubs And Modern Art – Barbican – Edward Lucie-Smith
A new show at the Barbican is devoted to the theme of Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art.
14 October 2019
Rembrandt-Velázquez And de Hooch: Two Major Autumn Exhibitions – Sue Hubbard
If you are planning an imminent trip to the Netherlands, there are two must-see exhibitions on at the moment. Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the Shadow of Vermeer at the Museum Prinsenhof, Delft and Rembrandt-Velázquez: Dutch & Spanish Masters at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
14 October 2019
Reading Stones & Beyond The Body Two Shows – Jude Cowan Montague
The stone tower of Saint Augustine is a dramatic setting for an art exhibition and has been host to some interesting shows by alternative London artists over some years.
9 October 2019
Cy Twombly, Gagosian – Song Dong, Pace – Edward Lucie-Smith
Two London shows from big commercial galleries reflect different but related aspects of the current international scene. One, at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, is for the internationally known American artist Cy Twombly.
8 October 2019
Bridget Riley, Rebecca Parker, Elizabeth Peyton Three London Shows – Edward Lucie-Smith
Two exhibitions of modest size – Bridget Riley at Lindsey Ingram, and Rebecca Parker at Huxley-Parlour – both at the very centre of the West End art district. They have one thing in common: the fact both artists are female. Plus real divergences, which symbolise the lack of any real direction in British art right now.
7 October 2019
Mark Bradford: Monumental Excavations Of Humanity Hauser & Wirth – Sooz Belnavis
I am a painter, and as a painter, I tend to look at other painters work, under the scrutiny of deciphering the surface, the pictorial plane. The sheer vastness of American Artist Mark Bradford leaves me breathless and dazed.
7 October 2019
Gauguin Not A Role Model For Our Time – Edward Lucie-Smith
Gauguin both is and isn’t a hero for our time. In one sense it’s brave of the National Gallery to mount a big show of his work in the /MeToo era. It’s hard to think of any artist, of the immediately Pre-Modern or Early Modern epochs, who behaved worse to women.
4 October 2019
Mona Hatoum: Emotional Formalism – Jude Cowan Montague
Burnt-out domesticity. Chicken-wire with burnt-black wood wedged inside in the shape of the chair.
29 September 2019
Do The Undone: John Giorno at Sperone Westwater – Ilka Scobie
“I had an idea in the late sixties, like putting my poems on matchboxes. I wanted to do poems on marble. I was a poet, but not in the art world. Five years ago, Jean de Loisy asked twelve artists to do things at Chateau de Versailles, outside of Paris.
28 September 2019
Amy Sherald: The Heart of the Matter – Hauser & Wirth NY – Ilka Scobie
“I want to be my own connection to America,” Amy Sherald tells the rapt audience, at her spectacular inaugural show at Hauser and Wirth.
28 September 2019
Mark Leckey: The Power of Bleakness – Tate Britain – Edward Lucie-Smith
Having just opened an exhibition devoted to the work of William Blake, who is, for all his eccentricities, a representation of art as we used to know it, Tate Britain has now
24 September 2019
Yassine Balbzioui – James Ostrer – Kristin Hjellegjerde London – Jude Cowan Montague
Yassine Balbzioui/James Ostrer – Kristin Hjellegjerde London: Masked figures in balaclava style hats, only their eyes visible peer directly at the viewer
23 September 2019
Damien Hirst Butterfly Genocide – White Cube – Edward Lucie-Smith
Damien Hirst’s show Mandalas, at White Cube Mason’s Yard, has already attracted indignant commentary in The Times. Rachel Campbell-Johnson’s review
22 September 2019
School of Paris Rendez-Vous at Louvre Abu Dhabi – Paul Carter Robinson
The influx of immigrants into any vernacular urban culture has always been a gamechanger, and there is no better example than Paris at the turn of the 20th century.
22 September 2019
Maurizio Cattelan: Broken Plumbing And Leaky Democracy – Blenheim Palace – Paul Black
Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Victory is Not an Option’ is a perfectly timed exhibition that parodies Britain’s long slide into populist self-destruction.
20 September 2019
Antony Gormley Plays With Our Perception of Space at RA
The Antony Gormley solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts opens on 21 September. It’s a solo show rather than a retrospective but covers work from the 1970s to the present day. The exhibition fills all thirteen rooms of the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries bringing together both existing and specially conceived new works.
19 September 2019
Blockbuster Rego, Freud And Murillo Books Released Autumn 2019 – Edward Lucie-Smith
A short time ago, it seemed as if making and publishing books about art – contemporary art, in particular, was a doomed enterprise.
18 September 2019
William Blake: Personal Realms Of Fantasy – Edward Lucie-Smith
William Blake is one of the heroes of British art. In some ways, however, his work fits uncomfortably into the current establishment set up.
14 September 2019
Peter Doig and Parisian Avant-Gardists Launch London Autumn Gallery Season – Edward Lucie Smith
Two exhibitions just opened at a pair of well-respected West End commercial galleries here in London, seem to illustrate the complexity of the contemporary art situation as it is now.
9 September 2019
Robert Polidori: Fra Angelico Opus Operantis – Revd Jonathan Evens
William Hood, when writing of Fra Angelico at San Marco, noted that the ‘translucent surfaces’ of the architecture ‘shimmer in the soft currents of light gliding over from just outside’.
18 August 2019
Urban Impulses Latin American Photography The Photographers’ Gallery London – Edward Lucie-Smith
Urban Impulses, the new exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery here in London, exemplifies the reasons why contemporary photography now so… Read More
5 August 2019
London Art Exhibitions Recommended By Paul Carey-Kent August 2019
The noted writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives us his rolling ten recommended Contemporary and Modern art exhibitions for August 2019 in London now. Paul currently freelances for Art Monthly, Frieze, Elephant, STATE, Photomonitor, Border Crossings and World of Interiors, and has a weekly online column at FAD Art News.
4 August 2019
Cut And Paste: NGS Launches First-Ever Collage Survey Exhibition – Clare Henry
Billed as the first-ever COLLAGE survey exhibition in the world, this Edinburgh Festival fun extravaganza of 400 years of cut and paste art encompasses Picasso to Monty Python, Victorian valentines to Andy Warhol, Max Ernst to Peter Blake, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg – and of course today’s Photoshop.
1 August 2019
Company Curiosities: A Clash of Cultural Objects – Edward Lucie-Smith
I have personal reasons to be interested in this book – Company Curiosities, by Arthur Macgregor. A direct ancestor of mine, not however mentioned in the text, was Chairman of the British East India Company in some of its glory days at the end of the 18th century.
31 July 2019
Helene Schjerfbeck Finland’s Best Kept Secret – Marina Vaizey
Is the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) the most fascinating artist the anglophone world has never heard of? The fashionable preoccupation with women artists of past and present is throwing up and out some real discoveries and rediscoveries.
25 July 2019
Ed Moses Qin Feng Blain|Southern London – Edward Lucie-Smith
The current Ed Moses paintings on display at Blain/Southern represent only a snippet of a very varied career.
25 July 2019