Ukraine has long held a fascination. Family lore has it that my great-grandfather left Odessa in the 1890s, driven out by pogroms, to settle in the East End of London.
1 July 2024
The title of this show of British women artists from 1520-1920 at Tate Britain is highly apt. ‘Now You See Us’ contains just the right amount of ironic sang-froid
16 May 2024
Revisiting Barbara Kruger’s work in the 21st century, I’m struck by how much it encapsulates the tone of its times
18 March 2024
Tacita Dean’s name gives a lot away. Her father, Joseph Dean, was a lawyer who studied classics at Merton College, Oxford and aptly named his children Tacita, Antigone and Ptolemy.
21 January 2024
Opening on International Women’s Day, Radium Dreams showcases a series of poems and artworks inspired by the remarkable life story of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie. A punchy collaboration between award-winning poet Sue Hubbard and acclaimed artist Eileen Cooper RA
27 March 2023
It’s been hard to choose a single painting by Frank Bowling for this series, to select one that is more significant in his long and illustrious career than any of the others. Each time his style has changed seems to have been a significant moment.
23 March 2023
Delft was Vermeer’s city. Stand in front of his small painting, The Little Street of 1658 and you will see cobbles and a gabled brick house with leaded windows, just as you still see all around you in the city today.
14 February 2023
Anthony Gormley Angel Of The North: We are enthralled by gigantic statues. The ancient Greeks referred to them as kolossoi.
24 December 2022
Artist Support Pledge Founder Matthew Burrows Solo Show – Sue Hubbard’s Much Loved Public Art Poem Finds A Permanent Home – Zavier Ellis And Mathew Gibson Launch New Contemporary Art Academy
9 November 2022
The white south African artist William Kentridge has used the play Ubu Roito to express his views against South African apartheid and its vicious attacks on its black citizens.
7 October 2022
Mr and Mrs Andrews is arguably Gainsborough’s most famous painting. A young couple poses for their wedding portrait beneath an oak tree. Behind them spreads a bucolic view
24 June 2022
Cornelia Parker exploded a garden shed with the help of the British army. She’d contacted them for advice and was invited to the Army School of Ammunition
28 April 2022
In the fine elegance of Burlington House, with all its associations of white privilege, Anish Kapoor’s lumbering train conjured images of India’s overcrowded railway system
21 March 2022
Rachel Whiteread approached the last tenant, retired docker Sydney Gale to explain her desire to make an artwork out of his old home.
9 August 2021
In an era when modernism was dictating that painting should abandon all connection to narrative, Paula Rego
6 July 2021
As a new young arts writer, I once went to Eileen Agar’s flat in Kensington. I honestly didn’t know who she was at that time. The flat was quite conventional, except for a few collages on the walls and her famous Bouillabaisse hat – constructed of cork and decorated with a large orange plastic flower, a blue plastic star, assorted shells, glass beads and starfish – sitting on a stand.
24 May 2021
What would Turner think? Would he even have recognised the artist collectives nominated for this year’s prize in his name as art?
13 May 2021
Among contemporary painters, none has investigated what it is that makes us individual and human more eloquently than Tony Bevan.
9 February 2021
Jock McFadyen is the psycho-geographer of the visual art world. ‘The laureate’, as Ian Sinclair has suggested, ‘of stagnant canals, filling stations and night football pitches’.
2 November 2020
The Royal Academy Summer Show has an unbroken record. Still, this year, due to the pandemic, it’s being held in the winter rather than the summer
8 October 2020
Rachel Howard’s Suicide Paintings were first shown at the Bohen Foundation in NY, in 2007 and the following year at London’s Haunch of Venison gallery. Left shocked and devastated by the suicide of an acquaintance who was found kneeling in an almost prayer-like position, suicide was, she realised, one of the last taboos.
1 October 2020
In this new series, Sue Hubbard explores single works by leading contemporary artists.
1 September 2020
In 1972 John Berger suggested that “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” The male gaze, he argued in Ways of Seeing, for centuries defined the way we looked at the female subject.
9 February 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
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
In these grim times, we need all the art we can get. Public art feeds the soul as well as the mind. It provides spaces for contemplation in a gritty difficult world.
21 March 2019
Jock is late for our meeting in the Academicians Room at the RA. Very late. He was stuck on a bus. I’ve known him for more than 20 years and figure that if we don’t have time to talk now we can always meet up in his home in Bethnal Green where, for ages, a group of us met to watch films on a Friday night
28 January 2019
The New Year revels are over. It’s January, and the art world is back to work. The first sign of this stirring is the London Art Fair 2019 that returns to the capital from 16-20 January.
17 January 2019
Yesterday the art world not only lost one of its finest and most loved abstract painters, but I lost a great friend.
12 April 2018
There was a time when the London Art Fair was the glitziest thing in the capital’s art world calendar.
20 January 2018
