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
Burnt-out domesticity. Chicken-wire with burnt-black wood wedged inside in the shape of the chair.
29 September 2019
“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
“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
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: Masked figures in balaclava style hats, only their eyes visible peer directly at the viewer
23 September 2019
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
The current Ed Moses paintings on display at Blain/Southern represent only a snippet of a very varied career.
25 July 2019
Brave New Visions, this special exhibition at Sotheby’s George Street galleries, is a tell and show of the ways in which Britain’s insular art world was expanded and transformed by newcomers,
23 July 2019
There can be no doubt that Art-Exit: 1939, at the 12 Star Gallery in Europe House, Smith Square, is a highly political exhibition.
18 July 2019
The new show at Charlie Smith London celebrates, as the handout tells you, “a full decade’s operations in Shoreditch”. Within that period, the gallery has presented 88 exhibitions and has participated in more than 30 art fairs in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA and here in the UK.
14 July 2019
Liz Magic Laser has created an exhibition on the ground floor of Fact Liverpool as part of Real Work. This… Read More
14 July 2019
Olafur Eliasson is now a very big deal in the world of contemporary art
10 July 2019
Artlyst has attended Talking Maps, a new exhibition at the famous Bodleian Libraries, Oxford – a celebration of maps throughout history
9 July 2019
The Greek artist Panayiotis Vassillakis, known simply as Takis, born in Athens in 1925, is a very senior member of today’s international avant-garde. His new show at Tate Modern – what? Not a woman, not a person of colour? – therefore qualifies as an event of some interest.
7 July 2019
It’s time for the annual show of sculpture in Regent’s Park, organised by the Frieze Art Fair, but opening far in advance of the fair itself, and lasting for much longer. Also, it’s free. What’s on view, you see for nothing. Which makes me wish, quite fervently, that it was a more convincing show.
6 July 2019
Felix Vallotton, the subject of a new exhibition on view now, at the Royal Academy, was a betwixt and between sort of artist. Swiss by birth, he became French.
4 July 2019
When the boats sail past on a summer’s day and the light falls gently, and we’re solstice-awake in the long days, Alexander Calder reels back to life as if he himself is a film, viewed in the flickering light of the sea cast by this special spot.
3 July 2019
Contemplating the Spiritual in Contemporary Art a new exhibition at Rosenfeld Porcini is proof, if proof is needed, that there is no shortage of artists exploring, as Erika Doss described them, ‘the intersections of iconography, religious orthodoxy
30 June 2019
A new contemporary and modern art fair at the Saatchi Gallery has just opened as a “pop-up” during the London Summer fair season. Organised in just six frantic weeks FairForSaatchi hopes to become an annual fixture.
29 June 2019
The Cindy Sherman retrospective just opened at the National Portrait Gallery is a major blockbuster, illustrating all aspects of a very prolific career.
27 June 2019
A rather too brief exhibition, well hidden away in the bowels of Somerset House and not mentioned in the official handout listing what is currently on view in the main gallery spaces there, raises many questions that aren’t being asked in our rather smug London contemporary art world. Entitled The Artist + AI, it is a compact solo show for an American artist called Scott Eaton.
25 June 2019
This is the time of year when London’s grandee galleries – official and commercial – are so busy presenting us with blockbuster shows that lesser lights tend to get squeezed out, at least where publicity is concerned. Here are a couple of exhibitions on a somewhat lesser scale that it would be a pity to miss. One, at Huxley-Parlour in Swallow Street, offers the work of the American artist Donald Sultan, one of the stars of the return to painting (as opposed to other forms of artistic expression) that took place in American art in the 1980s.
25 June 2019
