Tomas Saraceno “On Air” an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is definitely one of the most extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen. A once in a lifetime experience not to be missed if you are in Paris.
6 December 2018
Today London’s official art world is full of enthusiasm for so-called ‘minority art’, made by artists of guaranteed ‘minority origin’. On the whole, however, the artists so defined and officially promoted don’t come from Asia.
4 December 2018
That famous aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ was spouted by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian professor, philosopher and public intellectual back 1964, when his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, set the stage for my current train journey where I overhear the students discussing their A levels.
2 December 2018
You have to be reasonably senior to be an Academician of any sort. Put five together? The result is an exciting and extremely varied show.
2 December 2018
It was captivating to see the Fernand Léger exhibition (until 17 March 2019) at Tate Liverpool.
29 November 2018
The Robert Rauschenberg show Spreads: 1975-83 just opened at Thaddaeus Ropac here in London comes complete with a museum-worthy hardcover catalogue, and is indeed, though this is a commercial space, the kind of exhibition that any museum specialising in contemporary art might be proud to put on.
28 November 2018
It was a personal pleasure to visit this fair, now in its third year. The ambitious project has taken over the huge warehouse scale structure at Woolwich.
26 November 2018
Gordon Matta Clark died quite some time ago now – in August 1978. And he died quite young, aged only 35. However, like a number of artists from about the same epoch
26 November 2018
Once you struggle through the fairly formidable Introduction to this biography – a chapter devoted to orientating the reader concerning Josef Albers’ major achievement, the long Homage to the Square series of paintings
20 November 2018
Gauguin once reportedly exclaimed of self-taught artist Henri Rousseau’s self-portrait, “There is the truth and future! There is painting!”
19 November 2018
Hilma af Klint’s abstract paintings first dazzled me when I encountered her work in the 2013 Venice Bienalle.
18 November 2018
Angiosperms (roughly flowering plants) produce an incredible variety of seeds that are dispersed in creative, innovative ways, sometimes involving tricksy relationships with particular animals.
15 November 2018
Despite its title, Coca-Cola Girls, Alex Katz’s new show at Timothy Taylor doesn’t really belong in the realm of Pop Art. It does, however, have something in common with the concurrent Richard Smith show at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert.
14 November 2018
This exhibition at the National Gallery is a landmark event. It brings together a rich selection of paintings, and some drawings, by two of the greatest masters of the Italian Renaissance.
11 November 2018
‘Life-destroyer’, ‘get lost’, ‘monkeys’, ‘in bad faith’, ‘malediction’, ‘concealed dungeon’, ‘poison head’, ‘parasite’, ‘disenchantment’, ‘lechery’. The titles of Peter Howson’s latest work, in translation from often Latin or Anglo-Saxon words or phrases, give a graphic sense of the content.
10 November 2018
Here, lumped together for the sake of convenience in an overcrowded Autumn season, are four London galleries.
7 November 2018
Tucked away in a group of spaces on the gloomy ground floor of the National Gallery is a superb exhibition that seems likely to attract less attention than it should in fact get.
6 November 2018
The Modern Couples show currently at the Barbican has eyes slightly too big for its own – or at any rate for my stomach. Nevertheless, it is, in the present climate for the visual arts, an event that is both timely and important.
5 November 2018
As one of the participants in the globe-trotting EMPIRE 2 project, exhibiting the moving image on a world tour, I came to Paris for the project’s opening at Le100Ecs, an artist centre at 100 Rue de Charenton.
4 November 2018
Arriving at Montparnasse, I don’t at first see any sign of the Gallery Granville. With its modest frontage, it’s located just off-road in a modern shopping centre.
1 November 2018
The R.A.’s show of drawings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, almost all of them loaned by the Albertina Museum in Vienna, arrives at a crucial moment in the long history of visual art.
31 October 2018
As is becoming more and more apparent, contemporary art in the United States is becoming increasingly regionalised. Which is to say, identified with one geographical location: California North or South, Louisiana, New Mexico, Seattle – rather than being an expression of American culture as a whole.
30 October 2018
Looking around the NPG’s new Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition, I was immediately reminded of the fact that we are right in the middle of a culture war.
29 October 2018
Just as I had begun to despair of the future of video, or of video + installation, as mediums for genuinely convincing contemporary art, two major examples arrived to change my mind. One was the video by the Maori artist Lisa Reihana that forms part of the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy.
28 October 2018
Celebrating the tercentenary of Glasgow University Hunterian founder, Dr. William Hunter obviously calls for a significant exhibition. This impressive memorable display, immaculately presented, is organised by the Hunterian Art Gallery in collaboration with Yale’s Centre for British Art where it travels next Spring.
27 October 2018
I have various reasons for being interested in Edward Burne-Jones. Some are purely personal. For example, I happen to live in the area of West London where Burne-Jones spent thirty years of his adult life.
25 October 2018
It’s depressing how rapidly once-big art stars manage to fade nowadays. You blink your eyes, and suddenly they’re gone.
22 October 2018
I first encountered the work of Paul Feiler (born Germany 1918 Died 2013) at his centenary exhibition held at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings last Summer.
16 October 2018
Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) has turned into a kind of orphan in art historical terms.
15 October 2018
Black Mirror presents itself as ‘Art as Social Satire’, and there is indeed a real black mirror in the show.
10 October 2018
Anni Albers is quite frankly a peculiar artist for Tate Modern to devote an entire solo exhibition.
9 October 2018
The William Tillyer show at Bernard Jacobson is an example of what I’m starting to think of as the current ‘golden oldie’ phenomenon in London galleries.
8 October 2018
