It is not often that one comes across a book on contemporary, or near contemporary, art that shifts one’s view of what it is, how it has developed, and that direction those developments are likely to take in future.
8 April 2019
FACT Liverpool: Erika Beckman’s film, ‘Cinderella’ created in 1986 is a strange slip of time. I was quite intrigued by the film. At first, you are taken back to the 80s in terms of neon post-punk video effects and those hairstyles and the makeup.
1 April 2019
The art of painting is to still time and motion. As a result, the moment at which the artist chooses to freeze time is of real significance. The moments selected by John Kirby are those that reveal dis-ease.
31 March 2019
For 34 years the wonderful Roger Malbert headed up Hayward Gallery Touring, overseeing literally thousands of contemporary art exhibitions that toured to public galleries & museums outside London & were seen each year by half a million folk in over 45 places. An amazing career, & a hard act to follow.
28 March 2019
Tate Britain has one very good reason to offer us a Vincent Van Gogh show, which is that it is sure to raise attendances at an institution fighting to get them.
28 March 2019
Two shows have just opened at major London institutions –Sorolla at the National Gallery and Mike Nelson at Tate Britain. Different as they are, they both give one cause to reflect on the current situation in British art. Indeed, about what is happening to British culture in general.
27 March 2019
After catching only the last few moments of the atmospheric Faust (2017) at the 57th Venice Biennale, I was excited to discover that Anne Imhof was this year’s BMW Tate Live commissioned artist.
27 March 2019
In Liliane Tomasko’s current exhibition at Kerlin Gallery, the veil between the conscious and unconscious world is swept away.
26 March 2019
Two of the most consistent of these in terms of quality are Charlie Smith London, situated above a pub in Shoreditch; and the Pontone Gallery, just a step away from Sloane Square. Both of these galleries have just opened slightly unexpected shows.
19 March 2019
The London exhibition scene is currently so enamoured with dead avant-gardists that it was a pleasure to see work by the well-established American artist David Salle (b. 1954)
17 March 2019
At the moment Tate Modern offers retrospective exhibitions of three very different artists – Bonnard (French), Franz West (Austrian) and Dorothea Tanning (American).
14 March 2019
Jeff Koons has brought his blingy kitsch to the world’s oldest public gallery. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is presenting the master of hollow trinkets in an exhibition curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal and the artist himself.
11 March 2019
Henry Moore Helmet Heads: As an etcher, I have a long term interest in armour as one of the early applications of the process.
9 March 2019
Sometimes the dear old National Gallery here in London comes up with a nice surprise. Their new one-room, free entry exhibition is devoted to the work of the French painter Louis-Leopold Boilly, who lived from 1761 to 1845
9 March 2019
Violence is to be found everywhere and at all times, even where people pretend that it does not exist. That is the argument made by Jacques Ellul, French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, professor, and noted Christian anarchist.
3 March 2019
The RA’s new exhibition The Renaissance Nude, upstairs in the Sackler Wing of Burlington House, tackles an ambitious theme – the portrayal of the nude in Western art, from c. 1400 until the 1530s.
2 March 2019
Dorothea Tanning is the artist, face hidden to me back then, who drew and painted a short series of paintings that I have loved since a child.
2 March 2019
Exhibitions at Annka Kultys and Cell Project Space reviewed by upcoming curators who are students of Sarah Sparkes’ course How to be an Independent Curator course at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.
27 February 2019
The Franz West show at Tate Modern, with a smaller spin-off at the London branch of Zwirner, the late artist’s long-time dealer, presents the critic with a series of dilemmas.
27 February 2019
My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been’ wrote the photographer Diane Arbus, the poor little rich Jewish girl who walked on the wild side.
23 February 2019
Phyllida Barlow has long been one of the heroines of the professional contemporary art establishment here in Britain
21 February 2019
A major retrospective of the war photographer Don McCullin at Tate Britain showcases his images from Vietnam, Northern Ireland and more recently Syria alongside pictures of poverty in the East End and working-class life in northern England.
20 February 2019
A group of recently opened shows, very different from one another, raise questions about the direction the visual arts are now taking.
20 February 2019
Exhibitions at the Zabludowicz and New Art Projects reviewed by upcoming curators who are students of the How to be an Independent Curator course at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.
17 February 2019
With his Bob Dylan mop of curls and pug nose, he looks every inch the rebellious teenager that he was.
16 February 2019
It can be touch and go whether it’s on or not each year. The logistics are huge. The goodwill required for this annual impromptu show is necessary and substantial.
12 February 2019
I visited the white, white cube for the Emin show a day after the people-jammed preview opening. I’m a little allergic to crowds so rely on the Facebook grapevine for a feel of how sardine-packed the gallery felt. With queues stretching around the block.
7 February 2019
There’s a conflict of impulses in the art world just now. On the one hand, there is a desire to reflect what’s going on in society.
6 February 2019
GLASGOW’s reputation has risen & fallen over the years. 1990 saw a peak. The city is now in a trough.
6 February 2019
The catalogue for the new Bill Viola show at the Royal Academy – also featuring a group of Michelangelo’s best, most finished drawings – is careful to point out that it is not really proposing a rivalry, or even a close kinship, between the two artists.
31 January 2019
Molly Brocklehurst curated this small group show to a grand idea that stems from her own work as a painter; to use art to examine the philosophical and existential reality of looking back at memory itself.
28 January 2019
Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) is now one of the less-clearly remembered of the New York Abstract Expressionists, especially here in the UK. He was however amply exhibited in America during his lifetime
24 January 2019
