The Red Star show comes rather late in a series of exhibitions here in Britain, designed to celebrate – or commemorate – the Russian Communist revolution of a century ago. The R.A.. was, as is now becoming usual, a step or two ahead of Tate.
8 November 2017
The Monochrome show at the National Gallery has gained less coverage and generated much less enthusiasm that the current Living Gods show at the British Museum.
7 November 2017
Like quite a lot of grand museum exhibitions in London recently, this new show at Tate Britain doesn’t quite tell its announced story.
1 November 2017
The new show, ‘Age of Terror: Art since 9/11’ on the top floor of the London branch of the Imperial War Museum struggles to define the idea of ‘war’ in contemporary circumstances. The IWM was founded in 1917
30 October 2017
The Sam Jackson-Derek Ridgers show currently on view at Charlie Smith London, and due to be seen again next April at the Galerie Heike Strelow in Frankfurt, carries with it a curious echo of the Soutine show, now on view at the Courtauld Gallery.
29 October 2017
London is awash with more must see international exhibitions than perhaps any other city in the world. Paul Carey-Kent is out and about visiting many of the great shows on offer.
29 October 2017
British artist James Alec Hardy is interested in the mysterious liminal space between knowing and not knowing, fact and fiction, and much of his work explores this in-between state through a practice he refers to as ‘perception management’ or put more simply, playing with the direction of gaze.
28 October 2017
The Cezanne portrait show at the National Portrait Gallery follows hot on the heels of the show of portraits by Soutine currently on view at the Courtauld.
26 October 2017
This compact, high-quality exhibition at the Courtauld offers a fascinating sociological and psychological puzzle. Entitled Soutine’s Portraits, and subtitled Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys, it features members of the inter-war underclass
23 October 2017
I was very excited to see this exhibition. As a young girl, I was always fascinated by these images of graceful art nouveau women. Mucha’s friendship with the actress Sarah Bernhardt was one of respect, creativity and beauty. In 1895 Mucha lived in Paris.
22 October 2017
Everything at Once is the hopeful title of the vast exhibition currently being presented by the Lisson Gallery + Vinyl Factory in the Store Studios space at 180 The Strand
19 October 2017
This Week, Edward Lucie-Smith Reviews Two contrasting Exhibitions At the Saatchi Gallery London ICONOCLASTS – Saatchi Gallery Until 7 January 2018 The Iconoclasts show… Read More
17 October 2017
Harrison Pearce meticulously constructs kinetic sculptural installations out of industrial machinery, silicon and rope.
16 October 2017
Such is the pressure on gallery space that quite important exhibitions now take place in all sorts of strange places. Sometimes, quite literally, they hide in plain sight. This is the case with the very substantial show of work by the late John Bellany, who died just over four years ago.
13 October 2017
Duchamp And Dali – Royal Academy: This provocative little show at the R.A., done in parallel with the same institutions big retrospective for Jaspers Johns, asks a number of questions about both the past history of the visual arts avant-garde, and about its current travails.
10 October 2017
The new show by Jake and Dinos Chapman at Blain-Southern – their first outing with this prestigious dealer, offers a full-on re-interpretation of Goya’s Disasters of War, plus, on pedestals in the centre of the room, some full-size bronze versions of suicide vests.
10 October 2017
The bronze apple of creation called ‘Creations’ that Alexander De Cadenet placed on the Henry Moore Alter in the centre of the St Stephen Walbrook Church, City of London invokes an understanding around the apple of desire. The piece allows for a confrontation with one’s own soul.
10 October 2017
The two Frieze art fairs held simultaneously in London every year are now, according to received opinion, the biggest temperature taking, temperature raising events in the whole of the UK art calendar.
6 October 2017
Just occasionally, an exhibition manages to take me unawares. This was very much the case with Dan Colen’s new show… Read More
6 October 2017
London Galleries, London Frieze week
4 October 2017
Degas often seems like the odd man out, among the leading artists of the Impressionist Movement.
28 September 2017
This is the first public gallery show of Lichtenstein’s paintings to be held in Britain since Tate Modern’s well-attended retrospective in London, in 2013.
26 September 2017
From the Vapor of Gasoline, the odd title of the new mixed exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard comes from a slogan Jean-Michel Basquiat scrawled across one of his paintings. The phrase, so the exhibition list tells one ‘conjures [up] a society running on empty’. That may well be so, but one has to remember that the painting concerned was produced in 1985, more than thirty years ago, at the very height of Basquiat’s success in the New York art world, then much closer to being globally dominant than it is now.
25 September 2017
Often enough in his career, Jasper Johns has issued statements that say in effect: ‘Who am I? The truth is that I don’t think I really know the answer myself.’ Does this retrospective at the R.A. answer the question? Maybe not quite.
22 September 2017
The new Jean-Michel Basquiat show at the Barbican titled Basquiat: Boom For Real comes with a thumping big hardback catalogue published by Prestel.
21 September 2017
BARTHOLOMEW BEAL FAS – There’s a paradoxical situation in the art world right now, Both here in Britain and, according to what I see on the Web, abroad.
18 September 2017
The British Museum’s new exhibition, Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia, marks another triumph for the B.M’s policy of allying itself to Russian institutions.
17 September 2017
Twenty years in the planning, the Oscar Wilde Temple gloriously debuted in New York City’s Church of the Village. The artist duo David McDermott and Peter McGough have transformed the Russell Chapel into an opulent Victorian fantasy that replicates the sensual Aesthetic Movement championed by Wilde.
15 September 2017
There’s no doubt that the Jean Dubuffet show just opened at Pace here in London would be entirely worthy of a great museum.
14 September 2017
Up Now in London – Paul Carey-Kent chooses the best of the Autumn season’s start.
13 September 2017
At first glance, the late Victorian grandee who works is now in a show at Leighton House, and today’s culture hero Damien Hirst, leader of the YBA revolution of the 1990s, would seem to have little in common.
28 August 2017
Ralph Steadman has just published a very handsome new picture book, folio size, entitled Critters, about species threatened with extinction.
24 August 2017
