The latest stage in the National Portrait Gallery’s endeavour to reach out beyond its original remit – paintings and sculptures, often of not much artistic merit in themselves, of worthy Brits – is a rather fascinating show of Old Master portrait drawings, lent from other British national collections.
21 August 2017
This Summer, the Saatchi Gallery will be hosting the second of a series of exhibitions under the new SALON programme within the Gallery’s Duke of York premises in Chelsea, London.
17 August 2017
Daniel Richter has shaped painting in Germany as few others have done, since the 1990s. He slots in well with important painters such as Peter Doig and Billy Childish but adds a twist of ‘Street’ savvy to the mix.
15 August 2017
Harland Miller’s rather handsome exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, looks more like the end of something than the beginning of something. There are several reasons why this is so.
10 August 2017
The artist’s studio is both a practical workshop and the workshop of the mind, a place of reflection and play, of doubt and hard work. At first a modest collector of modest means, Matisse filled his studio with objects collected on his travels to create a stage-set of languid sensuality, returning to the same paintings, prints, sculptures and textiles for inspiration over and over again like old friends, each time finding new points of stimulation.
1 August 2017
Hot on the heels of the Princess Zeid show at Tate Modern, which runs until October 8th, is a much smaller and shorter-lived exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, by an artist also Middle Eastern, royal, and female, which runs only until August 18th. The artist is splendidly entitled Khawala Bint Ahmed Bint Kahalifa Al Suwaida.
1 August 2017
Mersad Berber was one of the very few artists from the former Yugoslavia who managed to acquire an international profile for himself.
23 July 2017
Modern Art Oxford is currently presenting the first posthumous exhibition of works by Rose Finn-Kelcey (1945–2014).
20 July 2017
As Hella Jongerius’ fascinating exhibition at the Design Museum proves, it is getting more and more difficult to draw a firm, unyielding line between what we call Design and what we still call Art.
16 July 2017
There happens to be quite a spectrum of feminist and what one might (maybe tactlessly) call ethnic exhibitions on view in London… Read More
15 July 2017
A challenging and intelligent new show at Tate Modern asks rather more questions than it actually succeeds in answering.
13 July 2017
Chris Ofili’s big tapestry, commissioned by the Clothworkers’ Company and now on view at the Sunley Room at the National Gallery, doesn’t seem to have attracted nearly as much attention as it should have done. It’s a pretty spectacular object, and in addition to that, it ticks all sorts of boxes.
12 July 2017
It is easy to dismiss the world of the ancestors and appeasing gods in a post-scientific Western society. Less so when burdened with a culture and history as oppressive as that of the white South African. Our shared past cannot simply be ignored, even if we were mere witnesses to it and can nurse a new narrative response to it. In a small selection of works currently on view at Ma-Wah, Continent, by artist Carla Raffinetti, invites us to reflect on the past as we suckle, forging our way out of the abyss.
10 July 2017
One telling feature of the show of Raphael drawings now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is its timing.
10 July 2017
A small confession to make here: I wrote a brief text for the catalogue of this show because Jamaica is where I originally come from. The subject of the exhibition is Jamaican art, manifested in its relationship to religion.
8 July 2017
The G F Watts Gallery, near Guilford, with one of very few art spaces in Britain that is basically dedicated to a single artist. Equivalents, perhaps, are Leighton House in Kensington, the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, and maybe – just maybe – Damien Hirst’s splendid new gallery in Newport Street, Vauxhall. There, however, the great Damien has been careful to show work by artists other than himself, though most of what is on view comes from his own collection.
6 July 2017
Everyone has a “somewhere else” in their lives Howard Hodgkin said in 1992. “My somewhere else is India”. Howard Hodgkin was 32… Read More
5 July 2017
A fascinating exhibition linking ‘Portraying a Nation’ and ‘The Evil Eye’ with works by August Sander and Otto Dix is currently showing at Tate Liverpool.
4 July 2017
What people choose to describe as ‘a masterpiece’ is usually pretty much a matter of context. On the whole, at this annual beanfeast for conspicuous consumers, you won’t find much in the way of graffiti art lurking around, though it’s just possible that you might be confronted with a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat now that he’s included in the pantheon of artists with multi-million dollar price tags.
2 July 2017
This year’s big graduation show of work by Fine Arts students from the Royal College of Art is both inspiriting and at the same time just a little bit depressing.
28 June 2017
This intimate exhibition of eighty watercolours from the Anglo-American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) has opened at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
23 June 2017
I confess I had a few reservations about the Fahrelnissa Zeid retrospective now at Tate Modern.
22 June 2017
The small exhibition of work by Richard Smith currently at the Flowers Gallery in Cork Street offers, among other things, a demonstration of just how drastically once huge reputations can fade. Smith died last year, at the age of 84.
16 June 2017
The Grayson Perry show that just opened at the Serpentine Gallery offers both a very new version of now-obligatory populism in the promotion of contemporary visual art and at the same time, a sly critique of it.
8 June 2017
Paul Carey-Kent Offers Artlyst his choice of the best London Art Exhibitions to see in June 2017
5 June 2017
Until the Modern epoch, and indeed right up to the present day, Hokusai was by far the most influential non-European artist to impact European art.
30 May 2017
Everyone in Britain was torn apart by World War ll. Artists were hungry, dislocated and like everyone else had lost their sense of safety and home. Rosenberg & Co.’s current exhibition ‘British Modern Masters’ presents the artistic release of the emotional build up of what British artists had seen or perhaps done during the war.
27 May 2017
The now very senior Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) has often found himself classified as a Pop artist, largely because a large part of his subject matter – still lifes of commonplace objects (in his case often items of mass-produced food) – overlaps with the kind of things that members of the American Pop movement chose to depict.
26 May 2017
Hauser & Wirth have demonstrated an impeccable sense of timing by presenting their Richard Milhouse Nixon show, ‘Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975’, first seen in their New York gallery in 2016 – that is to say actually before Donald Trump won the American presidency in December of that year.
22 May 2017
Paul Carey-Kent has sifted through Photo London the UK’s leading photography fair to put together this themed pick of what caught his eye. The most impressive Photo London yet runs 18-21 May. Art Fairs are not by their general nature intimate experiences, but photography as a medium is certainly capable of intimacy. So it was interesting to hunt down the latter within the former…
18 May 2017
I remember, some time ago, a film in which a young interviewer asked Louise Bourgeois, then in her 90s, what it was like to become famous at her advanced age. The tiny, bird-like figure replied acerbically: “I ‘ave been ‘eer all along.” Phyllida Barlow has, also, been here all along.
16 May 2017
Artist Hedley Roberts Picks Twelve of the best from the`57th Venice Biennale
15 May 2017
