Frieze Week And Beyond Gallery Round-Up October 2017 – Paul Carey Kent
London Galleries, London Frieze week
4 October 2017
Archives: Reviews
Degas – The Impressionist Movement’s Odd Man Out By Edward Lucie-Smith
Degas often seems like the odd man out, among the leading artists of the Impressionist Movement.
28 September 2017
Roy Lichtenstein: Ben-Day Dots And Printer’s Ink – Tate Liverpool
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
Society Running on Empty at White Cube by Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Jasper Johns: Who Am I? A Retrospective By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Basquiat Boom The Hero In His Own Play By Edward Lucie-Smith
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 – Maslen and Mehra Reviewed By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Scythian Gold Sinister Riches British Museum By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Unveiled – The Oscar Wilde Temple by David McDermott and Peter McGough NYC
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
Jean Dubuffet: Art Naked Without Pretensions By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Paul Cary -Kent Chooses His Must See Exhibitions For September 2017
Up Now in London – Paul Carey-Kent chooses the best of the Autumn season’s start.
13 September 2017
Alma Tadema Cinematic Blockbuster Painting – By Edward Lucie-Smith
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’s Ark – Species Threatened With Extinction By Edward Lucie-Smith
Ralph Steadman has just published a very handsome new picture book, folio size, entitled Critters, about species threatened with extinction.
24 August 2017
Drawing As An Encounter Between Artists And Sitters By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Bram Bogart: Focus On Boundaries Of Painting At The Saatchi Gallery
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
Is Daniel Richter In The Same League As Peter Doig?
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 – Voyage To The End Of Pop Art – Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Matisse Cultural Appropriation And His Studio RA Review By Sue Hubbard
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
Arabic calligraphy Another Islamic Winner Saatchi Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Sarajevo’s Mersad Berber – Memorial For A Local Hero By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Rose Finn-Kelcey: Forging The Future Of Feminist Art By Paul Black
Modern Art Oxford is currently presenting the first posthumous exhibition of works by Rose Finn-Kelcey (1945–2014).
20 July 2017
Hella Jongerius Playing With Colour By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Islamic Women Explore Their Identities In London Exhibition – By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Black Power! Tate’s Latest Right On Exhibition Explores African American Art
A challenging and intelligent new show at Tate Modern asks rather more questions than it actually succeeds in answering.
13 July 2017
Chris Ofili Tapestry Magic At The National Gallery By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Carla Raffinetti: Drawing A Way Out Of The Abyss New Exhibition
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
Raphael Drawings Appropriation On A Grand Scale By Edward Lucie-Smith
One telling feature of the show of Raphael drawings now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is its timing.
10 July 2017
Jamaican Spiritual Art And Its Relationship To Religion By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
G.F. WATTS – Not Quite Michelangelo By Edward Lucie-Smith
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
Howard Hodgkin: India My Somewhere Else By Sue Hubbard
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
Otto Dix And August Sander – Observing The Rise Of German Fascism
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
Virtual Masterpiece The Masterpiece Art Fair By Edward Lucie-Smith
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