The Art Diary February 2023 – Revd Jonathan Evens
2023 begins In Essex with a focus on female experience and perceptions of life changes, embodiment, and the world around them.
12 February 2023
2023 begins In Essex with a focus on female experience and perceptions of life changes, embodiment, and the world around them.
12 February 2023
Surveying current and upcoming exhibitions at the turn of the year provides evidence of the breadth and depth of the past and present engagement between art and spirituality.
4 January 2023
There was a time when Nativity exhibitions routinely featured among the Christmas offerings from London Galleries.
11 December 2022
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in ceramics from artists and the public, from the popularity of The Great Pottery, Throw Down to Theaster Gates’
13 November 2022
Under an image of Richard Woods’ ‘Small House’ installation at Southwark Cathedral, Fergus Butler Gaillie
1 November 2022
I begin this month with two exhibitions that touch on religion in the context of exploring identity and end with a series of book-based installations
9 October 2022
“Drawing is the starting point to nearly all of Kentridge’s work. He sees drawing as a testing of ideas, a slow-motion version of thought.”
9 October 2022
Homer is an artist that, although a household name in America, is entirely unrepresented in UK public collections.
24 September 2022
Last year was the centenary of the birth of Joseph Beuys. Centenary exhibitions included ‘The Inventor of Electricity – Joseph Beuys and the Christian Impulse’
3 September 2022
It’s such a simple motif – a woman at or by a window – yet, as curator Jennifer Sliwka ably demonstrates in this show, is one that contains hidden depths.
31 August 2022
Miguel de Unamuno wrote that, “In Mallorca art becomes reason and reason art.” While Palma is the obvious centre in which to test this maxim…
31 August 2022
From early on in their history, churches have regularly been spaces in which art was displayed and valued. That continued in the modern period…
14 August 2022
Oldenburg’s show at Judson House in May 1959 was his first solo show and consisted of three-dimensional constructions.
1 August 2022
The Vanity of Small Differences is an exhibition of six huge tapestries by Grayson Perry, which has recently opened to the public at Salisbury Cathedral. The tapestries have toured extensively over the last few years, but this is the first time they have been seen in an ecclesiastical setting.
14 July 2022
The image of Essex is currently being questioned, challenged and re-framed by artists and exhibitions in and from Essex.
9 July 2022
The adherence of the Singh Twins to the Indian miniature painting tradition has been a way of asserting their right to choose a visual language
20 June 2022
The word carnival derives from Latin expressions meaning either to remove meat or say farewell to meat. These indicate the Christian roots of carnival which are to be found in the period leading up the fasts of Lent.
2 June 2022
Les Lalanne, the late French wife and husband artistic duo, are the dreamers who re-enchant.
23 May 2022
The first major exhibition of Glyn Philpot R.A. (1884-1937) in almost 40 years is currently at Pallant House Gallery, while Tate Britain has the first major retrospective of Walter Sickert at Tate in over 60 years. The differences and similarities between these two artists whose careers overlapped are instructive.
18 May 2022
Several exhibitions/installations in Venice during the 59th Biennale re-situate key works or themes from Christianity’s historic engagement with the Arts, in some cases overlaying biblical narrative onto the present.
3 May 2022
Jacob Epstein, Louis Carreon, Titus Kaphar, Betty Spackman
14 April 2022
Raphael’s brief career shaped the course of Western culture like no other artist; this was so whether his work was affirmed or his influence rejected.
11 April 2022
Everything Damien Hirst does is controversial, from the initial shock of the new – the sensation of the YBAs – through his use of assistants, his choice of materials, the ethics of his use of animals, the plagiarism claims, the claims and counterclaims of ‘bad art,’ through to the commercialism of his overall operation.
28 March 2022
Ali Cherri, as an artist growing up in Lebanon during the Civil War, embodying traumatic experiences of catastrophe and violence
23 March 2022
Audrey Flack found her signature style during the 1960s. Originally an Abstract Expressionist, she moved through New Realism to Photorealism.
13 March 2022
Surrealism: Beyond Borders presents an expansive and hugely varied retelling of the story of Surrealism that challenges the Paris-centric traditional art history tale of its flourishing.
1 March 2022
9/11, made Rachel Feinstein want to use religious iconography in her work again. The result is Mirror, her current art exhibition at Gagosian.
9 February 2022
In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote, ‘I’d like to paint men or women with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal,
3 February 2022
I was taken back to the roots of my love for the visual arts on a visit to galleries around Cork Street just before Christmas.
27 December 2021
Albrecht Dürer, himself, lived in Nuremberg throughout his life but made several significant European journeys.
11 December 2021
Stirring it up or creolisation is taken by this exhibition as a defining characteristic of British Caribbean artists.
5 December 2021
Isamu Noguchi thought art should improve the way people live and believed sculpture could ‘be a vital force in our everyday life.
20 November 2021