Visual Arts Reviews
Rachel Whiteread: Detached, Gagosian GalleryTuesday, 16 April 2013
When I visited Rachel Whiteread two years ago, there were two old sheds gathering dust in her basement as though waiting to be loved and put to use. Why was she cluttering up her studio with such large and intrusive objects, I wondered? “Things fester,” she told me by way of explanation. “I like to mull things over, so they might lie about for years. It’s to do with me noticing them; they need to relate to my train of thought and investigation. Read more... |
Jacob Epstein: Portraits, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 08 April 2013
“I don’t like the family Stein; There is Gert, there is Ep and there’s Ein; Gert’s Poems are bunk, Ep’s statues are punk, And nobody understands Ein” (Anon). Read more... |
High Art of the Low Countries, BBC FourFriday, 05 April 2013
There was a time when the art of the Low Countries was considered to be very lowly and base indeed. It was the high art of Italy that counted if you were a person of culture and breeding. Not for you the carousing common folk of Jan Steen, or those watery flatlands of Van Goyen, touched with too much bleak realism. It was the arcadian Campagna of Claude – like Poussin a Frenchman but with the Rubicon flowing through his veins – that you looked to. Read more... |
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Happiest Man, Ambika P3Sunday, 31 March 2013
Ambika P3 is a windowless, cavernous basement once used to test concrete for huge building projects – the Channel Tunnel among them – now ingeniously recycled as a kunsthalle gallery / performance space. Thus it is strikingly appropriate for its current incarnation. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Florence: The Springtime of the RenaissanceSunday, 31 March 2013
It’s an instinct of curators to put the pieces back together, to reintroduce works of art which time and market forces have scattered to the four winds. In recent memory, exhibitions have reunited in one space all of Monet’s haystacks, Cézanne’s card players and, in the case of the National Gallery’s momentous Leonardo show, both versions of The Virgin on the Rocks. A new exhibition opened this week in Florence which takes the business of synthesis to the next level. Read more... |
Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, British MuseumSaturday, 30 March 2013
"In the midst of life we are in death.” This is a line we may feel compelled to reverse as we encounter the first exhibits in the British Museum’s extraordinarily powerful exhibition, for this is a display vividly bringing the dead to life in the very midst of their extraordinary demise. Read more... |
Ryoji Ikeda: superposition, Barbican TheatreThursday, 28 March 2013
It’s not often that a performance’s technological properties leaves you simply slack-jawed. Robert Wilson’s very long Swedish-language version of Strindberg’s A Dream Play did – at the same venue, though this time in 2001 – when the surtitle machines broke down (the audience gave an audible gasp of horror and then settled to its collective fate), but that was for altogether different reasons. Read more... |
Moore Rodin, Henry Moore FoundationThursday, 28 March 2013
Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais have decamped from their usual perch next to the House of Lords to cosy up to the work of Henry Moore. They can be found at Moore’s home and studio at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, in a tellingly succinct anthology of the towering giants of modern European sculpture. Read more... |
What Do Artists Do All Day?, BBC FourWednesday, 20 March 2013
You might phrase the question rhetorically: “just what do artists do all day?” Or you might ask it in the spirit of genuine enquiry: after all, to many, the artist is an exotic creature whose mystery is still to be fully penetrated. Either way, it’s pretty clear that though it may not be “a proper job”, artworks don’t make themselves. Read more... |
David Bowie Is, Victoria & Albert MuseumWednesday, 20 March 2013
How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense. Read more... |
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