sat 18/05/2024

abstract art

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, Tate Britain

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's phallic head of American poet Ezra Pound

Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings...

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The Hepworth Wakefield

A town in desperate need of regeneration commissions David Chipperfield, the architect of the moment, to build an art gallery in the hope of attracting visitors with deep pockets. In case you are suffering an attack of déja vu, this is not an action...

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Max Bill, Annely Juda Fine Art

'green square with migrated pythagorean triangles' (1982) by Max Bill, the missing link in modern art

Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at...

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Cage 99, St George's Bristol

John Cage, patron saint of silence and noise

John Cage, the focus of an adventurous three-day mini-festival in Bristol, is possibly one of the most influential figures in 20th-century culture. As much a practical philosopher as a composer of note, he made artists, writers and musicians think...

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Out Hear: Exaudi play John Cage Song Books, Kings Place

At its best, and most preposterous, John Cage's work can be a mind-cleanser. The overwhelmingly silly randomised conjunctions and ontological punning of the great Zen master of the 20th-century avant-garde can coax and trick you into letting go of...

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Mordant Mass, The Vortex

Nick Edwards aka Ekoplekz, creating abstract dub from the sound of surging electricity

Avant-garde art, by its very nature, always treads a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and between entertainment and alienation. Thankfully this is something understood very well by the joint curators of Friday night's show at the...

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Martin Creed, Hauser & Wirth

Installation view of Martin Creed's 'Mothers' at Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row

Who could not love Martin Creed? The tweed-encased harumphers of the world adore him, because they can say, “That’s not art,” and, “My cat could do that,” and have an all-round wonderful time. Conceptualists have it easy: what could be more fun...

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Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work, National Gallery

'Red with Red 1' (2007) by Bridget Riley

Well, we all make mistakes. Or, in my case, we (I mean “I”) sometimes just fail to look. This new, small but perfectly formed exhibition of Bridget Riley’s work in the National Gallery’s Sunley Rooms follows the pattern that the gallery has...

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Q&A Special: The Late Merce Cunningham

Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly...

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Art Gallery: Howard Hodgkin - Time and Place

Howard Hodgkin: 'The grand figure of British non-figurative painting'. Pictured: 'Dirty Weather' (2001)

Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and...

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