painting
fisun.guner
Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his conscience, and yet Claudius, conflicted, cannot pray. He must, therefore, remain a captive among the ghosts and the monsters where no light may fall.What did light mean for Philip Guston? Not what it means for most painters, nor for those seeking the redemptive light. The naked light bulb that pops up in so many of his paintings is both the Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
If they remember the 1960s at all, the ageing population of Bexhill-on-Sea will remember Bridget Riley for her black and white experiments in perception. The iconic results of this line of enquiry can still result in a “happening” for the eyeballs. And that’s exactly what you get from the earliest paintings in this show: uniform stripes of black and white that won’t for a moment stay still. Crest, 1964 (pictured below right), is particularly dazzling, with a pair of whiplash curves that speed up before your eyes and ripple back and forth at a bewildering pace. Crest leaps out of its Read more ...
Florence Hallett
For all the wrong reasons, the work of Dexter Dalwood serves as a useful metaphor for this exhibition. Trite, tokenistic and desperate to look clever, Dalwood’s paintings are as tiresomely inward-looking as the show itself, which is a dismal example of curatorial self-indulgence at the expense of public engagement. It’s not always a bad thing to give free rein to theorising curators, but this show compares unfavourably with exhibitions at, notably, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Courtauld Gallery that have successfully introduced the public to sound, but arguably arcane academic Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It's impossible to overstate the reverence accorded the painter Agnes Martin by her fellow artists; in the panoply of American cultural goddesses, she is right up there with Emily Dickinson. Yet she is scarcely known in the wider world, partly because her work is relentlessly abstract, but also because she was deliberately evasive.She left New York in 1967 just as her reputation was gaining momentum and moved to New Mexico, where she lived as a recluse until her death in 2004. She rarely agreed to interviews and when she did speak would give conflicting accounts of her past, so there was no Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s far too easy to think about the history of art as a series of class acts, with one superlative achievement following another. Exhibitions tend to encourage this view, and the notion of a superstar artist is key to persuading us that the latest blockbuster is unmissable. We know that the artists with the biggest reputations were not always celebrated in their own lifetimes, but just as the characterisation of the great artist as a lone genius is misleading and fanciful, this one-room exhibition shows that casting art history’s lesser-known figures as sorry failures is equally misguided. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 1967 when she produced Syncopated Rhythm (main picture), Sonia Delaunay was 82; far from any decline in energy or ambition, the abstract painting shows her in a relaxed and playful mood. Known as The Black Snake for the sinuous black and white curves dominating the left hand side, this huge, two and a half metre wide canvas is deliciously varied. The arcs of rich colour so familiar in Delaunay’s work are joined by triangles, squares and rectangles articulated with vigorous cross-hatching, see-through washes and solid blocks of pigment in a gorgeous array of vibrant hues. This Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Iranian-born New York resident painter YZ Kami, now in his mid-fifties, continually plays with our hunger to look at “reality” while being seduced by abstraction and repetition. In 17 canvases, painted over the past two years, Kami explores two distinct and recognisable styles or idioms that however much in common they have with contemporary concerns he has made his own. The results are both powerful and pleasurable. He uses oil on linen when painting blurred portraits based on photographs or, presumably when the subject is named, based on a person known to the artist; acrylic on Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At 86, Jo Baer is still painting vigorously. In the mid 1960s, she was an established New York Minimalist along with artists like Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt; but while they continued to explore abstraction, she changed tack – dramatically, or so it seemed. In the mid 1970s, she turned toward figuration declaring that the “naivety” of Minimalism (its refusal to engage with events in the real world) no longer made it relevant. Yet she still thinks of herself as an abstract painter and this survey, which spans 55 years, allows us to guage what she means by the claim.In the early days, her Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
MK Gallery has a knack for showcasing mid-career artists before any other public space and this is Ellen Altfest’s first survey in the UK. There are 22 paintings here which, given their demands on her time, represent a significant proportion of the 44-year old’s output to date. Most of the pieces come from private collections, representing her commercial success with White Cube. And while the blue chip gallery showed her in the modest setting of Hoxton Square, these works couldn’t be further from the epic installations which appear to characterise the gallery’s new space in Bermondsey. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Look at me, and think of England. This marvellous array of quirky, idiosyncratic watercolours by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) from the 1930s until his premature death during wartime when his plane, on an air sea rescue mission for which he had volunteered, crashed in Iceland. It is full of memorable and haunting pictures. Drawing on a profound understanding of the history of the English watercolour and its concentration both on domesticity and majesty, Ravilious utilised the conventional response – in part the English distrust of grandeur and ambition – to produce a subtle assault on such Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Opening It’s All About Piano!, a short but packed festival shared between Kings Place and the Institut français in Kensington, Mikhail Rudy made a rare appearance in the UK. The premise was unusual if hardly revolutionary, a meeting of music and film in which it was not obvious which was the accompanying medium. Was Rudy the silent-film pianist, or were the movies illustrative of latent narratives in Janáček and Musorgsky? Neither. And therein lay the recital’s success.It was back in 2012 that the Cité de la Musique in Paris commissioned from the Quay Brothers a film adaptation of Kafka’ Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The grand but domestic setting of Hertford House, home of the Wallace Collection, makes a fitting backdrop to an exhibition of paintings by Joshua Reynolds. The Marquesses of Hertford acquired some 25 paintings by Reynolds in the artist's lifetime, and after it, and the 12 that remain in the collection form the focus of this exhibition. Not only does the Wallace Collection give an impression of the way that paintings were collected and viewed in the 18th century and beyond, but in its wealth of Old Master and 18th-century French paintings, for example, it shares characteristics with Reynolds' Read more ...