fri 29/03/2024

pop art

DVD: Hockney

Since David Hockney entered his eighth decade (he is now 77), we seem to have witnessed an accelerated output of major exhibitions, biographies and documentaries. The public appetite has never tired of this most tireless of artists, but it’s an...

Read more...

Sci-Fi Week: Through the eyes of JG Ballard

A sci-fi special would be incomplete without the profoundly influential figure of JG Ballard, a writer who, when he began his career in the late Fifties, fully subscribed to the notion that  “sci-fi is the literature of the 20th century.”...

Read more...

Hockney

David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital...

Read more...

Allen Jones, Royal Academy

There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the...

Read more...

Richard Tuttle, Tate Modern / Whitechapel Gallery

It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its...

Read more...

Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern /ICA

Some artists are diminished by major retrospectives, including those artists we consider great. A gap opens up between what you see and what you hear, which is why you can never judge work with your ears, or at least your ears and nothing else. The...

Read more...

Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman, Pallant House Gallery

This exhibition makes me very sad. And not just because the subject of this long overdue survey died at the age of 28, and so left behind a body of work that stretches to only two very small galleries in the current exhibition, but because it does...

Read more...

CD: Julia Holter - Loud City Song

This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of...

Read more...

Patrick Caulfield/Gary Hume, Tate Britain

Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) is the greatest late 20th-century British painter the international art world has never heard of. This quietly magnificent exhibition of about 35 paintings, most of them very large, may at last bring about a...

Read more...

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, Tate Modern

Towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, there is a small abstract painting, Untitled, 1959, executed just before the artist found himself at the heart of the Pop Art movement. The painting is, by any measure, a failure....

Read more...

Andy Warhol: The Portfolios, Dulwich Picture Gallery

The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in...

Read more...

British Design 1948 - 2012: Innovation in the Modern Age, Victoria & Albert Museum

The V&A has played a blinder. This extraordinary, exciting and unexpected exhibition provides endless trips down memory lane for many and will be a revelation for others. Ignore the clunky title, moving us from the postwar Olympics of 1948 to...

Read more...
Subscribe to pop art