Visual arts
josh.spero
There is nothing new, nor inherently artistic, about making miniature models. Otherwise everyone who's ever stuffed a small ship into a glass bottle would be in the National Gallery. (Yes, Yinka Shonibare's fourth plinth ship-in-a-bottle outside the National Gallery is different.) But the boîtes (boxes/enclosures) of Charles Matton are of a different order entirely: recreations of artists' studios, imaginings of authors' libraries, tiny real rooms and tiny fake rooms. As well as the craft and the beauty, they challenge our very idea of seeing, space, reality.These are grand claims for what Read more ...
mark.hudson
Exhibitions with titles appended "in Britain" or "and Britain" tend to be the kiss of death: indicating concentration on a brief and insignificant visit, on the subject’s impact on British art or – even worse – the influence of local collectors on his or her reputation. With Mark Rothko, though, it has to be different. The New York abstractionist’s current near-sacred status is such that a show of his dog-ends and nail clippings would probably prove a major draw.Indeed, the sheer incongruity of the grouchy high priest of Colour Field Painting being in Britain at all, never mind socialising in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the most surprising and exciting collections of contemporary stuff on view for many a while. Some is functional, from coffins to bicycles, wine caskets, guns, bespoke shoes. Some would not be out of place in a contemporary sculpture show: life-size predatory creatures include David Mach’s King Silver Gorilla made out of silver wire hangers, Shauna Richardson’s life-size crocheted brown Crochetdermy Bear (pictured below), while Ji Yonf Ho’s shark made out of tyres swims in the air above us.Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk, or theartsdesk.com, is a website created in 2009 by leading British professional arts journalists and critics to offset the decline in supply of arts coverage in the print media where most of them worked. Launched on 9 September 2009, it publishes daily updating reviews, interviews and features by its member writers that aim to combine the best of print journalism standards with the speed, accessibility and technical opportunities of the web.Its particular strengths are overnight reviews of live plays, concerts and dance, in-depth Q&As with leading arts figures, weekly Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Every surface in my house is covered in plaster and brick dust, and wood, sand, cement, plaster and wire mesh are strewn all over the place. Furniture, carpets and pictures are covered in dust sheets and piled into two sealed rooms. You’ve guessed it, I’ve got the builders in and while the scaffolding was up, I spent days nose to wall repointing the brickwork, restoring the pediment and painting the windows.What a relief to escape from such squalor to a gallery – only to find that Phyllida Barlow’s exhibition is much like home! Bog-standard building materials are her stock-in-trade and Read more ...
fisun.guner
What are the most common responses to a work of contemporary art? I can think of two: “A six-year-old could have done that” (feel free to substitute “I” or “anyone”) and “But what does it actually mean?” Ryan Gander is an artist who is rather exercised by the latter. He is interested in the way we piece together scraps of evidence – overlooked details, context, history – in order to create meaning. We try to fill in the gaps. And when meaning eludes us we are often dismissive, even rather angry. Hence the protestation: “A six-year-old could have done that.” And indeed, that may well be true. Read more ...
ash.smyth
From Edinburgh to London and back, via Tatooine and Port Talbot, Rich Hardcastle has photographed playwrights and magicians, burlesque dancers and rugby captains, and regularly adorned the covers of The Big Issue, FHM and The Sunday Times Culture section. Along the way, though, the 40-year-old Londoner has missed no opportunity to shoot the great and the good-humoured, has documented Karl Pilkington’s idiocy abroad, and has produced the pictures for the illustrated book of Extras. Photographing funny faces, it turns out, is something of a specialism – and this month, his portrait of Rob Read more ...