Visual arts
fisun.guner
The British Museum’s current exhibition of 15th-century works on paper, Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, explores the increasing importance of the preparatory sketch in the development of western art. Central to that development was the availability of cheaply produced paper. But as we discover in the British Museum’s free exhibition of the evolution of Chinese printmaking, The Printed Image in China, paper was being successfully manufactured in China by the third century AD. This innovation, along with the invention of the compass, gunpowder and printmaking, is among Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Welsh landscape promoted by the tourist board is a known entity. Postcard photographers patrol its contours waiting for the rains to desist and the sun to peer out so that they can snap splendid estuaries, meadowed shores patrolled by a lone diesel train, elegant county towns hibernating in the fold of a loafy hill, aqueducts and crumbling abbeys, beetling peaks and labyrinthine ravines. These photographs by James Morris, from a new exhibition and book, find another, sterner Wales imposed on the old familiar template.The post-industrial Wales depicted here doesn’t always win admirers. Read more ...
josh.spero
In my parents’ day, apparently, one just turned up at the cinema whenever one felt like it, even if that meant the first thing you heard on entering the auditorium was Bogart signalling the start of a beautiful friendship. That doesn’t wash these days – the auteur put paid to that – and given the short films commissioned by ICO/LUX to run before the feature, we can only approve. ICO, which supports independent film in the UK, and LUX, an agency for artists who work with film, asked eight international artists to make five-minute films, the results of which are being premiered at Cannes Read more ...
josh.spero
Sincerity is not a quality the contemporary art world seems to value: the masking of emotions under layers of irony is where we stand. But while Damien Hirst paints from a cynical palette, British Pop Artist Stuart Semple's Nineties-inflected paintings have sincerity to spare.The Happy House, his new show at Morton Metropolis and his first in London for three years, combines the commercial tropes of Pop Art as refracted through a certain naffness with self-portraits both visual and emotional. This is clear in the show’s outstanding picture, A Pounding Outside Poundland, where Semple recreates Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On my previous trip to the Second City in 2009, the much-awaited Art Institute of Chicago extension wasn’t quite ready for visitors, but is now about to celebrate its first birthday, and it’s a treat. The Modern Wing adds 35 per cent more space to the Institute, bringing it up to a nice round one million square feet and making it America’s second biggest art museum after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was designed by Renzo Piano, whose new wing (another glass-and-steel box) will be unveiled at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later this year; he’s clearly the go-to guy for Read more ...
judith.flanders
Marc Quinn is used to making a spectacle of himself. In Self (1991 and ongoing), a life-sized cast of his head was filled with his own blood. It was a stark and sobering reflection on what we all share, the universality of the most basic of human elements. But with the works in his new show Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela and Thomas, "spectacle" becomes the operative word, and universality is nowhere to be found.In these sculptures, produced over the last two years, Quinn has chosen to produce portraits of people who have elected to undergo radical and repeated cosmetic Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last year critics were pleasantly surprised that the Turner Prize shortlist included works that could actually be admired for traditional notions of beauty. This year they might be surprised at its sheer variety. The four nominees not only include a painter, but an artist who crushes, bends and rips her canvases, a sound artist who sings and places her recorded voice in unusual and tucked-away places, and a duo who make futuristic films in which humans have evolved in “microgravity”. With subjects ranging from the suicide of Kurt Cobain to the death of members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Read more ...
fisun.guner
I wondered how long it would be before Andy Warhol’s "15 minute" quote came up. From the whizzy, flash-bang opening credits I knew it wouldn’t be long. I was right: but less than seven minutes? Less than five? I didn’t time it, since I was still somewhat mesmerised by the sight of perky presenter Alastair Sooke doing a kind of disco-dancey, pointy-arm manoeuvre in front of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon during the intro. (Oh no, Alastair, I wanted to cry, you can’t out-cool Andy, so don’t even try.)Art critic TV presenters come in all sorts of guises these days. You can be scruffy, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The fountains have been switched on at Somerset House, and I watched a group of tourists giggling as they picked their way through the water jets. They obviously hadn’t noticed the cheerful sound of running water coming from the edge of the courtyard, which encourages you to descend some narrow stairs down to the light wells that illuminate the lower floors of Somerset House.Loud gurgling and trickling noises conjure vivid images of babbling brooks and mountain streams tumbling headlong over glistening boulders – of water in its natural state, in other words, which is a far cry from the Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Next week sees the opening of an exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art of new work by Maggi Hambling, one of the most innovative and prolific - not to mention flamboyant - artists working in Britain today, which neatly coincides with a show of sea paintings at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. You can see a selection in theartsdesk's gallery. Born in 1945, she has a reputation for being fierce and she’s certainly imposing – had she opted for a career in the performing arts she’d have given Edith Evan’s Lady Bracknell a run for her money – but she’s also extremely good company. And she’s a grafter, Read more ...
hilary.whitney
To accompany theartsdesk Q&A with artist Maggi Hambling by Hilary Whitney, this is a selection of pieces from two new exhibitions of her latest work opening in London and Cambridge. Maggi Hambling: New Sea Sculptures at Marlborough Fine Art coincides with The Wave, an exhibition of Hambling’s wave paintings at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. These paintings, sculptures, etchings and reliefs (a new departure for Hambling) energetically capture the restless motion of the sea and demonstrate Hambling’s increasingly bold way of working.
Click on the images to view them in a slideshow. Read more ...
josh.spero
One can hardly imagine the spiky dervish Grace Jones sitting still for a second, let alone remaining motionless long enough to have photographs (and plenty of them) taken for her portrait. Nevertheless, Chris Levine has managed to pin her down - in a manner of speaking. Levine's exhibition at the Vinyl Factory - Stillness at the Speed of Light - captures the performance artist's restless activity in a very clever way: several of his portraits are in fact lenticular 3D portraits - holograms. Having shot many images of Grace's face in motion, Levine layers them and illuminates them with acid Read more ...