Visual arts
alice.vincent
At seven o'clock on a Friday night, with the first spring twilight of the year as a backdrop, Newcastle’s Civic Centre reverberated to a new composition for its Carillon bells. Mingling eerily with birdsong, it marked a rather different start to the weekend from the hoards of hen nights getting ready for a night on the Toon. This was the opening night of AV, the biennial international festival of electronic arts.The festival chose energy as its curatorial theme. It was a snug fit for a town associated as strongly with its foundations in industry, and more recently with economic hardship and Read more ...
ash.smyth
When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public to the great Hindi word swarnadosh (erm, "nocturnal emissions"). Banerjee (b. 1972) is generally credited with having introduced the graphic novel to India. Incorrectly, as it happens; but with Corridor (2004) and The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) – over and above his work as illustrator, publisher and film-maker – the Goldsmiths-trained Read more ...
ash.smyth
The subversive artist and film-maker Sarnath Banerjee, credited with introducing the graphic novel to India, features in a London show, Royale With Cheese, at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1, where his eight-scene graphic narrative Che in Africa is displayed. You can see it here. And read the interview with him here: "I’m very interested in the disreputable men of history, especially the Big Men in Africa – the leaders known as the grandes légumes..."
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Royale With Cheese is at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1 until 3 April
Sarnath Banerjee's Read more ...
fisun.guner
Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry. What’s more, he’s a hugely prolific musician, so I’m sure he means only that he feels a little more comfortable expressing himself through imagery rather than abstract concepts – though obviously, being human, he must do that as well.Alongside these many activities, Childish also co-founded the Stuckists, that rather silly anti-conceptual art Read more ...
sue.steward
This week I discovered Irving Penn’s little-known portraits of anonymous street traders, taken in Paris, London and New York between 1950 and 1951. Previously unseen in the UK, they are now appearing at Hamiltons’ Mayfair gallery: 33 examples from a series of almost 252 full-length portraits collectively titled Small Trades. While they lack the instant glamour of the celebrity Portraits currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery, these sensitive depictions of skilled street traders – including a Parisian cheese-seller, a London house painter, a New York flower delivery man - are Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England.” Upon its publication 75 years ago, J B Priestley’s English Journey became an important influence for writers, photographers and even, it has been suggested, the agenda of the post-war Labour administration. Cushioned by the success of The Good Companions (1929), Priestley embarked on his tour of the English regions at a time of economic Armageddon. In this new English journey, and in the teeth of a new recession, photographer John Angerson set out to follow in Priestley Read more ...
mark.hudson
Henry Moore is said to have first encountered the image of the reclining figure in Paris in 1925 in a plaster cast of an ancient Mexican Toltec-Maya figure in the Trocadero Museum. It was to become probably his most frequently explored theme, revisited hundreds of times over the following 60 years before his death in 1986. From the relatively realistic to the almost totally abstract, Moore’s reclining figures can be seen in galleries and public spaces all over the world. Here we give you 11 particularly glorious examples, all to be seen at Tate Britain's magnificent exhibition Henry Moore. Read more ...
mark.hudson
Who gives a **** about Henry Moore? The standing of the craggy-faced Yorkshire miner’s son who dominated British art for half a century has declined massively since his death in 1986. Where once Moore was British art, most people in this country have now probably never heard of him. Those pin-headed, slab-like forms that once seemed universal in their embodiment of utopian modernity now feel so of their time you expect to see Muffin the Mule come clopping round the corner at any moment.If the watchword of contemporary culture has become "difference" – the compunction to accommodate the "other Read more ...
fisun.guner
Like Philippe Starck, whose Alessi tripod lemon squeezer is a bit like an evil-looking Louise Bourgeois spider, Ron Arad emerged in the Eighties as something of a “rock‘n’roll” designer. It’s a label that’s stuck, as has its sexy variant “post-punk”. The latter came about after his break-through Rover Chair (1981; main picture) found its first customer in Jean-Paul Gaultier. The Rover Chair was a clever salvage job: an old battered leather Rover car seat mounted on curved steel. It was perfect for the 1980s bachelor pad and, aptly, made its television debut on Top Gear under Jeremy Read more ...
josh.spero
Works of art are usually quite easily recognisable: they’re in a frame, or on a pedestal, or (if it’s a particularly expensive one) there’s a security guard nearby. You’ll probably be in an art gallery or a smart private house too. But what about when the art is in the land? And moreover, when that art is almost too subtle to be noticed?This is what confronts the viewer of Ana Mendieta’s work, on show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London. Cuban-born Mendieta (1948-85) made interventions in the landscape based around her own silhouette, such as pressing her hand into grass or arranging stones Read more ...
howard.male
In the mid 1940s when the Queen Mother purchased Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (1943) Princess Margaret remembers saying, “Poor Mummy’s gone mad. Look what she’s brought back.” But though this painting is one of the undoubted masterpieces of 20th-century British art, it’s easy to see why the Princess responded as she did. At a glance, the dry, scrubby brushwork, muted colours and somewhat lumpen forms don’t exactly sing out of the grandeur of the English countryside in the way that, say, the paintings of Samuel Palmer or John Constable do. But Nash was a metaphysical poet as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Over the past couple of years, maverick photographer Gavin Bond has built up a contacts book that would be the envy of Rankin or Annie Leibovitz. He’s been shooting everyone who is anyone: subjects range from godfathers of rock such as Bono and AC/DC, through familiar acts like The Killers and Gwen Stefani, to fresh faces and emerging starts like Katy Perry and Vampire Weekend. Borrowing a vocabulary from the highly imagined and stylised world of the pop video, Bond’s photography largely concentrates on the impact of the artists as performers. However, "behind-the-scenes" shots of bands on Read more ...