Visual arts
sue.steward
The British Library has for the first time created an exhibition from its unique photography archive of some 300,000 items, dating back to the first days of the process. Sue Steward reviews this major exhibition elsewhere, while here we present a selection of some of these marvellous early images.Click on a picture to enter full view and the slideshow
Anna Atkins, (algae) Dictyola dichtoma, 1843-53.
Lady Alice Mary Kerr, Portrait of William Scawen Blunt, c 1870.
Samuel Bourne, From the top of the Manirung Pass, India, 1864.
Francis Frith, Hastings from the beach – low water, 1864.
Henry Read more ...
theartsdesk
Graffiti is the only form of artistic self-expression that can get you both arrested and exhibited. Its most celebrated exponent, Banksy, is the subject of tabloid news speculation. The faces and names of most graffiti artists are even more of a closed book. Until Crack & Shine, that is. Gaining exclusive access to these creative renegades as they work, the photographer Will Robson-Scott shines a light into occluded corners of nighttime London where graffiti art finds its stealthy way onto brick walls and tube carriages. His images, which radiate both a pulsing energy and a ravishing Read more ...
sue.steward
Wales doesn’t figure high on the UK charts of art awareness, but one of its leading contemporary artists, 43-year-old Tim Davies, represents a generation who are producing significant, original work without approbation from the Hoxton or Shoreditch taste-makers, and often, attention comes from abroad. In Wales, of course, it’s a different story: he was Gold Medal winner in the 2003 National Eisteddfod, and on the other hand the only British artist shortlisted for the prestigious international Artes Mundi prize in 2004. Davies’ major solo show at the Glynn Vivian Gallery in his hometown, Read more ...
fisun.guner
The sculptor Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), RA, CBE, won the Turner Prize in 1990. His public works are characterised by their gigantic scale and ambition. In the UK he is probably best known for Marsyas (2002), the viscerally red “ear trumpet” that elegantly spanned the entire length of the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern. He is also the artist behind the world’s most expensive public sculpture. Cloud Gate (picture below), completed in 2006, is a beguiling polished steel ellipsis located in Chicago’s AT&T Plaza. Costing $23 million and measuring 10 metres by 20 metres, its silver mirrored surface Read more ...
mark.hudson
West Coast pop art always was a poor relation to the world-beating New York original. Beside the Big Apple titans – Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg – LA painters such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin and John Altoon remained essentially local figures. Or that’s certainly the way it has looked from this side of the pond. Ruscha (pronounced to rhyme with touché) may now be acclaimed as one of America’s greatest living artists, but with this first major British retrospective, the 72-year-old artist still has a lot to prove here and a lot to tell us about an aspect of American Read more ...
theartsdesk
Half a century of Ed Ruscha's paintings are on show at the Hayward Gallery, London. Mark Hudson reviews elsewhere in theartsdesk the display of Los Angeles's most famous painter, "an aspect of American art about which we’ve remained remarkably ignorant".
Click on an image to open the full view. [bg|/ART/mark_hudson/Ed_Ruscha] All pictures copyright Ed Ruscha 2009, image credits Paul Ruscha except where marked.
Oof, 1962 - 1963, Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Securing the last letter, 1964, Courtesy Collection of Emily Fisher Landau, New York.
The Old Tech-Chem Building, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Does a winning photograph jump out at you? Sure, we can talk earnestly of composition, an interesting subject, a telling juxtaposition, or the abstract interplay of colour, texture and light. But perhaps more than any other visual art form, what strikes us most about a photographic image remains somehow more elusive. And the hand of the artist who presses the shutter, rather than wields the brush, is not so easily perceived.Which brings us to this year’s winning entry for the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize. The standard for this annual award and exhibition remains Read more ...
alice.vincent
With the launch of the Wunderbar Featival this week, Newcastle continues to demonstrate just what 2008’s European Capital of Culture judges missed when they anointed Liverpool. The 10-day celebration, which starts tomorrow, is international in content but thoroughly North-East in spirit: unpretentious, clever and surprising. There are 28 free and ticketed events taking place throughout the city, from conventional cultural venues such as the Baltic, Northern Stage and Gallery North to people’s private living rooms and a plot of land in Byker. It is one of those rare festivals that makes it Read more ...
theartsdesk
Mark Hudson reviews on another page the National Gallery's exhibition of 17th-century Spanish sculpture and art, The Sacred Made Real, which he describes as "in some ways the most contemporary exhibition in London". Here are some of the artworks on show.
Click on an image to open full view [bg|/ART/mark_hudson/Sacred_Made_Real]
Saint John of God, about 1655, Alonso Cano (1601-1667), Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada, © Photo Imagen M.A.S. Courtesy of Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada
Saint Francis in Meditation, 1635–9, Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), National Gallery, London, © Read more ...
theartsdesk
An extensive selection is shown here of the work of Romuald Hazoumé, the Benin contemporary artist whose iconic masks made from petrol canisters dumped around his poverty-stricken homeland of Benin launched his international career. A major installation is owned by the British Museum, other pieces have been exhibited in the Saatchi and Hayward Galleries. Read the article on him by Sue Steward. Click on a picture to enter each section.Masks
(Photos Jonathan Greet. Images courtesy October Gallery, London)
Sénégauloise, 2009, Found objects, 33 x 22 x 25cm. .
La Meré Cotivet, 2001, Found Read more ...
josh.spero
Worries that London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad had fallen at the first hurdle – as it seemed when the proposed Olympic Friend-ship, carrying a cargo of British artists and philosophers around the world, was scrapped – can be assuaged. The organisers of the London Olympics have, in fact, turned their course around: instead of this monumental, nationalistic, elitist, pretentious idea, they have moved to the local, the inclusive, the relatable. Artists taking the lead, a co-production of Arts Council England and London 2012, has announced the 12 public art projects it is commissioning for a total Read more ...
anne.billson
I've been having rather a surreal autumn here in Paris. First, I was lucky enough to catch the last day of Une semaine de bonté at the Musée d'Orsay, where the original collages were on display in five colour-coded chambers. For those not in the know, Max Ernst's graphic novel avant le fait is a series of 182 collages made out of printed images cut from old books, and was first published in 1934, in a series of five pamphlets. The title means, "A Week of Kindness", but the contents are anything but kind.In fact, these images are downright sinister and disquieting. In one, a giant sphinx peers Read more ...