Visual arts
Florence Hallett
When New York artist Adam Parker-Smith said “I feel like so many of my ideas start out as jokes, for better or worse”, he may not have anticipated featuring in an exhibition that looks like the mother of all art-world pranks. Parker-Smith, Damien Hirst, Banksy, KAWS, and Jeff Koons are among the 20 artists included in XXI, advertised as “the world’s first asset-based contemporary art exhibition”, launched online this week by ARTCELS, a new digital broker for blue chip art investments, and hosted by the Los Angeles branch of contemporary art dealers, House of Fine Art (HOFA).By now you might Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Arguably one of the most poignant effects of the lockdown has been to simultaneously draw attention to the connections between the arts and the distinct ways they have evolved into their own forms. Sculpture, painting, textiles, performance art, sonic installations – are now all in the same place, namely the internet. In a way, it’s exciting to have so much accessible. In another it’s deeply dreary; when viewed via a screen things are literally flat.However, though we expect words to be 2D, they conjure in different dimensions. Visual Verse is a digital publication dedicated to ekphrasis Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anyone lucky enough to have a garden will be newly appreciative of the oasis that even the humblest of outdoor spaces can provide. Based on the Royal Academy’s hugely successful 2016 exhibition of the same name, and broadcast on Monday evening by Exhibition on Screen via Facebook, Painting the Modern Garden opened the door to a different world. As the camera lingered on constellations of dahlias, banks of lavender and waterlilies, tended by contented insects to the twitter of birdsong, the film’s opening sequences plunged us into the living artwork that is Monet’s (not humble) garden at Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Newly conserved and restored, the eight exterior panels of Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, 1432, are the focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, cut short by Covid-19, but now available to view via an online tour. Along with as yet untreated interior panels depicting Adam and Eve, the paintings are displayed at eye level, allowing unprecedented and truly remarkable views of works that transformed the art of painting in the Renaissance with their realism and revolutionary use of oil paint.When later this year they resume their position high up in Van Eyck’s immense work, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
As the art world adjusts to our new reality, social media has allowed galleries and museums to remain open in spirit at least. Tate has kept up a stream of pictures, films and activities for children, while the often brilliant Royal Academy twitter account dispenses a daily dose of silliness via #radailydoodle. What might have been a fun but shortlived corona-craze for dressing up as works of art has only become more refined, with particularly impressive contributions by National Gallery staff, whose head of press has the Lady with the Ermine and Girl with a Pearl Earring (pictured below) Read more ...
Florence Hallett
One year on the world is drastically altered, but footage of Notre Dame’s stricken spire collapsing in flames is no less shocking. That this event, endlessly replayed, has not paled against the new reality of daily death tolls is testament to the scale of the loss. As the rector of Notre Dame, Patrick Chauvet put it: “Notre Dame is not just Paris, it’s France and beyond France, it’s the world.”By the time a fire was discovered at 6.43pm, more than 30 minutes had elapsed since a sensor had detected smoke in the attic, and Notre Dame, one of the great monuments of Gothic architecture, was Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Normally we'd put a descriptor - "cellist", "film maker", "techno producer" for example - in the title of this interview, but for Irina Nalis there isn't space. Like, "10 Questions for psychologist, ministerial adviser, festival founder, architectural consultant, digital humanism activist and techno veteran Irina Nalis" wouldn't fit across the page. But that's the multidisciplinary world for you. Irina Nalis is a co-founder of the Vienna Bienniale for fine arts, has worked for the Austrian culture ministry, is currently a uni:docs fellow at the University of Vienna, and works with the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a spooky exhibition! Léon Spilliaert suffered from crippling insomnia and often spent the nocturnal hours in the conservatory of his parents’ house in Ostend drawing his haggard features (pictured below right: Self-portrait, 1907). His shock of blond hair catches the light as it billows in an agitated swirl above his head, as though expressing a turmoil of inner disquiet. Elsewhere, he stares down at us though dark rimmed eyes, his mouth drooping open like that of a corpse, as though he were an apparition come to visit this moonlit chamber. Echoes of Edvard Munch haunt these Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Paradise, according to German artist Thomas Struth, is to be found in the tropical rain forests of Yunnan Province, China. His gorgeous photograph Paradise 11 is the first thing I saw on entering the Hayward Gallery and, immediately it had a soothing effect on my frazzled urban psyche. Then I spotted the cable car dangling above the tree canopy – a sure sign that the remote wilderness of Xishuangbanna is no longer unspoiled; Paradise has been trampled on. Next I discovered that these magical forests are being uprooted to make way for rubber plantations.Since this is an exhibition review Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A young woman sits sewing (pictured below right: Young Woman Sewing,1655). She is totally immersed in her task, and our attention is similarly focused on her and every detail of her environment. The cool light pouring though the window illuminates her work and also gives us a clear view. She sits on a wooden platform that raises her above the cold floor tiles; on one side of her is a linen basket and, on the other, an ebony chair, its carved back and legs picked out with gleaming dots of light. Resting on the chair is a lacemaking kit replete with beautifully observed little bobbins, waiting Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Bill Brandt’s photographs and Henry Moore’s studies of people sheltering underground during the Blitz (September 1940 to May 1941) offer glimpses of a world that is, thankfully, lost to us. A year and a half after the end of the bombing campaign, the work of the two artists was published side-by-side in the December 1942 edition of the pioneering illustrated magazine, Lilliput. As a caption beneath a sleeping woman reads, “It is interesting to note how often Brandt and Moore, working quite independently of each other, chose very similar subjects for their work.” The magazine’s full-page Read more ...
Florence Hallett
For David Hockney, drawing is born out of familiarity: his portraits both express and fulfil the urge to know someone deeply and well. In his 60-year career, he has returned again and again to those closest to him, drawing them often enough that each portrait feels like a fragment of a conversation held over time: sometimes they pick up where they had previously left off, sometimes they return to a subject long forgotten. In the first major exhibition to be devoted to Hockney’s drawings for more than 20 years, one is acutely aware of intruding on a lifelong dialogue, the nature of which is Read more ...