Visual arts
Florence Hallett
Half organic, half high-tech, a bank of magnet-flowers sways not in response to a breeze, but to a magnetic field. Their uncannily naturalistic movements are coupled with a form that is blatantly functional: an unseen, elemental force masquerades as nature at its most benignly pastoral (Pictured below right: Magnetic Fields, l969). For Takis (real name: Panayiotis Vassilakis), magnetism introduces an extra dimension to sculpture, providing an active component that serves both as material and means. No longer restricted to the mere representation of action, for Takis, sculptures are action.In Read more ...
Bill Knight
With 50 curated exhibitions spread across the town, there is much to see at Arles. In an effort to whittle it down I asked the man in the press office what was hot. "The weather," he replied deadpan.For this feast we have to thank Lucien Clergue, who founded the festival in 1968 with Jean- Maurice Rouquette and Michel Tournier and whose photographs were shown here some 17 times before his death in 2014. This year we can see some of them again. Clergue & Weston mounts a selection of his images alongside a repeat of Edward Weston’s show which in 1970 introduced him to the Rencontres, and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Once a year, the National Portrait Gallery gives us a slice of immediate social history presented in an array of contemporary painted portraits of the young, the old, and the inbetween. In its 40th iteration the international competition 44 paintings have been chosen from well over 2000 entries submitted by artists from 84 countries, ranging from Australia to Turkey, with the vast majority being from the UK.The subjects are from the artists’ worlds: self portraits, family, friends, models. Over the years the ethnicities have widened visibly, in heartening ways. Charlie Schaffer’s Imara in her Read more ...
David Nice
Fortunate those Italian towns and cities whose Renaissance rulers looked to the arts to enrich their domain. Now neglect of cultural heritage can be laid at the doors of successive governments, but regional enlightenment can make a difference even in the era of Salvini. Treviso, clutching the inevitable title of "the Venice of the mainland" and only 30 kilometres distant from that still dreamlike city, was lucky to have a cultured centre-left mayor for five years between Lega Nord representatives, one of them convicted for trying to form an armed criminal gang during the late 1990s; sadly in Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing.Loosely based on the life of Gerhard Richter, probably Germany’s foremost visual artist, his new film Never Look Away, epic in scale, the story spanning several decades over more than three hours, is a dramatic rollercoaster, both a pleasure and shocking to watch. It is also very moving. And yet, although made with great brio – the camerawork, editing Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Félix Vallotton is best known for his satirical woodcuts, printed in the radical newspapers and journals of turn-of-the-century Paris. He earned a steady income, for instance, as chief illustrator for La Revue blanche, which carried articles and reviews by leading lights such as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie. You can see the influence of Japanese prints in the flattened spaces, simplified shapes and unusual viewpoints that give a comic slant to scenes of Parisian life. A sudden downpour sends people scurrying for cover, hats are blown off by gusts of wind and a street is filled Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Under a turbulent sky racked with jagged clouds suggesting bolts of lightning, pale figures hurl themselves into a spitting expanse of water. Swathed in white towels, other figures mingle with the pink bodies, seeming to process along the pier as if towards a baptism. Swimmers’ vigorous arms overtop their submerged heads; on land, no individual face is distinguished. As if exuberance could tip at any time into anarchy, a sense of threat pervades the depiction of communal leisure. By the time the Second World War broke out, the invincible boys depicted in Claude Flight’s linocut, Boys Bathing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Forthright and often disturbing, Francis Bacon’s “male couplings” are also ambiguous, and it is this disjunction that gives them their power. Erotic, violent and yet so often tender, these 14 works from the 1950s to the 1970s restate Bacon's pre-eminence: surely no other artist has locked together sex and violence with such conviction. Bacon explores the relationship between two bodies, and specifically two male bodies – though gender is often left in doubt – with a frankness that feels like a physical blow. Vulnerability and intimacy are brought up short by brute strength: primal, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Kiss My Genders may not claim to be a survey, yet it seems perverse to mount an exhibition of work by LGBTQ artists who address issues of gender identity without including some of the best known names. Particular emphasis is placed, says the press release, on works that revisit the tradition of photographic portraiture; so why no sign of Claude Cahun, Gilbert and George, Urs Lüthi, Robert Mapplethorpe or Pierre et Giles – all pioneers in using photography to explore gay sexual identity ?They, or their representatives, may have declined to take part, of course – a decision that would have been Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A beguiling collection of small paintings by Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) forms an exhibition from his early career. It is a vanished world of domesticity in a Parisian flat, where Vuillard lived with his mother, a seamstress, for almost all his life. In his fifties, he told a friend that his mother was his muse. She died, aged 89, when he was in his sixties.Shy as he seemed to be, he did have a gift for friendship, and with his other artist friends, whom he had met when they all studied in the 1880s at the Académie Julian had formed the Nabis (Hebrew for prophet) with Bonnard and Maurice Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In a photograph taken in 1962, Frank Bowling leans against a fireplace in his studio. His right hand rests on the mantlepiece which bears books, fixative and spirit bottles, his left rests out of sight on the small of his back. His attire is somewhat formal but decidedly casual — trousers loose enough to bend in, a striped jumper with the sleeves rolled up, workman-like, and a shirt which looks like it has several top buttons undone. From the floral wallpaper, cornice rail and mantel mouldings, it’s clear this is a London residence, yet over patterned posies, he has mapped out his theory of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The times they are a-changin’. On show at the Barbican is a retrospective of Lee Krasner’s stunning paintings and, for the first time ever, Tate Modern is hosting two major shows of women artists. At last, the achievements of great women are being acknowledged and celebrated.Russian artist Natalia Goncharova was both a trailblazer and a powerhouse of creative energy. 1913 was the year she took Moscow by storm. The first avant-garde artist to be given a retrospective at the Mikhailova Art Salon, she was determined to make a big impression. The exhibition was hugely ambitious – nearly 800 Read more ...