Visual arts
Sarah Kent
What a superb location for a performance! The flats on the north-east corner of Islington Green back onto a crummy atrium from which a staircase leads down to a vaulted, concrete pit (pictured below). A cross between a car park and a bull ring, or a subterranean version of a de Chirico painting, this huge chamber reminded me of the stark designs of the Italian modernist, Aldo Rossi.Peering over the topmost balustrade, one sees silent figures entering the subterranean space through portals created with slender rods of light. Most are dressed in black; they are professional mourners flown in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Art historians can so easily get carried away looking for a thesis, a scaffolding on which to hang theories which can sometimes obscure as much as reveal. Not so here: as near perfect as might be imagined, this is a beautifully laid out, fresh look at a master painter, that lights up the National Gallery's basement exhibition space. For decades Monet has been the epitome of the blockbuster artist, but we take almost for granted the pleasure of looking at his incandescent paintings. He has become the feel-good painter par excellence. His paintings are gorgeous and sumptuous and long ago Read more ...
Rupert Edwards
Sexy is an overused word in the arts but it’s an adjective you can’t help applying to some of Helaine Blumenfeld’s voluptuous marble sculptures as you run your fingers over their surfaces. These abstract bodily forms, often in the purest icing-white crystalline stone, are so tempting that you almost want to lick them. Licking is not actively encouraged but Blumenfeld is very keen that you touch and feel the surface of the work. It’s a transgression of art world conventions that’s typical of this sculptor, who has never had much to do with the contemporary art world… and which maybe explains Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brett Goodroad (b. 1979) is an artist and painter based in San Francisco. Born and raised in rural Montana, in 2012 he received the Tournesol Award, overseen by Sausalito’s Headland Center for the Arts. The Award recognises one Bay Area painter each year and financially assisted Goodroad and gave him studio space, allowing him to develop his distinctive, figurative, abstract style. He has since exhibited extensively in California as well as New York and Vermont. His monograph, A Sequence in Love was published in 2016 and in May he will be exhibiting at the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton as part Read more ...
Michael Rakowitz: The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Fourth Plinth review - London's new guardian
Katherine Waters
Fifteen years ago on a cold grey Saturday in mid-February, Trafalgar Square was filled with people marching to Hyde Park in opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. A million people gathered in London. Three times that number turned out in Rome. That day, across Europe and the rest of the world, between six to eleven million people participated in the largest coordinated anti-war rally in history. The scale of the movement was unprecedented. Protest globalised. Just over a month later air strikes took out Iraqi observation posts and troops crossed over the borders. The invasion of Iraq Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hie thee to Oxford, for it is doubtful that we will see the like of this exhibition again this side of the Atlantic. American art of the 1920s and 1930s was once disregarded in its homeland in favour of Francophile superiority, and once it fell into critical and commercial favour it became too expensive to move around at the beckoning of would-be international hosts.But the Ashmolean is – bolstered, too, by its nearly breaking the million-visitor mark last year – a master at barter: as the repository of more Michelangelo drawings than anywhere else, its loans made the Michelangelo exhibition Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection. But the mood shifts from picture to picture, and she appears by turns as a wisp-like erotic reverie, an imposing, moon-faced goddess, and, in a flash of humour that teeters on the edge of cruelty, a cartoonish blob of a creature with a long, upturned snout (Pictured below Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The American artist, Joan Jonas is one of the pioneers of performance art. Now 82, she is being honoured with a Tate Modern retrospective and Ten Days Six Nights, a festival of live art in which many of her performances are being recreated.Traditionally in art, women were allocated the roles of model and muse. Frustrated by such limited options, in the 1960s many courageous women began developing careers as artists in their own right. Many chose performance art because, unlike painting and sculpture, it wasn’t freighted with a history dominated by men. The genre allowed women Read more ...
Alexandra Baraitser
It was always my dream to be an artist but I never expected to be a curator. Graduates considering vocations in critical and curatorial practice went to the Royal College of Art or studied art history at university. Not me: I trained at Chelsea College of Art and then went to the British School at Rome where I was the Abbey Scholar in Painting.In general I like to work with painters – there's a poetry in painting that gives endless possibilities and painting is often about looking inward – searching the "space within". Silent Painting is the sixth show I have curated, featuring three women Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sometimes you come across an artwork that changes the way you see the world. Tacita Dean’s film portrait of the American choreographer Merce Cunningham (main picture) is one such encounter. Occupying a whole room at the National Portrait Gallery, the installation consists of six screens each showing Cunningham sitting in his dance studio, listening. In some shots he is alone, in others Trevor Carlson, the executive director of his company, stands holding a stopwatch and counting down the final seconds of each session to signal that Cunningham can relax and shift his position. What is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is a very human crowd at Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography. There are the slightly melancholic portraits of authoritative and bearded male Victorian eminences, among them Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle and Sir John Herschel. The Victorians invented and eulogised childhood, so we see a procession of children, including the inspirational Alice of Alice in Wonderland and her siblings, bathed in a kind of wondering innocence that is later echoed by some gorgeous young women. It is the Victorian age in full flow, gleaming from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery in the gradated Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Mortality inflects commemoration. So it is with portraiture: the likeness – particularly those which celebrate lives of status and accomplishment – will always be limned with death.The National Gallery’s tiny exhibition of Murillo’s two known self-portraits (Self-portrait, c. 1650-55 pictured below, and Self-portrait, c. 1670, main picture) – brought together for the first time since they were separated from the private collection of his son, Gaspar – is not only a tight and elegant reflection on Murillo’s art as he aged, but also a meditation on the purpose of Read more ...