Visual arts
Peter Quantrill
Fear not. The Arts Desk has not suddenly sprouted a Sports Desk. Heaven forfend. Korea in late February had more to offer than luge, bobsleigh, skeleton and all the other bemedalled and potentially life-threatening variants of hurling bodies down icy slopes. The host region of every Olympic Games throws open a window to the world on its culture, and PyeongChang 2018 was no different.This mountainous province on the country’s eastern seaboard has staged a summer music festival for the last 13 years. When it was awarded the Games in 2016, the PyeongChang Winter Music Festival was born. This Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray far from the brutal and disturbing. No such survey could be without them, and their echo is heard in almost every room: Jenny Saville mines the possibilities of the body as base flesh from a specifically female viewpoint (main picture); Cecily Brown confronts us with forbidden sexuality. But if the prominence of Bacon and Freud suggests a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. “I don’t do detached observation.” A large number of the images in Another Kind of Life were taken by photographers who took care to befriend their subjects. Given that these were people on the margins of society – either from choice or necessity – gaining their trust was no mean feat. Once accepted, though, the photographer was in clover.In the mid-1960s, Danny Lyon took many memorable shots of Chicago bikers burning Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On entering the gallery, you are greeted by the cheeping of birds. A flock of zebra finches flies around a circular cage and comes to rest on the branches of the apple tree “planted” in Mark Dion’s latest installation (main picture), before taking off on another circuit. Despite being confined inside an aviary, they seem happy enough; how, though, does one tell? Most of us living in cities know precious little about birds or any of the other species sharing the planet with us – although, of course, we try to learn something. Heaped around the foot of the tree and arranged on branches and Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Colours had meanings for Emil Nolde. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.” As the son of a German-Frisian father and a Schleswig-Dane mother, Nolde was raised in a pious household on the windswept flat land on the border on Germany and Denmark that his family farmed. The Bible was practically the only book in the household and had been in the family for nine generations, and his understanding of colour was drawn as if from a chromatic psalter. “Every colour harbours its own soul,” he wrote, "delighting or Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Let the light in” has been the fundraising slogan for the two-year project to revamp and modernise the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, and adjacent Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. And that is just what has happened, with two triumphs at the Hayward.The first is the building itself. It has long been a marmite, love it or hate it, sample of fashionable 1960s brutalism: it opened in 1968, followed less than a decade later by the National Theatre and the Barbican, to mention more examples. Yet from the beginning the Hayward, named after a chairman of the London County Council, and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Titian! Mantegna! Rubens! Dürer! Veronese! Van Dyck! Raphael! Velazquez! About 140 works which were once part of Charles I’s 2,000-strong collection are reunited in a sumptuous collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Royal Collection. It is a marvellous selection covering the 15th to the 17th centuries, the Northern and Southern Renaissance and the baroque. Charles I may have been a wretched king and politician, but he was an outstanding and original connoisseur collector and commissioner of art. Among the greatest hits exhibitions, there are even surprises: take Rembrandt' Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When I began studying art history, my Bible was Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The reproductions are mostly in black and white and, thumbing through my dusty old copy, I find a photograph of the Jesuit church in Rome, whose ceiling was transformed by the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli into a glorious vista of the heavens teaming with cherubs, angels and saints. The reproduction is less than 13 x 17 cms, so Gaulli’s throng is reduced to an ecstatic tangle of tiny monochrome swirls comprising limbs, drapery, clouds and shafts of celestial light. The content is abstracted, yet the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It seems they’re having trouble with the lights. Thirty-five past five and they’re not yet on. “Typical,” laughs a woman, surveying the huddle of hi-vis chaperones. Palm fronds wave in the wind, suits leave work. St James’s Square slowly fills with people. The huddle of technicians breaks up and in a short moment, candy coloured bulbs strung in rainbow belts between plane trees light up and everyone goes “Oooooh” and gets out their phone.It’s the second year of Lumiere London, the four-day (or rather four-night) festival of light across the capital put on by maestros of urban show, Artichoke Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In the dark days of January, white cube galleries are luminous spaces. This is especially true of Pi Artworks right now: the Fitzrovia gallery is showing an incandescent array of 23 paintings by Selma Parlour. Taken in at once and at first sight, her abstract works arrest the eye with unlikely chords of colour and angular planes that suggest competing vanishing points. This is a show that releases both dopamine and mild anxiety, thanks to the pleasure of the warm hues, and the stress caused by an indeterminate focal point.The London-based painter has laid claim to a palette of lively yet soft Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Art fairs are vaguely promiscuous. So much art, so many galleries, so very many curators. They’re a glut for the eye yet curiously anodyne — the ranks of white cubicles could belong to a jobs fair, except there’s a Miró round the corner. And it’s impossible not to price-perv, that sly flick of the eye down to the label just happens.Not so at Art UK. They’re the London Art Fair’s museum partner this year, and this is their first ever exhibition. Nothing’s on sale because they hold none of the works themselves. Instead, all the pieces on display are publicly owned, if seldom seen. They’re on Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What was it about the privileged male Victorian/Edwardian British writer that led to such a fantastical outpouring of books for children that were to embed themselves so thoroughly that they have stayed with their readers into adulthood? All when published were further immortalised by collaborative illustrators: Lewis Carroll and the Alices, illustrated by Tenniel; JM Barrie and Peter Pan; Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (illustrated by EH Shepard), and AA Milne’s four short books of poems and stories (also by Shephard). In their own time these writers were also variously polymaths Read more ...