Visual arts
Mark Sheerin
Something like a parked zeppelin sits on three mirrored legs on a museum lawn in Belgium. It’s a cigar-shaped steel fabrication that, were it to float free of its three legs, could also pass for a UFO. But given the context - a sculpture park outside Antwerp - we can rest easy. Never Mind is a work of art by Richard Deacon.Deacon’s works are all puzzles. This 765cm-long mirrored capsule offers few clues about its ultimate agenda. Was it sent here to frighten us, like an airborne invader? Is Never Mind (main picture) a tribute to the 1991 breakthrough LP by grunge band Nirvana? Or is it a Read more ...
Bill Knight
Now in its 48th year the veteran photography festival is in better shape than ever. You can walk through the French sunshine to more than 20 exhibitions, hear a talk, meet the snappers and shop on the fringe. It's not just a show; it's a holiday, reaching out to the world, this year notably, to the photographers of Colombia and Iran.Their images give an unmediated view of their lives and troubles - Colombian women staring down the camera "like men"; sad pictures of remembrance from Iran (pictured right: Shadi Ghadirian, Qajar, 1998). Some pictures are truly shocking. Here, for example, are Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oh those Victorians! Hail Prince Albert whose far-sighted ambition led to Albertopolis, embracing museums, galleries, universities and the Royal Albert Hall. And what in the early 21st century do you do with the Victoria & Albert Museum itself: one of the world’s greatest museums occupying higgledy piggledy buildings which have been a-building, expanding and growing topsy-turvy for more than a century and a half?In its largest building project since 1909, the museum continues to enhance, expand and change to meet different demands: demands from visitors, and demands from the objects Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This sparkling display of some four score watercolours from the first decade of the last century throw an unfamiliar light on the artistry of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the last great swagger portrait painter in the western tradition. None here is a portrait in the conventional sense: rather Sargent is, so to speak, off duty, painting for himself with a glorious spontaneity, a professional on holiday. Among friends, he created images for himself in a medium that needed great skill, lent itself to experimentation, and produced immediate results. This is not a retrospective, concentrating Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Portraying a Nation juxtaposes photographs by August Sander with paintings by Otto Dix. It's an inspired idea as both artists wanted to hold up a mirror to German society during a time of extreme change. Dix described his lucid form of critical realism as “life undiluted”, while Sander wrote “We must be able to bear seeing the truth.” “Photography”, he observed, “can depict things in magnificent beauty, but also in terrible truth.” Sander planned to create a portrait of his country by photographing people from all walks of life. Begun in 1920, this mammoth task was still unfinished Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The marvellous National Gallery of Ireland, founded in the 1860s, has opened its doors to its brilliantly revamped, updated and expanded galleries. As a spectacular bonus in its opening summer, Vermeer and Masters of Genre Painting reposes in the enfilade of the newly re-done permanent galleries for temporary exhibitions.After half a dozen years effectively closed for refurbishment, the new National Gallery of Ireland joins a roster of other modernised and expanded institutions. Just a year ago the Switch House opened at Tate Modern, and at the end of June, the V&A will open its massive Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a prominent Ottoman family, many of whom were involved in the arts, she died in 1991. Tate Modern's exhibition opens with a portrait of her grandmother painted by Zeid when she was only 14, which with its delicate touch and finely observed detail, reveals a precocious talent.She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts for Women but, when she was 19, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Why is dust so fascinating yet, at the same time, so repellent? Maybe the fear of choking to death in a dust storm or being buried alive in fine sand provokes a visceral response to it. My current obsession with dust comes from having builders in my home over the last seven months. Despite everything being shrouded in dust sheets, a film of corrosive particles has infiltrated every nook and cranny and silently blanketed my world; so I couldn’t resist a Whitechapel Gallery exhibition devoted to this pervasive nuisance. The show begins with a photograph by Man Ray taken in Marcel Duchamp’s Read more ...
Alison Cole
As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Michelangelo – Love and Death, directed and edited by David Bickerstaff, which is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s Michelangelo/Sebastiano exhibition (just! – it closes on 25 June) duly attempts to rise to the challenge, with the publicity promising a “dramatic retelling of the life and creative journey of the original celebrity artist” and a film Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors. If Grayson Perry is to top that, as the title of his Serpentine Gallery show optimistically predicts, his exhibition will have to attract a throng of 5,900 visitors a day!Even though his current Channel 4 series Divided Britain and earlier ones like In the Best Possible Taste and All Man have turned him into a household name, I doubt if Perry’s celebrity status gives him that much pulling power. The exhibition title is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved. Returning from Holland to France after the First World War, he lived and worked in what seem like impossibly cramped conditions, a narrow and unforgiving-looking bed the only comfort in a room dedicated to the rigorously geometric compositions for which he had become famous. Walls, furniture and even books were painted white, with selected features like the stove and an ashtray left black, and squares of primary colour pinned here and Read more ...
Alison Cole
This summer the wonderful Kröller-Möller museum in Otterlo hosts the first major Dutch retrospective of the works of Hans (Jean) Arp since 1960 – an exhibition that will travel in a marginally smaller version to Margate’s Turner Contemporary later this year. The exhibition sits slightly tangentially within a celebratory year marking 100 years of Dutch design, from the founding in 1917 of De Stijl – an artist magazine and school of thought/movement founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg, and whose most famous member is Piet Mondrian – to the present day.In this context, the German-French Arp Read more ...