Visual arts
Sarah Kent
The exhibition starts promisingly. You can help yourself to an orange from Roelof Louw’s pyramid of golden fruit. Its a reminder that, for the conceptualists, art was a verb not a noun. Focusing on activity rather than outcome, these artists were committed to the creative process rather than the end product. The idea was what mattered, and if it led to an open-ended exploration, so much the better.For centuries, the whole point of art had been its longevity; now mutability and destruction were welcomed as part of the creative process. Left intact, Louw’s pyramid of oranges (pictured Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Visceral and vividly colouristic, Clare Woods' paintings are at once abstract and figurative, perpetuating traditional genres but simultaneously occupying a less easily defined area of artistic practice. She puts innocuous or ambiguous subject matter into tension with titles and forms that suggest dark undertones, while big, universal themes are treated with the immediacy of personal experience. Her work is notable for its luscious paintwork and yet she is not a painterly painter, her initial training as a sculptor continuing to inform and shape her work.A graduate of Bath College of Art and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography focuses on two contrasting generations. Beginning in the 1970s, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld travelled America photographing things that are so ordinary, yet so odd, that they transcend the familiar to become surreal. And alongside them are five Europeans, 20 or so years younger who, by and large, seem glued to their computers. Joel Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia, December 1978 (main picture) is one of my all-time favourites. In the background is a house on fire; flames are spurting from the roof. Luckily, a crane is in Read more ...
Alison Cole
This exquisite exhibition reminds one of the sheer pleasure of looking. It is small – just 22 works in all – but it presents UK audiences, for the first time in almost a generation, with an opportunity to explore the art of Dutch flower painting, spanning nearly 200 years. In our everyday lives we enjoy flowers for their prettiness, their freshness and graceful fragility, but here we can be exhilarated and enraptured by them as well.These works show how gorgeous and profound Dutch flower painting can be. For the great art historian Ernst Gombrich, each picture was a vanitas – a meditation on Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Bertrand Russell’s History of the World is a charming little booklet that carries a chilling message: “Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he is capable.” A line drawing shows Adam and Eve sharing a neatly sliced apple followed by a comic depiction of medieval warfare. Next comes “The End” printed opposite a photo of a mushroom cloud. The juxtaposition of image and text drives home the point; all the polemics in the world couldn’t make a clearer case for nuclear disarmament. The booklet was published by the Gaberbocchus Press (colophon Read more ...
Hugh Pearman
A lot of colour has drained out of world architecture with the unexpected death last week of Dame Zaha Hadid, aged 65. She was a vivid personality who made astonishing buildings, succeeding as an Iraqi-born woman in gaining worldwide renown from her adopted London. Her achievement was remarkable in a profession still dominated by white western males, and she played a considerable part in changing the status quo through talent, determination and character. She was difficult, fierce to the point of being alarming, caustic, funny, hypersensitive, and had a unique personal style Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Barbican has built a steady reputation for almost unclassifiable large-scale art exhibitions, particularly in architecture, design and photography: they have been underestimated pioneers, often working in areas themselves under-scrutinised. Thus they often manage to surprise, and so it is here.This vast anthology is subtitled “Britain as Revealed by International Photographers”, and has been assembled under the aegis of Martin Parr, the highly successful photographer of the banalities of British life. It looks through the eyes of 23 foreigners, including five women, at the last eight Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Here be two modestly scaled masterpieces from the 1760s by George Stubbs, highlights of a centuries-old tradition of painting the horses owned by the Dukes of Newcastle and their lateral descendants the Dukes of Portland (the Devonshires are also connected in a grand web of aristocratic marriages). Stubbs was commissioned by the third Duke of Portland (1738-1809), William Cavendish-Bentinck, indisputably one of the grandest in the land: a politician and a multi-billionaire in today’s terms. He was a man of huge personal responsibilities and a patron of the arts: Humphrey Repton designed the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The trio of Sixties television documentaries assembled here are prototypical examples of Ken Russell’s oeuvre: hyper-real, and often frenzied, depictions of the lives of their subjects. Each not-quite or more-than documentary was made for the BBC in an era when boundaries were pushed and the corporation allowed directors to follow their artistic sensibilities. Although there is little immediate link with the Ken Loach of 1966’s Cathy Come Home, both he and Russell thrived in the fertile environment of a BBC which took chances.The Great Passions collects Always on Sunday (1965), a portrayal of Read more ...
David Nice
Art can inspire music, and vice versa. When concert (as opposed to theatre or film) scores are accompanied by images, however, the effect dilutes the impact of both; above all, the imagination stops working on the visual dimension created in the mind's eye. That had to be the case last night, though given Olivier Messiaen's tendency to outstay his welcome by at least three movements in his orchestral epics, Deborah O'Grady's nature photography carried on with its capacity to surprise and stun long after the music, in this second event of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of orientation for those approaching Russian culture, and with it the country’s history and character, without particular advance knowledge.Much is new here, not least the artists themselves, none of whose names are anywhere near as well-known as their subjects. The wider intellectual world they inhabited may seem remote, with its conflicts between Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Once you’ve seen him, you can’t forget him. Taken in 1951, Paul Strand’s black and white portrait of a French teenager sears itself onto your retina. He stares unflinchingly back, and looking into his eyes, you feel almost scalded by his exceptional beauty and the piercing intensity of his gaze. With his chiselled features, Roman nose, curled lips and leonine shock of hair, he could be a classical Greek sculpture; and as though to affirm this association, his skin has the sheen of burnished bronze. The textures and patterns are all-important; his denim boiler suit and knitted woollen Read more ...