Visual arts
Marina Vaizey
The septuagenarian American sculptor Richard Serra can treat the most massive sheets of steel as though they are handy pieces of paper for his version of origami; or he can decide to stack huge dense metal blocks as though they were children’s play bricks. He can playfully balance huge slabs of steel held just so by a perfectly judged tension, and he almost persuades us that one huffing breath might bring the whole thing down, particularly so in London Cross, which is just what it says it is: two huge elevated steel planks crossing each other at an oblique angle in a specially constructed Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There is a 1953 Volkswagen parked in the Great Court of the British Museum, and we are reminded that Hitler persuaded Frederick Porsche (who gave his name of course to a hideously expensive luxury automobile) to design a people’s car. The postwar economic miracle of the defeated Germany finally allowed the Beetle to go into mass production; 21 million of them in fact – the largest number of a single model ever produced, until its hugely successful run ended in 2003. Here is a neat paradox: how an idea of one of the monsters of history became a protagonist of effective technological advance Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.Pulled and gathered at points, the towering red central section of this vast new sculpture sometimes resembles Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ashes is a two-part exhibition. The darkened gallery at 3 Duke Street, St James’s is filled with the onscreen image of a young black man sitting on the prow of a small boat with his back to us (main picture). He turns occasionally to smile to camera; he stands up and balances precariously as the boat bobs up and down on the swell; he falls overboard, climbs back on and stands silhouetted against the blue sky, grinning down at us.With his lithe young body, bleached dreadlocks and disarming smile he seems very amiable and laid back; it's impossible to imagine him in any sort of trouble. And Read more ...
fisun.guner
All human life, as they say, is here: we witness displays of warmth and tenderness in virtuous matrimony; reflection and contemplation in quiet solitude. We respond to the soft seductions of the flesh in its yielding ripeness, and we feel the pathos of the withering of the flesh in age; there’s even the mocking of the aged flesh still lusting for the piece of the old action. There’s civic pride and intellectual curiosity. And then there’s simply being; being in a fully conscious, thinking and feeling sense – don’t we get exactly that when we stand before a Rembrandt self-portrait? Here is a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I was a nigger for twenty-three years. I gave that shit up. No room for advancement.” This astute joke, by American comedian Richard Pryor, is stencilled in black capitals on the gold ground of a painting by Glenn Ligon.I’ve long admired the work of this black American minimalist. In the late 1980s he invaded the territory of pure abstraction – a bastion of white, middle-class males – and introduced content, usually in the form of texts taken from black authors or activists. So what appear to be all-black paintings after Ad Reinhardt turn out to be canvases densely layered with capital Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”Sometimes the 3D effects are spectacular, and seem completely integral to the resultIt was an idea that obviously came to fascinate Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Traditionally, art exhibitions have been about looking, but as more and more artists cross boundaries to engage with sound, touch and movement or to use film and video, work that is static and silent is becoming the exception rather than the rule.Curated by Sam Belinfante as a Hayward touring show, Listening focuses on the relationship between sight and sound. Ironically, the most resonant piece is totally silent. Sound Holes, 2007, by Christian Marclay (pictured below right) consists of photographs of the perforated metal plates indicating an intercom in a lift or beside a front door. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
England is in the throes of an unusual Teutonic love fest, and in 2014 no doubt deliberately. Music of course has always been omnipresent: Bach to Wagner, and a passion for Beethoven and Schubert that knows no bounds. But there has been a love-hate relationship with the visual arts. We are somewhat uncomfortable with the Northern Renaissance, preferring the Italian, and as for expressionism, that was, for a long time, far too blatantly emotionally strident and in your face. There was a moment in the 19th century when artists fell for the Nazarenes, but that helped to lead to the Pre- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We all romanticise the olden times. Those we think of as belonging to them are no different. The Castle of Otranto – by common consent, the first Gothic novel – was published a quarter of a millennium ago. “Otranto ‘lost its maidenhead’ today,” wrote its author Horace Walpole. To him, if not to us, the 1760s reeked of modernity so he claimed that this was a true story plucked from a cobwebbed Neapolitan library in 1529 – that is, a quarter of a millennium before.“Tranflated by WILLIAM MARSHAL, Gent,” fibbed the frontispiece. “From the Original ITALIAN of ONUPHRIO MURALTO, Canon of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. In 2007, I was left breathless by the German artist’s new paintings at the White Cube gallery in Mayfair: huge, spectacular churned-up poppy fields, whose sweetly blushing poppy heads were drooping from blackened stalks erupting from deeply encrusted, scorched, scraped and furrowed earth. To make such grand statements about the piteous nature of war, about the recklessness and hubris of humanity, about the hope that only rarely deserts us, and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“The minute I touched New York,” wrote Berenice Abbott, “I had a burning desire to photograph the city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same but always changing.” Backed by funding from the Federal Art Project, the elegiac photographs she took of New York in the 1930s record cluttered corner shops and brownstones standing cheek by jowl with new high rise developments. “The past jostling the present” was how she described the juxtapositions of old and new that she found so inspiring (pictured below left: Rockefeller Centre, New Read more ...