Visual arts
Sarah Kent
At the turn of the 20th century, London’s smart set queued up to get their portraits painted by American-born artist John Singer Sargent. Sitting for him was a performance, a way to show the world just how rich, glamorous, clever or important you were. And everything – from the pose to the hair, jewellery and clothing – was stage-managed to create the best impression.At Tate Britain, the brilliance of Sargent’s showmanship is on display from the start in his 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, who stands decked in an opera cape. Beside the painting is the garment itself, a gorgeous confection that Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The downstairs of the Whitechapel Gallery has been converted into a ballroom or, rather, a film set of a ballroom. From time to time, a couple glides briefly across the floor, dancing a perfunctory tango. And they are really hamming it up, not for the people watching them – of whom they are apparently oblivious – but for an imaginary camera.We seem either to be witnessing a film in the making or the reenactment of a well known scene from an old movie. There they are again, upstairs. This time the couple appears on screen performing the same sequence (main picture), but for a camera on a dolly Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Judy Chicago created Birth Project in the 1980s, recognising with typical perspicacity that the favouring of “the paint strokes of the great male painters” over “the incredible array of needle techniques that women have used for centuries” has implications far beyond the precedence of one art form over another. She saw that a gendered hierarchy of art forms had contributed to the erasure of female experience, and pointed to the “iconographic void” where images of childbirth in western art might be.Appearing early on in the show, Birth Tear/Tear, 1982, is an extraordinary evocation of the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Under the guidance of director Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward Gallery seems hell bent on reducing art to the level of fun for all the family. And as though to prove the point, cretinous captions strip the work of all meaning beyond the banal, while press pictures showcase kids gazing at large sculptures.Their latest exhibition, When Forms Come Alive consists of sculptures by 21 artists, all of whom employ organic rather than geometric forms. “Dynamic, exuberant and playful, the works in this show, take visitors on an adventure into a world of fascinating forms,” says Rugoff.The “adventure” begins Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In Titian’s painting Diana and Actaeon,1559, a cluster of naked beauties bathes beside a stream. Scarcely visible in the right hand corner is a black woman helping the goddess hide her nudity from Acteon who has stumbled into her private glade. The servant’s clothing and dark skin contrast with the pearly pink flesh of the nymphs – so much so that she almost merges with the tree trunk behind her, as though she were just part of the scenery.In her intaglio version of Titian’s painting, Barbara Walker bleaches out everyone except the black woman, whom she lovingly highlights in pencil. This Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American artist Barbara Kruger started out as a graphic designer working in advertising, and it shows. Her sharp design skills and acute visual intelligence now produce funny, clever and thought provoking installations in which words and pictures illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie.The Serpentine Gallery show opens with one of her most iconic pieces – a hand holding up a card which reads: “I shop therefore I am” (pictured below), a witty rejoinder to the famous maxim “I think, therefore I am” penned by philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century. Read more ...
Alice Brewer
2023 was a good year for Andy Warhol post-mortems: after Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, after Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Home, Richard Dorment’s Warhol After Warhol.Their publication journeys undoubtedly benefitted from the value Anglophone cultural programming currently puts upon "pre-awareness": bookshops, for instance, are full of feminist and queer retellings of well-known novels and myths; the highest-grossing film of last year was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the first of many films that the toy company Mattel intends to eke out of its intellectual property.For Warhol scholars, it is Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Rosemary, heather and hops. These are just a few of the ingredients included in a special blend of herbal tea created by artist, Dineo Seshee Raisibe Bopape. Subtle yet deep in flavour, the amber coloured tea has a calming, if not soporific and dream-inducing effect. Picked by Bopape on the Frantsila herb farm in Hämeenkyrö, Finland, the tea was then packaged and delivered to the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, and there partly incorporated into the artist’s current exhibition. Today, a sachet of this blend – aptly titled Raisibe Dreaming – sits on the counter in my small Read more ...
Alastair Davey
"Beautiful outside, unmissable inside" is the is the new tagline for the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. If the restoration of James Thornhill’s painted hall wasn’t enough to prompt a journey on the Thames Clipper, Paul Cocksedge’s installation, Coalescence might do the trick. Though contemporary critique is nothing new (think of Flora Yukhnovich’s interpretations of the Rococo style), Cockridge uses the hall as a backdrop for 2,500 pieces of anthracite, a high carbon coal, suspended in front of scenes depicting the Hanoverian dynasty. The resulting orb is remarkably striking and though Read more ...
Mark Kidel
To take a trip into the world of Issy Wood is to be embraced by paradox. A richness of imagery that can at time shock with its blandness and at others seduce with a sense of wonder; a perfectly accomplished surface that reveals, with familiarity, a labyrinth of unexpected depth and sensuality; a confrontation with the glitz of hyper-reality that’s constantly playing with the illusory nature of all images; collections of apparent trivia bathed in an aura of mystery.She has a large show right now at the splendid Lafayette Anticipations, a very well-run showcase for cutting-edge contemporary art Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The vast and various spaces of Frank Gehry’s monumental Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris suit the needs of the thrilling Mark Rothko exhibition now inhabiting its labyrinthine multi-storey suite of galleries.Some of the 115 works on display require a kind of intimacy – enclosed spaces with the feel of a chapel rather than the classsic antiseptic white cube – and others benefit from wider vistas, in which his relentless explorations can breathe, standing alone while being connected with other works from the same period. With help from the artist’s son Christopher Rothko, the curator Suzanne Read more ...