Visual arts
fisun.guner
When a large and ambitious group exhibition is mounted on a particular theme or subject, in this case the human figure in contemporary sculpture, it’s always interesting to note what gets left out as well as what goes in. It’s reasonable to ask what story is being promoted under the heading of a general survey. Here are 25 sculptors, all but one from Europe and America, spanning the past 25 years. You might ask, “But where is our own Antony Gormley?” After all, Gormley has been the “go-to” British sculptor whose subject for the past quarter of a century has been the human figure. His absence Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to reject the emotive clichés and lazy token battles and focus on what matters. In Pain in the Arts, Tusa urges that both sides take personal responsibility for an essential part of human life.His title, beyond the dubious pun, refers to the very real, and feared, pain in the long-established arts world right now, caused by current government pressure Read more ...
Florence Hallett
At the risk of sounding crass, I can’t help feeling that had Winifred Nicholson painted fewer flowers she might be better represented in the annals of art history. Of course, being a woman hasn’t helped, but as a woman flower painter she was ever destined for the footnotes. As is often the way with female artists, Winifred was highly regarded in her lifetime, and at the outset of her career she outsold her husband Ben Nicholson, whose reputation, posthumously, has almost entirely eclipsed her own.Next to the white reliefs and austere abstract paintings that have secured her husband's Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I agreed with some reluctance to review British Folk Art, since I anticipated an overdose of quaint charm, naive whimsy and endearing eccentricity. You know the kind of thing – fire screens embroidered with overblown flowers and paintings of fat porkers, faithful dogs or stallions galloping like rocking horses.I needn’t have worried; some naive paintings are included along with embroidery samplers and patchwork quilts, but predictable items like these are offset by a stunning array of ship’s figureheads and trade signs including a cobbler’s boot (pictured below), a locksmith’s padlock and key Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’ll admit, there's a scene that made me well up during the excellent Marina Abramović biopic The Artist is Present. If you've seen it you’ll know the scene I mean – it’s where Ulay, Abramović’s former partner, in art and in life, takes the seat opposite her on the last day of her MoMA marathon performance. And the tears come, hers and his and then ours, and she takes his hands, and then more tears. Oh god.Abramović and Ulay did some powerful work in the Seventies. As a couple they gave expression, in a highly wrought, often florid fashion, to the psychological violence that often bubbles Read more ...
fisun.guner
Lord, I confess I have never seen Kenneth Clark’s epic 13-part series Civilisation. Not in its entirety at any rate – only snippets on YouTube, and, more recently, excerpts at Tate Britain’s current exhibition, where highlights from his many televisual essays from the Sixties are being screened on multiple monitors, the earlier ones, in black and white, presented rather in the style of a carefully rehearsed, stiffly enacted avuncular chat in front of a favourite painting or sculpture. But having read him, including the book based on that acclaimed 1969 series, I can vouch that his plummy Read more ...
Florence Hallett
John Deakin was lukewarm about his career as a photographer because his heart wasn’t in it. Really, he wanted to be a painter, and so it was in spite of himself that he became a staff photographer at Vogue in 1947, acquiring a reputation for innovative portraiture and fashion work. Vogue’s studio was dangerously close to Soho and Deakin was prey to its temptations, his alcoholism and dubious friendships with many of its most celebrated and notorious characters providing a constant distraction.The tension between Deakin’s life as a talented, salaried photographer, and his role at the heart of Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
On the morning I visited William Forsythe's installation there was a fire truck parked up on Circus Street. Its crew were all in the Old Municipal Market, taking in the art and, like everyone else, interacting with the kinetic sculptural elements. It is the stuff of arts outreach programme fantasies.Forsythe is an American choreographer and sculptor who lives and works in Germany. He made his name at the helm of Ballet Frankfurt and has since proved himself an able visual artist, along with a radical director. Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No 2 previewed in Essen, began life as a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Last year, the German artist Georg Baselitz told Der Spiegel: “Women don't paint very well. It's a fact,” citing as evidence the failure of works by female artists to sell for the massive sums raised by their male counterparts. The amusing punchline to that story is that shortly afterwards a Berthe Morisot painting sold at auction for more than double the amount ever achieved by Baselitz himself. But be honest - come on, use your fingers - how many women artists can you think of? Because however much Baselitz’s misogyny appals you, the prospect of not one, but three programmes dedicated to Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
At the core of Memphis Living by Hernan Bas are five large paintings of equal size that could be blown-up spreads from a fashion magazine. Each features a modellish young man surrounded by statement architecture, iconic design and lush vegetation. But in the way their backgrounds tend toward abstraction, Bas confuses the viewer and confounds the lifestyle imagery. Not a fashion statement then, but a statement about fashion perhaps. There are ghosts in these colourful houses, which accounts for the lost look of their solitary occupants. In one work, Memphis Living (feeling the spirit) ( Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Viewed through an arch designed to evoke a dimly lit chapel, Lorenzo Costa and Gianfrancesco Maineri’s The Virgin and Child with Saints, 1498-1500, is strikingly legible (pictured below right). The Virgin sits on a marble throne beneath a richly decorated arch, the throne’s fictive architecture covered with panels depicting Biblical scenes, the infant Christ standing precariously on his mother’s knee. By mimicking the poor lighting conditions for which this altarpiece was designed, painted architectural features are revealed as so much more than mere scenery, serving instead to punctuate Read more ...
fisun.guner
Maria Lassnig, the Austrian figurative painter best known for her emotionally complex self-portraits, died yesterday aged 94. She was virtually unknown in the UK until her solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2008. In a compact survey which focused on recent work one self-portrait - You or Me, 2005 (main picture) - attracted the greatest attention. Here the artist, aged 86, wears a startled expression while pointing a gun at her temple and one straight at the viewer. It is a promise of mutual destruction utterly alive with the presence of the artist. Lassnig’s self-portraits, in Read more ...