Visual arts
Marina Vaizey
The lawns, fields, meadows and sheds of the Henry Moore Foundation themselves exemplify the notion of in-and-out, exterior-interior and are thus the ideal setting for exploring the notion of body and void in Moore’s work and the way it is echoed in the sculpture of succeeding generations. Thus we have a subliminally provocative setting for a succinct, even oddly exquisite (however monumental) selection of the contemporary sculptural avant-garde, varyingly echoing in new guises notions of inside-outside which we can now see obsessively preoccupied Moore. Moore himself, although a teacher Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Occasionally, but rarely, great imaginative leaps take place in the progression of art that seem to have come from nowhere. This can be said of Julian Schnabel….In these early paintings Schnabel worked with materials on surfaces that had never been used before....The sheer originality of Schnabel’s vision struck the art world explosively.”So writes curator David Thorp in a catalogue essay for this exhibition. And the solemnly vacuous puff continues: “But as with all momentous changes in art these inevitably created as much criticism as acclaim.”Let me begin by saying this. I’ve come to these Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Yinka Shonibare MBE makes work from a less entrenched position than his many decorations suggest. This Member of the British Empire (he adopted the initials as part of his name after receiving the honour in 2005) is naturally also a Royal Academician, an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths, and has an honorary doctorate from the RCA. Shonibare is one of the most celebrated artists around, a fixture as well received as the ship in a bottle which occupied the Fourth Plinth in 2010 and which now has a permanent home outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.Yet his ambitious new work for year’ Read more ...
fisun.guner
If you’re not already familiar with at least some aspects of Chris Marker’s work, this exhibition will feel overwhelming, if not confusing. You may have to pay a second visit to get the most out of it, or even make sense of it. It’s certainly a demanding retrospective of the influential French filmmaker, and an immersive "surround-screen" gallery survey probably isn’t the best introduction.Still, I feel compelled to commend the ambitions of the Whitechapel Gallery in bringing Marker’s work to wider public attention and doing its best to highlight themes across a life’s work (“career” is a Read more ...
David Nice
In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I thought, irrevocably shut for me 45 minutes and four chords into the first act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha could well open again in two concerts – London is to get three on a UK tour this week - around the musical Minimalist theme from Dennis Russell Davies and the excellent Basel Symphony Orchestra. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Not so long ago, photographers were rejoicing in the freedom the digital revolution seemed to bring; unencumbered by the limitations of film, paper and darkroom practice, photography was suddenly liberated from the niggling pedantry of material constraints.So it is in the cyclical nature of things that the photographers shortlisted for this year’s Deutsche Börse Prize all hark back, in some way, to pre-digital image-making, whether in their choice of equipment, technique or subject matter. Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery, argues that this illustrious prize plays a Read more ...
fisun.guner
When it comes to the two vying giants of 20th century art we do – don’t we? – all fall into that cliché of two opposing camps. You have the seductions of colour and decorative form on the one hand and you have the more classical rigours of line on the other, the one exemplified by Matisse, the other by Picasso. It’s not an absolute demarcation – a line that’s never blurred (and Matisse had, of course, a very elegant line); just a profound difference in emphasis and sensibility. It’s also a difference in artistic temperament. And how we respond shows, I think, a difference in temperament, too Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The 1960s art scene in Vienna was dominated by Actionists such as Günther Brus, Otto Muehl and Herman Nitsch, who specialised in iconoclastic performances resembling pagan rituals. With women’s naked bodies being used either as raw material or an arena for sexually suggestive violations, they were often deeply misogynist.Having exhibited the men, Richard Saltoun is now showing two of the women – Valie Export who defined herself as a Feminist Actionist, “an independent actor and creator, subject of her own history”, and photographer and film-maker, Friedl Kubelka who is scarcely known in this Read more ...
mark.hudson
Alan Davie, who died on Saturday aged 93, was one of the great 20th-century British artists, a life-long maverick whose explosive canvases cut a swathe through the provincial aridity of the postwar art scene. The first British – probably the first European – artist to become aware of Pollock’s innovations and take on the challenge of “action painting”, the quietly spoken but formidable Scot forged his own expressive path that was less an imitation of Pollock more, as fellow artist Peter Doig put it recently, “like an expanded Paul Klee… but much more physical, much more visceral.”At the time Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Given the kooky title of a new painting show at De La Warr Pavilion, it seems necessary to point out, yet again, that painting isn’t dead. The line is from poet A.E Housman, who wrote a versified dialogue between a dead man and his living friend. So while certain painters may be dead, contemporaries can talk to them. And that’s what 21 painters line up to do in this new, undogmatic survey on the South Coast. Rest assured, the conversation is breezy.Co-curators David Rhodes and Dan Howard-Birt have taken the bright decision to show artists who are “emerging”, mid-career and senior. Where else Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the most passionate works are drained of emotion; and without a ripple of feeling ruffling the exquisite calm of these genteel waters, British art appears unrelentingly polite – and provincial.Thank heavens for Phyllida Barlow who manages, single-handedly, to energise the space by filling the Duveen galleries with an installation Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Perhaps my big mistake was to read the exhibition blurb before going in: as someone who worries about dark, confined spaces, I was anticipating Miroslaw Balka’s new installation with a perverse sort of excitement. Certainly, for anyone who enjoys a dose of controlled terror Above your head sounds promising, with White Cube’s basement gallery supposedly transformed into a “large cage” and the ceiling lowered to a claustrophobic two metres. Disappointingly, however, the thrill was entirely in the anticipation.As someone particularly susceptible to the sensations the Polish artist has tried to Read more ...