Visual arts
Sarah Kent
Isaac Julien was a student at St Martin’s School of Art when the Brixton riots broke out. Black youths took to the streets, frustrated by high rates of unemployment, police harassment, far-right intimidation and media hostility, and all hell was let loose.The following year, 21-year-old Colin Roach was shot at the entrance to Stoke Newington Police Station and this time Julien felt he had to respond. “I was determined,” he said, “to appropriate video art techniques and repurpose them for the street.” Made with Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983 records the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In this juxtaposition of Piet Mondrian, a world famous modernist, and Hilma af Klint, a little known Swedish painter, guess who knocks your socks off ! This fascinating show is a delight and a revelation, because it declares the spiritualist underpinnings of modernism which many, until now, have sought to hide.The exhibition comes to a climax in the very last room. Ten huge paintings – 10 foot by 8 – enfold you in the world of Hilma af Klint. The theme of this joyous installation is the progression from childhood to old age (pictured below: "Youth", 1907). Gliding across vibrantly coloured Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington on 14 June, 2017, with a death toll of 72, is still under investigation. The dead were largely recent immigrants to the UK. The tragedy, it’s clear now, was caused by an unholy mixture of neglect, racism, greed and corruption. There’s been much shameful denial and buck-passing, and the issues around the building’s shockingly inadequate cladding haven’t led to much action elsewhere.Steve McQueen’s film, now showing in a continuous programme at the Serpentine Gallery, addresses these issues with a mixture of anger and Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In the centre of a Venn diagram linking climate change to the mystic landscape of Dartmoor and the West Country, sits this tightly conceived show about "green" witchcraft in contemporary art. Witches were once very common in this part of the world; the last witch to be executed in Britain was from Exeter. The local museum has invited a selection of artists to contemplate this local history and the result has brought the dark arts into the light of a 21st-century space for art.Of the four artists who have been invited to engage with the collection at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei has created an extremely beautiful installation at the Design Museum in which the disparate elements play their part in creating a powerful overall message. On one level the exhibition is about design, but it also invites you to consider far more serious issues than are normally addressed in this temple to consumerism.A deep sense of loss permeates the exhibition. In fact, the longer I stayed the more I was reminded of the terrible photographs taken at Auschwitz that record the mounds of hair and piles of shoes collected from those killed in the camp’s gas Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When Berthe Morisot organised the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, along with Monet, Degas, Renoir and co, she’d already exhibited at the Paris Salon for a decade – since she was 23. That’s not bad for someone refused entry to art school because she was a woman!Luckily, Berthe and her sister Edma had parents wealthy enough to employ artists like the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot to give them private lessons. They even had their own studio and, judging by the landscape included in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s (DPG) show, Edma was rather good; but as was expected of an upper Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.Room after fabulous room is hung with a hundred artworks, mostly paintings, on walls painted navy blue. This daring decision works well for most artists, the exception being Van Gogh whose landscapes die against the dark background. Luckily the dark blue offsets the cream wallpaper and pale pink blouse of Van Gogh’s Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
A small cottage vanishes into a surrounding bay, its walls apparitional against pale waters. In the background, a pier juts out into the ocean, equidistant to sea-green hills and a brown strip of land. The tide gently meets the shoreline, white on blue-grey wash. All is quiet, all is still, as nature slowly erodes every last trace of man.This is Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s White Cottage, Cornwall, 1944, one of the earliest works from her residence in St Ives. Though representational and naturalistic in style, White Cottage, Cornwall, captures Barns-Graham’s gradual turn towards a more Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Despite the fact that it’s a cruel depiction of an aging woman, I have always loved Quinten Massys’ The Ugly Duchess (pictured below, left). The Flemish artist invites us to laugh at an old dear who, in the hope of attracting a suitor, has tucked her hair into a horned headdress and decked herself in a décolleté gown that exposes her wrinkled cleavage. Even in 1513, her ridiculous outfit would have been outmoded. In her hand she holds a rosebud, suggestive of amorous intent; the implication is that this misguided soul has donned her youthful finery in an attempt to regain her lost allure and Read more ...
Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons, Hayward Gallery review - spooky installations by a master of detail
Sarah Kent
Entry to Mike Nelson’s Hayward Gallery exhibition is through what feels like the store room of a reclamation yard. Row upon row of Dexion shelving is piled high with salvaged building materials including old doors, ancient floorboards and wrought iron gates, while even more gates and doors are leant against the walls.It’s all a bit too neat and tidy for a real junk yard, though; and my heart sank. Please don’t let this retrospective be a sanitised version of Nelson’s installations, because without the right degree of tackiness, they simply wouldn’t work. I needn’t have worried, though; from Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
It’s 1986, and a young Sonia Boyce (main picture) speaks to poet and sculptor, Pitika Ntuli, about the "perpetual struggle to be heard and appreciated" as a Black woman who is an artist. "I’m here, you can’t wish me away," she responds with characteristic verve and fight. Cut to 2023, to the UK debut of Boyce’s award-winning Venice Biennale installation Feeling Her Way, and the same concerns about visibility, audibility and laudability remain at the fore of her work – but with a golden, gleeful difference.Spread across five adjoining rooms in the Turner Contemporary, Feeling Her Way Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I once gave Peter Doig a tutorial, when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art. He had little to say about his strange images and I came away feeling I’d seen something unique, but was unable to tell if he was a very good painter or a very bad one. He now enjoys international success and his paintings sell for millions of pounds yet, judging by his Courtauld Gallery exhibition, my ambivalence was well founded. The show contains a sublimely beautiful painting and two very bad ones. The Alpinist 2019-22 (pictured right) is Doig at his very best. A lone skier trudges up a snow covered Read more ...