sat 19/07/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Kara Walker: Fons Americanus, Tate Modern review – a darkly humorous gift

Sarah Kent

Soaring some 40 feet up towards the ceiling of Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus looks ludicrously out of place – like a Victorian interloper within this cathedral to contemporary art.

Read more...

William Blake, Tate Britain - sympathy for the rebel

Katherine Waters

Poor Satan. Adam and Eve are loved-up, snogging on a flowery hillock and all he’s got for company is a snake — an extension of himself no less, and where’s the fun in monologues? Poor, poor Satan. He’s a hunk too, if you don’t mind blue. Coiffed hair and toned arms with a sexy sky slouch. Ever seen such a lovely lounger? Ever seen such a mournful moue? He’s angel worthy of our pity, even if he is fallen.

Read more...

Van Gogh’s Inner Circle, Noordbrabants Museum review - the man behind the art

Katherine Waters

Vincent van Gogh (b. 1853) could be difficult, truculent and unconventional. He battled with mental illness and wrestled with questions of religion throughout his life. But on good form he was personable. He was said to be an excellent imitator with a wry sense of humour, and was a loyal (if often fierce) friend and family relation.

Read more...

Peter Doig, Michael Werner review - ambiguous and excellent

Katherine Waters

There are two moons in Night Bathers, 2019 (pictured below) One is set in the sky, a great soupy plate with a greenish fringe creating an ugly smear of white across the night. The other is a treacherously hazy rectangle, floating like a cloud above a reclining bather — so inexplicable it could double as a cataract. The latter is, perhaps, a reflection of the former, but at a surreal remove — no reflection looks like that, no reflected light would fall there.

Read more...

Tim Walker: Wonderful Things, V&A review - a bracing full-body immersion

Florence Hallett

If leafing through the pages of Vogue is a soothing balm, Wonderful Things is a bracing full-body immersion.

Read more...

Artists in Amsterdam, Dulwich Picture Gallery review - a slight but evocative sketch

Florence Hallett

Done well, a one-room exhibition can be the very best sort, a small selection of paintings allowing the focused exploration of a single topic without the diluting effect of multiple rooms and objects.

Read more...

Edinburgh Festival 2019 reviews: Below the Blanket / Samson Young: Real Music

David Kettle

Below the Blanket ★★★★  

Read more...

Black Sabbath: 50 years, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery review – not heavy going

Guy Oddy

The well-spring of certain musical genres and hometowns of certain influential musicians have long been a source of civic pride – and a boost to the tourist industry – in many clued-in parts of the world. One only has to think of the co-opting of Bob Marley’s life and influence in attracting tourist dollars to Jamaica or the raising of the Beatles to mythic status – bus tours and all – in Liverpool.

Read more...

Helen Schjerfbeck, Royal Academy review - watchful absences and disappearing people

Katherine Waters

Light creeps under the church door. Entering as a slice of burning white, it softens and blues into the stone interior, seeming to make the walls glow from the inside. Beneath the lintel, a milder slot of sun pours upwards. To the right, a plain column, only half in the composition, supports an arch which merges with the back wall, disappearing against its horizontal plane. The chapel is empty but its stillness feels peopled. Here, absence is watchful.

Read more...

Beuys' Acorns, Bloomberg Arcade London review – not much to look at, but important all the same

Sarah Kent

The City of London is an ecological disaster. Around Bank, Mansion House and Cannon Street there’s scarcely a green leaf to be seen. Glass, steel, concrete and tarmac create an environment that excludes plant life, birds and insects and is detrimental to human health.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Album: Bonnie Dobson & The Hanging Stars - Dreams

What a great album – and what a great story to lift the heart in these fetid times. A story that crosses oceans and decades and brings together a...

Harvest review - blood, barley and adaptation

Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like...

Poor Clare, Orange Tree Theatre review - saints cajole us si...

What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons...

Album: Alex Warren - You'll Be Alright, Kid

The best-selling single so far this year in the UK is ...

That Bastard, Puccini!, Park Theatre review - inventive comi...

Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the...

Hamlet, Buxton International Festival review - how to re-ima...

Ambroise Thomas’s version of Hamlet is the flagship production of this year’s Buxton International Festival and was always going to be a...

Friendship review - toxic buddy alert

The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have...

Album: Slikback - Attrition

In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the...

Interview: Quinteto Astor Piazzolla on playing in London and...

“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered...