Visual Arts Reviews
Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain review - tenuous but still persuasiveWednesday, 27 March 2019
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Read more... |
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain review – exhilarating reminder of industrial mightThursday, 21 March 2019
Mike Nelson has turned the Duveen Galleries into a museum commemorating Britain’s industrial past (pictured below right). Scruffy workbenches, dilapidated metal cabinets and stacks of old drawers are pressed into service as plinths for the display of heavy duty machines. Read more... |
Only Human: Martin Parr, National Portrait Gallery review - relentlessly feelgoodTuesday, 19 March 2019
The Magnum photographer Martin Parr has spent decades observing contemporary human activity world-wide as – perhaps – a mesmerised observer, an anthropologist, a tourist, addicted to the vagaries of the human condition. Read more... |
Kader Attia / Diane Arbus, Hayward Gallery review - views from the marginsTuesday, 12 March 2019
Feelings run high at the Hayward Gallery in a fascinating pairing of two artists from widely differing backgrounds. Kader Attia muses on unhappy, conflicted relationships between cultures in visual meditations on variations of colonialism. Read more... |
Louise Bourgeois, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge review - a slender but choice selectionMonday, 11 March 2019
Pink walls, slightly dusky in the subdued light of a room shielded from the wintry sun, suggest the bodily concerns of this show, which through the touring collection Artists' Rooms, boldly reviews Louise Bourgeois’s career in a single, modestly sized, exhibition space at Kettle’s Yard. Read more... |
Dorothea Tanning, Tate Modern review – an absolute revelationSaturday, 09 March 2019
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died in 2012 aged 101 – but as so often happens, she was eclipsed by her famous husband, German Surrealist Max Ernst. Read more... |
Franz West, Tate Modern review - absurdly exhilaratingThursday, 28 February 2019
Franz West must have been a right pain in the arse. He left school at 16, went travelling, got hooked on hard drugs which he later replaced with heavy drinking, got into endless arguments and fights, was obsessed with sex and, above all, wanted to be an artist but hadn’t been to art school. His life reads like a bad novel or Hollywood’s idea of the tortured genius struggling to make his mark in a world indifferent to his talents. Read more... |
Phyllida Barlow: Cul-de-sac, Royal Academy review - unadulterated delightSaturday, 23 February 2019
It doesn’t get better than this! Phyllida Barlow has transformed the Royal Academy’s Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries into a euphoric delight. Entering the space, you have to turn right and process through the three galleries; but by closing the end door to create the cul-de-sac of the title, Barlow has turned this somewhat prescriptive lay-out into a theatrical experience. Read more... |
John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing, Two Temple Place review - inside the mind of a visionaryThursday, 14 February 2019
The power of seeing was the bedrock of John Ruskin’s philosophy. In the bicentenary of his birth, a revelatory exhibition at Two Temple Place in London opens out the idea and makes it manifest through both his own work and the treasures of his collection. Read more... |
Don McCullin, Tate Britain review - beastliness made beautifulMonday, 11 February 2019
I interviewed Don McCullin in 1983 and the encounter felt like peering into a deep well of darkness. The previous year he’d been in Beirut photographing the atrocities carried out by people on both sides of the civil war and his impeccably composed pictures were being published as a book. Read more... |
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