tue 04/11/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery review - seeing is not always believing

Sarah Kent

There are some wonderful things in Space Shifters, the Hayward Gallery’s autumn exhibition. The selection of work plays with one’s perceptions of space and everything in it.

Read more...

Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, V&A review - gaming for all

Alfred Quantrill

Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five years.

Read more...

Turner Prize 2018, Tate Britain review - a shortlist dominated by political issues

Sarah Kent

I’ve just spent four hours in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain. The shortlisted artists all show films or videos, which means that you either stay for the duration or make the decision to walk away, which feels disrespectful.

Read more...

Courtauld Impressionists: From Manet to Cézanne review - much loved treasures, seen afresh

Marina Vaizey

Heir to one of this country's great textile manufacturing firms, Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947) – highly original in his then unfashionable fascination with the art of his own lifetime  – bought some of the best known and best loved paintings now in the public domain.

Read more...

I object, British Museum review - censorship, accidental?

Katherine Waters

It’s the nature of satire to reflect what it mocks, so as you’d expect from a British Museum exhibition curated by Ian Hislop, I object is a curiously establishment take on material anti-establishmentarianism from BC something-or-other right up to the present day.

Read more...

Renzo Piano, Royal Academy review - worth the effort

Sarah Kent

Architecture is notoriously difficult to present in an accessible way and this survey of Italian architect Renzo Piano, who gave London the Shard, does not solve the problem.

Read more...

h 100 Young Influencers of the Year: Marina Gerner on Russian art

Marina Gerner

On a recent visit to the Royal Academy, I noticed a tall, elegantly dressed man who spent quite some time admiring a square object attached to the wall. I wondered whether to tell him that far from being Russian avant-garde art, which was the theme of the exhibition, it was in fact the temperature and humidity control box.

Read more...

Roderic O’Conor and the Moderns, National Gallery of Ireland review - experiments in Pont-Aven

Katherine Waters

In the autumn of 1892 Émile Bernard wrote home to his mother that, following the summer decampment to Pont-Aven of artists visiting from Paris and further afield, there remained "some artists here, two of them talented and copying each other.

Read more...

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, V&A review - appearances aren't everything

Katherine Waters

When in 2004 Frida Kahlo’s bedroom  sealed on the command of her husband Diego Rivera for 50 years from her death  was opened, a trove of clothes and personal items was discovered.

Read more...

diep~haven 2018 review - a missed connection?

Mark Sheerin

The daily car ferry from Newhaven in Sussex to Dieppe in Normandy is an unlikely phenomenon. Neither port is very large; neither region very populous, and the journey sways you along for four contemplative hours. It enjoys the custom of truckers, school parties, and retired caravan-owners. But it also caters for art lovers with time on their hands.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Macbeth, RSC, Stratford review - Glaswegian gangs and ghouli...

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s so very different about Belfast and Glasgow, both of which I have visited in the last few...

Sananda Maitreya, Town Hall, Birmingham review - 80s megasta...

During a false start to “Billy Don’t Fall”, on Sunday night at Birmingham’s iconic Town Hall, Sananda Maitreya took the opportunity to address the...

Mr Scorsese, Apple TV review - perfectly pitched documentary...

This five-parter by Rebecca Miller is essential viewing for any...

Madama Butterfly, Irish National Opera review - visual and v...

Emotional truth backed up by musical sophistication is what saves Puccini’s drama about a geisha deserted by an American officer from mawkishness...

Hallé John Adams festival, Bridgewater Hall / RNCM, Manchest...

Am I dreaming? Did I really see a living composer of...

'Vicious Delicious' is a tasty, burlesque-rockin...

Three of last year’s finest singles were by Luvcat, a classy-but-naughty Eartha Kitt-style bad girl steeped in burlesque-rock’n’roll spirit. In...

theartsdesk at Wexford Festival Opera 2025 - two strong prod...

A drawback of choosing relatively or very obscure operas, as they've been mostly doing in Wexford Festival since 1951, is that the audiences...

Bach's B minor Mass, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Whelan, C...

The greatest procession of mass movements ever composed merits the best line-up of soloists, both vocal and instrumental, as well as the perfect...

Kaploukhii, Greenwich Chamber Orchestra, Cutts, St James...

To St James’s Piccadilly to hear the young pianist Misha Kaploukhii give an impressive performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto,...