sat 19/07/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Michelangelo: Love and Death review - how to diminish a colossus

Alison Cole

As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment.

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Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! Serpentine Gallery

Sarah Kent

The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors.

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The Discovery of Mondrian review - the most comprehensive survey ever

Florence Hallett

Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved.

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Jean Arp: Poetry of Forms review - subversive pioneer honoured in Holland

Alison Cole

This summer the wonderful Kröller-Möller museum in Otterlo hosts the first major Dutch retrospective of the works of Hans (Jean) Arp since 1960 – an exhibition that will travel in a marginally smaller version to Margate’s Turner Contemporary later this year.

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Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, British Museum

Florence Hallett

With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art.

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Highlights from Photo London 2017 - virtual reality meets vintage treasure

Bill Knight

At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography.

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Visual art at Brighton Festival - disturbing, playful, but ultimately rudderless

Mark Sheerin

As befits a festival with a spoken word artist as its guest curator, storytelling is at the heart of the visual arts offer in the 2017 Brighton Festival. It is not known if performance poet Kate Tempest had a hand in commissioning these four shows, but she can probably relate to the four artists in town right now.

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57th Venice Biennale review - riveting and bewildering

Alison Cole

Riveting and bewildering, the 57th Venice Biennale has just opened its myriad doors to the public with several thousand exhibits spread across Venice and its islands.

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Alberto Giacometti, Tate Modern

Marina Vaizey

Chain-smoking and charismatic, the painter, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived much of his life in Paris from his arrival there in his twenties. He was just in time for post-war cubism and pre-war surrealism, the energetic noisiness of the avant garde.

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Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors, Gagosian

Alison Cole

At 93, Picasso’s revered biographer, Sir John Richardson, has curated a vital new celebration of the artist’s life and work, focusing on one of his most enduring and delightful subjects, the Minotaur.

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