Visual Arts Reviews
Ryan Gander: Make every show like it's your last, Manchester Art GalleryWednesday, 09 July 2014
When Ryan Gander’s wife wanted a designer lamp, the versatile artist knocked one up from junk. She was so impressed he sold it as an artwork and by now has made 55 in his garden shed. Three are here in Manchester, made from foil food trays, a guitar stand and concrete. These pieces are quite unrepresentative of the rest of this highly conceptual show, but in a diverse, major survey there appears to be no truly representative way in. Read more... |
Digital Revolution, The Curve, BarbicanFriday, 04 July 2014
Digital Revolution begins with an archive section taking you back to the 1970s when Ralph Baer developed a video game allowing punters to play ping pong on TV (below right: poster for the original Pong arcade game) and Steve Jobs worked on Break Out, in which a virtual ball bounces off a bank of horizontal lines. Read more... |
Making Colour, National GalleryMonday, 30 June 2014
The National Gallery has a range of personas it adopts for its exhibitions, and for this one, about colour, it has deployed the po-faced, teachy one. The pompous tone is because it’s not just about art this time, there’s science in it, which makes it extra serious. Read more... |
Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album, Royal AcademyFriday, 27 June 2014
From Apocalypse Now to Blue Velvet to Speed, as a screen presence Dennis Hopper grew ever more scary. Lately gallery-goers have got to know another side of Hopper via his painting. Now there is a belated run-out for his work as a photographer, although work is maybe the wrong word. He spent much of the Sixties with a camera slung round his neck, but didn’t make a dime from any of his pictures. Read more... |
Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings, David ZwirnerFriday, 27 June 2014
Bridget Riley’s mural for St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, which was unveiled in April this year, is something I’ve seen only in photographs. And on seeing it for the first time my reaction, I’m afraid, was, “Oh no". It obviously didn’t help that the photographer had wildly exaggerated the one-point perspective, so that the parallel lines of two facing walls converging sharply made you feel the vertiginous pull of a rabbit hole. Read more... |
Franz West: Where is My Eight, Hepworth WakefieldSaturday, 21 June 2014
The windows of Hepworth Wakefield command some attractive views, and for the present show looking out the window might even be a valid alternative to looking at the work. Curator Eva Badura-Triska reports that Austrian artist Franz West was a believer in the aura or the atmosphere of an art work. It hardly matters where you look. As if to prove the point there are installations which include chairs facing away from the work, or sofas angled to provide little point of focus. Read more... |
The Human Factor, Hayward GalleryWednesday, 18 June 2014
When a large and ambitious group exhibition is mounted on a particular theme or subject, in this case the human figure in contemporary sculpture, it’s always interesting to note what gets left out as well as what goes in. It’s reasonable to ask what story is being promoted under the heading of a general survey. Here are 25 sculptors, all but one from Europe and America, spanning the past 25 years. Read more... |
Art and Life: Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Dulwich Picture GallerySaturday, 14 June 2014
At the risk of sounding crass, I can’t help feeling that had Winifred Nicholson painted fewer flowers she might be better represented in the annals of art history. Of course, being a woman hasn’t helped, but as a woman flower painter she was ever destined for the footnotes. Read more... |
British Folk Art, Tate BritainWednesday, 11 June 2014
I agreed with some reluctance to review British Folk Art, since I anticipated an overdose of quaint charm, naive whimsy and endearing eccentricity. You know the kind of thing – fire screens embroidered with overblown flowers and paintings of fat porkers, faithful dogs or stallions galloping like rocking horses. Read more... |
John Deakin and the Lure of Soho, Photographers' GalleryTuesday, 27 May 2014
John Deakin was lukewarm about his career as a photographer because his heart wasn’t in it. Really, he wanted to be a painter, and so it was in spite of himself that he became a staff photographer at Vogue in 1947, acquiring a reputation for innovative portraiture and fashion work. Read more... |
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