Visual Arts Reviews

The Brits Who Built the Modern World, BBC Four / The Man Who Fought the Planners, BBC Four

Tom Birchenough Friday, 21 February 2014

There really was astonishing talent on display in The Brits Who Built the Modern World (*****), as full a television panorama of the work of the five architects whose careers were under examination – Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw, Michael Hopkins and Terry Farrell – as we’re ever likely to get.

Berlinale 2014: Cathedrals of Culture

Tom Birchenough Friday, 14 February 2014

Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.

Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern /ICA

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Some artists are diminished by major retrospectives, including those artists we consider great. A gap opens up between what you see and what you hear, which is why you can never judge work with your ears, or at least your ears and nothing else.

Hockney: Printmaker, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Fisun Güner Sunday, 09 February 2014

David Hockney has been a printmaker for almost as long as he’s been a painter.

Bailey's Stardust, National Portrait Gallery

Marina Vaizey Saturday, 08 February 2014

Several hundred photographs, of varying scales and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints in superb tones of greys blacks and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years.

Richard Deacon, Tate Britain

Florence Hallett Wednesday, 05 February 2014

A retrospective is often a daunting prospect for all concerned, not least the poor visitor who must prepare for a gruelling marathon, visiting every forgotten cul-de-sac of an artist’s career.

Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner, Turner Contemporary

Fisun Güner Sunday, 02 February 2014

Helen Frankenthaler is often presented as being both a stepping stone between art movements and as an artist who fell – because such things matter in the tidy narratives of art history – between the cracks of various American isms. Frankenthaler, who made her name in the fertile New York art scene of the early Fifties and who died in 2011, found success and fame early, but then had the possible misfortune to be seen as a “transitional figure”.

Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? Hayward Gallery

Sarah Kent Wednesday, 29 January 2014

If you're suffering from the January blues, hurry to the Southbank Centre where Martin Creed’s exhibition is bound to make you smile. The man best known for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 by switching the lights on and off at Tate Britain has filled both floors of the Hayward Gallery with things that not only lift the spirits but reveal how to make magic from virtually nothing.

Comment

Derek Jarman: Pandemonium, Somerset House

Sarah Kent Sunday, 26 January 2014

It is 20 year since Derek Jarman died of an AIDs-related illness. To commemorate the event King’s College London, where he studied English and History, is staging Pandemonium – an exhibition, a symposium, a 24-hour installation in the ornate chapel and coach trips to Prospect Cottage in Dungeness where Jarman retreated after discovering he was HIV positive and created an idiosyncratic desert garden in the shingle.

Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness, BBC Four

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 22 January 2014

If you’re going to make a programme about the Rococo, that ornate and playful decorative arts movement that began in France at the start of the 18^th century and flourished under the French king Louis XV, naturally you’d want to start in Bavaria. Or perhaps not. But Waldemar Januszczak does, heading off with his bag-on-a-stick and his lolloping gait in the nature of a weary pilgrim to visit a German Rococo splendour or two in stone and pastel-coloured stucco.