fri 29/03/2024

Visual Arts Reviews

Jenny Saville, Modern Art Oxford and Ashmolean Museum

Fisun Güner

Jenny Saville rose to art stardom under the patronage of Charles Saatchi. Fresh out of art school, she was contracted to produce work that would then be shown in his gallery. The Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997 followed, and she became a fully paid-up member of the YBAs.

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Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, National Gallery

Sarah Kent

Three paintings by Titian depicting stories from Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses welcome you to the National Gallery’s exhibition Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. Diana and Callisto shows Diana casting out the pregnant nymph Callisto from her company.

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Stonehenge Fire Garden, Salisbury Plain

Ismene Brown

Stonehenge, the monumental mystery of Britain’s past, decked out like a laundry yard with drying white vests and flowerpots scattered among its gigantic monoliths. It makes a most disconcerting image, and it is the precursive tableau that the public should not miss if they make the trek out to Salisbury Plain tonight or tomorrow for one of the Cultural Olympiad’s stranger installations. Get there before it all starts.

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Dorothea Tanning: Collages, Alison Jacques Gallery

Anne Blood

In Dorothea Tanning's Victory, a piece of charred toast is mounted on a black background and framed in gold. The work comes dangerously close to pure jest but instead propels itself into a critique of female domesticity and then down a road of historical influences from Surrealism and Dada straight through to stark 1960s Minimalism. Tanning made this piece in 2005, when she was well into her nineties, and it’s a delightful example of her late work.

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From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism, Royal Academy

Marina Vaizey

As the clouds continue and the rain pours down, the Sackler Gallery at the Royal Academy is filled with sun-dappled scenes from France. The anthology is a potpourri of paintings culled from the remarkable collections put together by the millionaire race horse breeder and art obsessed Sterling Clark – the fortune inherited from his grandfather’s involvement with the Singer Sewing Machine company - and his French actress wife Francine.

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Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Sarah Kent

For three months in the spring of 2010, New Yorkers were gripped by Abramovic fever. The mania owed its origins to a somewhat unlikely source – a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of a 63-year-old Serbian performance artist.

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Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, Tate Modern

Fisun Güner

Edvard Munch strikes a heroic pose. Buck naked, he’s pointing a sword at the sky – or perhaps that’s just a stick he’s picked up in the garden, where he’s surrounded by dense greenery as he stands with his arm raised in a taut diagonal. Perhaps he is dreaming of Gram, the Norse Excalibur,  and himself as Sigurd. 

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Andy Warhol: The Portfolios, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Josh Spero

The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in pink, purple and brown - hardly any nourishment, certainly nothing fresh.

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Yoko Ono: To The Light, Serpentine Gallery

Sarah Kent

The Eurozone is in crisis and the American economy stagnating; Syria is self-destructing, the Arab Spring has stalled and climate change threatens the whole planet, yet Yoko Ono believes that “the world, now, is really turning towards the light”.

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Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings, Courtauld Gallery

Steven Gambardella

They’re all here - well, most of them - the superstars of official art history. You would never get all these artists in one show if it were a painting exhibition, and it’s thrilling to see them cheek-by-jowl on the gallery walls. Drawing is widely seen as a secondary art, relegated to preparation and research for bigger works. So, of course, the majority of works in the show are studies for bigger projects from paintings to architecture.

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