Visual Arts Reviews

London 2012 and Beyond: The Best of 2012

Jasper Rees Monday, 31 December 2012

The Mayan calendar recently suggested it was all over. It is now, almost. 2012 was, by anyone’s lights, an annus mirabilis for culture on these shores. The world came to the United Kingdom, and the kingdom was indeed more or less united by a genuine aura of inclusion. Clumps of funding were hurled in the general direction of the Cultural Olympiad, which became known as the London 2012 Festival, and all sorts leapt aboard.

Art: The Best of 2012

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 26 December 2012

It was the year that everyone got just a little hysterical about Damien Hirst. That and the art market that made him. But that didn’t keep the visitors away from his retrospective at Tate Modern. The exhibition had more crowds than Wembley Stadium, or at least more than for any other exhibition in Tate Modern’s 12-year history (and possibly for any exhibition since Tate records began). It was cleverly curated (i.e.

Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape, Royal Academy

Marina Vaizey Sunday, 16 December 2012

All roads start from Rome, and so it proves in this challenging exhibition put together from the holdings of the Royal Academy’s art collection, archives and library. It features 17^th-century Italian paintings – some of the grandest by the French artists who settled in Rome, and took inspiration from the surrounding campagna – brought back to Britain by the Grand Tourists who, in the midst of their various adventures, amassed substantial art for their stately homes.

Mariko Mori: Rebirth, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 12 December 2012

The Royal Academy’s spacious white galleries at Burlington Gardens are flooded with mystic light and filled with New Age baubles. You are bathed in a trippy purple haze as you enter one gallery which contains a giant glowing pod. The translucent pod is meant to resemble an ancient monolith but instead looks more like an oversized Ikea lamp. The work derives its title, Tom Na H-iu II, from the Celtic “Tom na h-iubhraich” – a site of “spiritual transmigration”.

Comment

Carving in Britain from 1910 to Now, Fine Art Society

Marina Vaizey Sunday, 09 December 2012

Carving in Britain from 1910 to Now is an accurate but unalluring title for what is a seminal show.

Francesco Clemente, Blain Southern

Marina Vaizey Wednesday, 05 December 2012

The Neapolitan Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 into a patrician Italian family, the son of a judge. He studied classics in school and architecture in Rome, became a photographer, and then turned, as a fine art autodidact, to painting and drawing. He has spent substantial time over several decades in Madras, where he had a studio, and in Varanasi, with its continual burning pyres for the dead before they are floated off into the Ganges.

Artes Mundi Prize, National Museum Wales, Cardiff

Mark Hudson Friday, 30 November 2012

An award for artists whose work engages with "social reality, lived experience and the human condition" has been won by a Mexican forensic technician whose works deals intimately with her country’s brutal drug wars. Britain’s most valuable art award to a single artist, the Cardiff-based Artes Mundi Prize, saw nominees this year from Cuba, England, India, Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden.

Jean Dubuffet/ Gwen John and Celia Paul, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Marina Vaizey Tuesday, 27 November 2012

Pallant House Gallery is an extraordinary hybrid, an elaborate and magnificent early 18^th-century town house on a narrow Chichester street in the heart of the city, with a soberly elegant extension by Colin St John Wilson (2006) which houses one of the finest collections of 20^th-century British art anywhere in the country. Nothing could be more powerful and intelligently surprising than its present unusual combination of shows.

Death: A Self-Portrait, Wellcome Collection

Fisun Güner Sunday, 25 November 2012

Death terrifies and fascinates in equal measure: we fear both the journey and the void, but can’t help but poke and prod its weary carcass. That’ll be us soon, as sure as taxes. The promise of eternal life offers to take out death’s sting, and one wonders whether art, rather than offering a straightforward memento mori, really might have a similar function.

Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, British Library

Marina Vaizey Friday, 16 November 2012

A photograph from 1858 shows a feeble and frail octogenarian who happens to be the last Mughal emperor. Bahadur Shah II (pictured below right), reclining in his wretched prison in Delhi, awaiting trial, is about to be exiled to Burma. Many of his family and his retinue would be summarily executed, the civilian population murdered, and a number of the great Mughal monuments of Old Delhi ruined.