Visual Arts Reviews
Turner Prize 2012, Tate BritainTuesday, 02 October 2012
There are two films in the Turner Prize exhibition and taken together and watched end-to-end they last just under three hours. That sounds gruelling for an art exhibition, but they’re from the strongest two candidates on this year’s shortlist. And since neither is one of those poorly filmed and edited pieces that are best viewed as moving wallpaper as you drift in and out of the gallery, both are worth devoting time to. Read more... |
Thomas Schütte: Faces and Figures, Serpentine GalleryFriday, 28 September 2012
On the evidence of this Serpentine exhibition of huge sculptures, small sculptures, photographs, drawings, watercolours and prints, the German artist Thomas Schütte is obsessed, but obsessed, with faces. It is billed as the first show to focus entirely on his portraiture, of himself, his friends, and from the imagination. And the focus helps the visitor to grasp how playfully serious – or seriously playful – the artist is. Read more... |
Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain, British MuseumFriday, 21 September 2012
Alonso Berruguete, Vicente Carducho, Juan Antonio Conchillos y Falco and Pedro Machuca are hardly familiar names in the Anglophone art world, but their drawings are on view in a revelatory exhibition. The British Museum is showing nearly all its Spanish drawings and a fine, succinct collection of prints, in an anthology called From the Renaissance to Goya. Read more... |
Bronze, Royal AcademyMonday, 17 September 2012
A Dancing Satyr leaps into the air, his head thrown back in ecstasy. His alabaster eyes appear like two pinpoints of illumination in the dimly lit gallery. The bronze figure, which is the first work you encounter in an exhibition spanning 5,000 years of bronze sculpture, is believed to be the work of the famous Greek sculptor Praxiteles, who was active in the second half of the fourth century BC. Read more... |
Punk on Show: Was England Dreaming?Monday, 17 September 2012
On the 35th anniversary of the year punk met the mainstream, it’s to be expected that retrospection and nostalgia are in the air. Television has had a go, albums are being reissued and old soldiers are telling their stories. By its very nature an anniversary suggests that things were cut and dried, that 1977 was a beginning or a marker in the sand. Read more... |
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, Tate BritainWednesday, 12 September 2012
The vividly dramatic story of Isabella, from a poem by Keats (in turn from Boccacio’s Decameron,) crying over her lover Lorenzo, who, base born, was murdered by her brothers, was much admired by the Victorians. The tale is not for the squeamish: the widowed mistress resolutely dug up the corpse and detached the head, which she then buried in a pot of basil. Read more... |
Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings/A Survey of Photographs, Gagosian GalleryTuesday, 11 September 2012
There are two exhibitions of Cy Twombly's work at Gagosian Gallery right now. One is fine and will detain you for a few minutes. The other is exactly the revelation we want to refresh and enhance Twombly for his afterlife. Read more... |
Art of Change: New Directions from China, Hayward GallerySunday, 09 September 2012
At the Hayward Gallery a young woman falls over backwards; her flight is magically arrested at a gravity-defying point of imbalance. Since she is blinking, one can safely assume that she is alive, present, and human rather than a waxwork or an illusion. How, though, does she sustain such an impossible position? Read more... |
John Berger: Art and Property Now, Somerset HouseSaturday, 08 September 2012
John Berger isn’t a man who has suffered through appearing to take himself massively seriously. His way of phrasing his most modest utterance as though the fate of the world’s dispossessed hangs on his trenchancy is insufferable to some. But generally the world takes this mountain-dwelling Marxist sage pretty much at his own estimation: as a great alternative voice crying out amid the crassness of our market-driven culture. Read more... |
Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War, Imperial War MuseumFriday, 07 September 2012
The wide eyed little girl is sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, clutching her large soft toy, her head encased in a voluminous bandage. Eileen Dunne, aged three, was injured by shrapnel during the London bombing in 1940, and Cecil Beaton’s Ministry of Information photograph of the bewildered child travelled the world, graced the cover of Life magazine and silently pleaded the British cause. Read more... |
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