wed 02/07/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, Royal Academy

Fisun Güner

A beguiling shadow play greets and enchants on arrival: the silhouettes of three ballerinas, each performing an arabesque, are cast upon the wall as you enter. The effect, as their softly delineated forms dip and slowly rotate, is mesmerising. It’s also an apt opener to an exhibition devoted to exploring how Degas strove to achieve a sense of fluidity and movement in his paintings of dancers, a subject for which he is chiefly known.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 40 Years, 12 Exhibitions, Annely Juda Fine Art

Judith Flanders

A retrospective of an artist’s work is not usually a history of a working relationship, but in the case of Christo, this impressive exhibition of works from the past 40 years also marks two crucial partnerships: with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who was his equal and co-creator from 1961, and with the Annely Juda gallery, which has mounted 12 exhibitions over four decades, as well as being intimately involved in their massive environmental “wrapped” pieces.

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Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual Arts

Josh Spero 'Francis Bacon's Studio' by Charles Matton

There is nothing new, nor inherently artistic, about making miniature models. Otherwise everyone who's ever stuffed a small ship into a glass bottle would be in the National Gallery. (Yes, Yinka Shonibare's fourth plinth ship-in-a-bottle outside the National Gallery is different.) But the boîtes (boxes/enclosures) of Charles Matton are of a different order entirely: recreations of...

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Rothko in Britain, Whitechapel Gallery

Mark Hudson

Exhibitions with titles appended "in Britain" or "and Britain" tend to be the kiss of death: indicating concentration on a brief and insignificant visit, on the subject’s impact on British art or – even worse – the influence of local collectors on his or her reputation. With Mark Rothko, though, it has to be different. The New York abstractionist’s current near-sacred status is such that a show of his dog-ends and nail clippings would probably prove a major draw.

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Power of Making, Victoria and Albert Museum

Marina Vaizey

Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the most surprising and exciting collections of contemporary stuff on view for many a while. Some is functional, from coffins to bicycles, wine caskets, guns, bespoke shoes.

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Phyllida Barlow: RIG, Hauser & Wirth, London

Sarah Kent

Every surface in my house is covered in plaster and brick dust, and wood, sand, cement, plaster and wire mesh are strewn all over the place. Furniture, carpets and pictures are covered in dust sheets and piled into two sealed rooms.

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Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario, Artangel in Hoxton, N1

Fisun Güner Will a crumpled piece of paper unlock the mystery of 'Locked Room Scenario'?

What are the most common responses to a work of contemporary art? I can think of two: “A six-year-old could have done that” (feel free to substitute “I” or “anyone”) and “But what does it actually mean?” Ryan Gander is an artist who is rather exercised by the latter. He is interested in the way we piece together scraps of evidence – overlooked details, context, history – in order to create meaning. We try to fill in the gaps. And when meaning eludes us we are often dismissive, even rather...

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Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum, New York

Graham Fuller Hals's 'The Fisher Girl': 'The passage of time has placed her on equal footing with the movers, shakers and roisterers of the Dutch Republic'

If one comes away with any certainty from the New York exhibition Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum (until 10 October) it is that the Golden Age Dutch master (1582/3-1666) keenly understood and sympathised with his fellow human beings. Whether Hals (beloved of Courbet, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Whistler and Sargent) was painting drunks and prostitutes in tavern scenes, humble fisher folk, or burghers and intellectuals and their wives, he unerringly captured the essence of his...

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Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, London

Marina Vaizey Laura Knight's 'Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring': a famously captivating image of the Home Front'

The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and her expression intense and concentrated as she screws a breech ring as part of the manufacture of the Bofors gun at a factory in Newport, is a famously captivating image of the Home Front in the last world war.

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Stanley Spencer and The English Garden, Compton Verney

Fisun Güner 'Wisteria, Cookham,' 1942: 'Fecund, exuberant nature can barely be contained by anything manmade'

In his later years, Stanley Spencer cut quite a figure in his native village of Cookham in Berkshire: he would often be seen pushing his rickety pram, with its battered umbrella, paints and canvas, and a hand-painted sign requesting all curious onlookers to desist from disturbing the artist at work. He spent most of his life in the village - even acquiring the nickname “Cookham” at the Slade, since he’d rush back by train after lessons every evening, presumably in time for tea.

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