Visual Arts Reviews
Watercolour, Tate BritainTuesday, 15 February 2011
Does watercolour painting suffer from an image problem? Do you think of the wild, vaporous seascapes of Turner, or Victorian ladies at their sketchbooks dabbing daintily at wishy-washy flower paintings? Do you associate the medium with radical innovation or with staid tradition? And would Jackson Pollock have appeared quite so heroic flinging thin washes of watercolour around instead of viscous oils? Read more...
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Douglas Gordon: K.364Friday, 11 February 2011
After writing about a recent survey of French artist Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I found myself wondering about his collaboration with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. In 2006 the two artists made the acclaimed film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and while Parreno’s skills as a film-maker were pretty evident from that... Read more... |
Cory Arcangel, The Curve, BarbicanWednesday, 09 February 2011
It is probably a worrying sign when the computer games of your youth become the historical butt of a conceptual art joke. Digital artist Cory Arcangel, who appropriates video-game technology, repurposes and redesigns it, has installed 14 10-pin bowling computer games in the Barbican's Curve gallery, and if you remember the earliest, an Atari, you're almost... Read more... |
Susan Hiller, Tate BritainThursday, 03 February 2011
Susan Hiller describes herself as a curator as well as an artist. She makes work out of objects that she’s collected over the years. She collates information, too, and personal testimonies. These all go toward making works whose primary aim is to question meanings and categories and belief systems. These belief systems are those that are often found on the outer fringes of mainstream norms – or, if you’re put off by the dry language of academe – which Hiller isn’t – the loopy stuff that’s a... Read more... |
Martin Creed, Hauser & WirthThursday, 27 January 2011
Who could not love Martin Creed? The tweed-encased harumphers of the world adore him, because they can say, “That’s not art,” and, “My cat could do that,” and have an all-round wonderful time. Conceptualists have it easy: what could be more fun than his Turner Prize-winning Work No 227, a light going on and off in a room? And lovers of abstract art love him because his work is just there. “Take it or leave it,” it seems to say. And they love him because, well, because his work... Read more... |
Modern British Sculpture, Royal AcademyFriday, 21 January 2011
Austere, elegant, impressive. Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph is a thing of beauty, a monument that embodies permanence in the face of all that is impermanent, and solidity in the face of all that is ephemeral. It’s an inspired decision to bring it indoors, for inside a hushed gallery, away from the rush of traffic and stripped of its flags and sculpted wreathes, Lutyens’s memorial can at last be properly admired as a work of art. Read more... |
Robert Mapplethorpe, Alison Jacques GalleryTuesday, 18 January 2011
The first thing to make clear is that Robert Mapplethorpe, notorious for his photograph of himself with a bullwhip up his arse, is not really a photographer: he is a sculptor who works in the medium of photography. What else can explain the marble and ebony of his chiselled subjects, or the fact that most of the works selected for this show as responses to Mapplethorpe are sculptures? Read more... |
Gabriel Orozco, Tate ModernMonday, 17 January 2011
The show opens with his iconic 1991 piece, My Hands are My Heart, a double photograph of Orozco’s naked torso. In the first photograph his hands clutch a hidden object at chest-height; in the second the hands splay open to present to the viewer a piece of clay, now impressed with his fingermarks in the shape of a heart. In two simple images, Orozco encapsulates the artist’s act of creation, and then of offering the creation to the viewer. Read more... |
The Painter, Arcola TheatreMonday, 17 January 2011
Joseph Mallord William Turner - Billy to his intimates, such as he had - is the notional centre of The Painter, a snapshot of the great British landscape artist as a young iceberg. Toby Jones is the main draw in this world premiere of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's new play, and he emanates quiet charisma and sardonic... Read more... |
The Urethra Postcard Art of Gilbert & GeorgeFriday, 14 January 2011
Radio interviewer: “Are you Royalists?” George: “Of course! We’re not weird.” Gilbert & George may have been accused in the past of being coprophiliac pederast fascists (owing to their love of turds, anuses, young men with cropped hair and bovver boots and the Union Jack), but this art duo can certainly make you smile. In fact, Gilbert & George can often be quite irrepressibly funny – definitely "ha ha" as well as peculiar. And since they and their art seem as one, one senses they’d... Read more... |
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