Galleries
Bill Knight
Asking theartsdesk's theatre photographer to review Photo London is like asking a car mechanic to review the London Motor Show. "Remember the big picture!" I kept telling myself as I tried to deconstruct the lighting of a particular shot or measure the depth of field.And big picture it certainly is. Now in its second year at Somerset House, Photo London aims to be the best photographic fair in the world – "the first photographic fair of the smartphone generation" – with over 80 galleries and 480 artists exhibiting. The exhibitors are a selection of London galleries alongside a range of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John.The show is also making, if you like, a statement about the market. Photography as a medium has been around since the 1840s, ubiquitous for much of the 20th Read more ...
David Nice
To liberate traffic-choked city streets for pedestrians, to suspend phantasmagorical, literally high art above their heads and give a sense that London belongs to them: that’s an admirable vision, surely. Artichoke has been wowing the crowds since it brought Royal de Luxe’s The Sultan’s Elephant to town in 2006. Its festivals of light have drawn crowds and prestige to Durham in three alternate years, and to Derry-Londonderry. Could Lumiere work in as diffuse a city as London?That would depend on what you saw and how crowded it was where you were. Last night I gave up on the installations from Read more ...
theartsdesk
Can a portrait really be a portrait if we can’t see a person’s face? And what if the reason we can’t see their face is that it is covered with a lump of dough? Is it a joke? And if it is a joke, is it on us or them? Or perhaps it is a joke about art itself: doughy masks aside, Dahlgaard’s portraits are in every other way conventional, and dough is not so dissimilar to clay, a venerable material in the history of art.As ludicrous as the project undoubtedly is, Danish artist Søren Dahlgaard’s photographs are remarkably effective in their interrogation of portraiture, challenging our Read more ...
David Nice
This is difficult. An official obituary, such as the one I’ve just finished for The Guardian, has no problem in pointing out the achievements of Kurt Masur’s distinguished career. Whatever his party-line status in Honecker’s East Germany, which he used to get the Leipzig Gewandhaus rebuilt to his own satisfaction, Masur did play a crucial role as one of five spokesmen preventing a Tiananmen Square-style massacre before the Berlin Wall fell. In 2001 he responded swiftly with his New York Philharmonic to give a memorial performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem, motivated players to give free Read more ...
theartsdesk
Walls that are floors, floors that are walls, and stairs that go up to go down: in the brain-befuddling art of MC Escher (1898-1972) the mundane everyday meets a world of paradox in which the rules of gravity, space and material reality are thrown into disarray. From his fantastical architectural spaces with flights of stairs that lead nowhere, to dazzling tessellations that fade into infinity, Escher is synonymous with queasy optical illusions that fascinate and nauseate in equal measure.Astonishingly popular, the art of Escher is some of the most widely recognised and well-loved ever made, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Arena is the longest-running arts documentary programme for television at the BBC, and perhaps the world: as the BBC itself phrases it, this compendium celebration presented 24 hours in 90 minutes for 40 years, marking the show's latest anniversary. Conceived by the ever-creative and energetic Humphrey Burton all that while ago, Arena has made over 600 films, looking at high and low culture with equal curiosity, alacrity and even audacity.This visual anthology was a slightly queasy trip down memory lane, dizzying and provoking as we heard TS Eliot himself reading The Waste Land to visuals Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“High Spirits” is a multi-layered title: the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) was himself a heavy gambler and a heavy drinker, continually using up his material assets in such pursuits. His high spirits extended to the Georgian society he satirised with such robust good humour; high society and even low society attracted his interests, while he also expended enormous energy detailing political and sexual intrigues.So while the 17th century Dutch are busy drinking and eating and being in general enthusiastic consumers in several gorgeous rooms at The Queen’s Gallery, this is a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. It’s true that there are a handful of other artists with that charisma, but none so rare as Vermeer. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only the subject of a recent novel and a film, but also a kind of poster for Holland as a whole, and the star of the recently reopened Mauritshaus in the Hague. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can hardly see the handful of Vermeers for the crowds.Such power to attract is shared by a few others, including several Dutch masters – think Rembrandt and Van Gogh – Read more ...
theartsdesk
At first glance David Stewart’s Five Girls 2014, the winning entry in this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, is a very ordinary scene. Five young women sit behind a table, obligatory mobile phones within reach and lying amongst the remains of a rather dismal-looking lunch. They’re not looking at each other, and nor are they looking at us – in fact they are not even looking at the same thing: they embody the disengagement we like to insist is the malaise of the young. And yet, while fulfilling our low expectations, they also confound them: they are not hunched over their Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Every object tells a story, nowhere more so than in a museum. The Victoria & Albert has been busy retelling as many stories as it can by rearranging, refurbishing, adding and subtracting from the millions of objects it has at its disposal to display, study and conserve.The simply named FuturePlan, which started in 2001 and has several more years to run, has been redoing, reviewing and renewing the entire museum, examining one by one the extraordinary holdings of the V&A, sometimes across cultures, sometimes with a horizontal chronology across categories, and sometimes from beginning Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chairs, chairs, chairs, as far as the eye can see. Plywood or plastic shells, some decorated with hilarious drawings of jolly nudes by Saul Steinberg (main picture), others in all the colours you can imagine – stacks, in rows, alluring and all so familiar. As it is an exhibition, there is an air of reverence – heaven forbid that you actually have a chair to sit on! - but these chairs have been design icons for well over half a century. Here they are the stars of “The World of Charles and Ray Eames”, an anthology of projects and successes, shown not only in actual produced objects but drawings Read more ...