Galleries
fisun.guner
The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio.It's one of several light works currently dotted around the city centre, which is known as The Peninsula – the river wraps around the old part of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tony Ray-Jones is one of the hidden greats of British social documentary photography. A huge influence on photographers working today, he documented the English at play with great empathy and often surreal humour. Touring seaside resorts during the latter half of the Sixties, his acute observations of English social customs and eccentricities were, he says, intended to capture a distinctly English way of life “before it became too Americanised”.Martin Parr cites Ray-Jones as the single biggest influence in his work. Though his images are framed in a far more formal way, there is a great Read more ...
fisun.guner
You can use a computer to draw, as Hockney does, every day on his iPad, yet, despite all the technological advances the 21st century has thrown our way, the pencil continues to be the artist’s most basic tool. And though there are those who lament, as they have done for decades, the “deskilling” of art, dismissing the art they don’t like or perhaps feel alienated by, drawing not only persists but remains fundamental: just as writers still write novels with plots to recreate the world filtered through their imaginations, artists still put pencil to paper to do the same. And lest we forget, Read more ...
theartsdesk
"What I’m looking for is that fraction of a second that at least I could remember the concert by." At the start of the 2013 BBC Proms season, photographer Chris Christodoulou let theartsdesk into the secret of snapping conductors at work. Now that the Proms are over for another year, we publish not the official shots, but the ones which are simply too quirky to be released by the BBC press office. These images may not particularly flatter their subjects, but they do capture what it is to be a silent maestro magically conjuring sound from the massed ranks of an orchestra. Make sure to click on Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's the First Night and there's the Last Night. Nowadays among the staples of the two-month world-famous festival of music at the Royal Albert Hall, there is also the Doctor Who Prom. Last night, to mark the 50th anniversary of the resurgent TV sci-fi show, a celebration was laid on featuring Murray Gold's music from the last eight years of Doctor Who.Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir under Ben Foster, there was also, to tickle the musical tastebuds of the fans, some music not hitherto noted for its connection to Daleks, Cybermen, time Read more ...
theartsdesk
Chris Christodoulou has been photographing conductors at the BBC Proms since 1981. Many attending the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall may well have attempted to spot him. They can give up on that game herewith. As he explains to theartsdesk, the venue with its many curtains and nooks allows him to work discreetly. (If you want to know what he looks like, see below right.) We have been featuring Chris’s pictures in an annual gallery since 2010. This year we have asked him what makes a good picture of a conductor, and how he goes about securing it. He explains, and has supplied us with a Read more ...
theartsdesk
A stage performance in any art form communicates through sound and motion. A photographer's task is to capture the dramatic experience in the silence and stillness of the 2D image. In the worlds of ballet and opera, none does it with more commitment to truth and drama than the great Laurie Lewis. To mark the end of the 2012-13 season, we present 25 images selected by the photographer exclusively for theartsdesk. They comprise a snapshot of the last nine months of work witnessed by audiences at the Royal Opera House, Sadler's Wells, the London Coliseum, the Barbican and beyond. There's even Read more ...
theartsdesk
The historians of punk are in full flow. Jon Savage's book England's Dreaming and the BBC Four's documentary series Punk Britannia have documented much of what needs to be said. But punk was as much a visual statement of intent as a musical one, which is why a new book of photographs by Sheila Rock is such a welcome addition to the punk library. Rock was there at the start, taking pictures for NME, Smash Hits and, most importantly, The Face, where her images did much to establish its commitment to style. Nick Logan worked with Rock on all of those publications. In his introduction to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The images in this gallery illustrate some of the links and juxtapositions made in The Springtime of the Renaissance. Classical statues which influenced Florentine artists, works reunited for the first time in centuries, sculptural forms reproduced in two-dimensional paintings (see main image) - you can find all of them below. The 20 images are arranged in 10 pairs, each of which represents a theme of the exhibition.Click on the images to enlarge, and read the full article about the exhibition here.Row 1: The Dawn of the Renaissance The first-century BC Boy with Thorn in marble (Galleria Read more ...
fisun.guner
The London Art Fair may not have the international heft or VIP glamour of Frieze, but for 25 years it’s been the place to see and buy the best of British modern art. While the main fair features 100 established galleries – including Browse and Derby, specialists in mid twentieth-century British figurative art, and Pangolin, one of the few galleries in the UK dedicated to sculpture – there are two curated sections that are worth spending time in: Art Projects provides a compelling snapshot of contemporary art now, while the Catlin Guide features a selection of the UK’s brightest graduates.Both Read more ...
theartsdesk
For the past 10 years Brian David Stevens has been taking photographic portraits of veterans on Remembrance Sunday. The images play on the notion of the unknown soldier. Each subject is portrayed without the distinguishing marks of regiment or rank or even any clue to the part of the Armed Forces in which they served. “Faces, only,” says Stevens. “Each deep-etched with who they are and what they did, that we might look, and think - and thank them.”Brian David Stevens' websiteClick on the images to enlarge.
Marina Vaizey
Take the day, and a stiff drink afterwards, as you’ll need it for this thoughtful and deeply disturbing exhibition. A picture, goes the cliché, is worth a thousand words, and nowhere more so than in this heartbreaking, beautiful and affecting anthology, which manages to speak with unparalleled directness, yet with nuanced subtlety.Here are over 400 photographs by 12 artists, spanning the world, and shown with outstanding clarity, helpful pacing and variety. It is a self initiated record of perhaps the greatest turning points of the last century as the world moved on from centuries of Read more ...