Galleries
fisun.guner
Whether you think the weird world of Walter Potter is cute or creepy, there’s little doubt that the Victorian taxidermist, and creator of humorous tableaux in which fluffy creatures enact human scenarios, has acquired some standing in the art world. When his museum collection went under the hammer at Bonham’s in 2003, Damien Hirst, David Bailey, Harry Hill and Peter Blake each bid for valuable items. Now each has contributed to an exhibition that not only recreates part of Potter’s original museum, but invites us to celebrate the quirky art of the outsider artist.Baby rabbits that pore Read more ...
josh.spero
Contemporary art can, unsurprisingly, become dated pretty quickly – the clue is in the name. Another of Damien Hirst’s mirrored cabinets of pills or of Gavin Turk’s piss-takes of Andy Warhol at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park is hardly the sort of sight which will enthuse hardened art-gallery goers.But then that’s not the point of art fairs – the major ones like Frieze, Basel and Miami, anyway: they codify established trends, reinforce hierarchies. Even the layout of the galleries shows you this, with heavyweights like Gagosian and Gladstone hogging prime positions, with everyone Read more ...
sue.steward
The 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial has seen unprecedented numbers of visitors flock to the coast, and tonight will host a talk by one of the most original fine-art photographers working in Britain today. Wolfgang Tillmans will explore his unique and hugely influential approach to photography and the relationship between contemporary art and documentary and will undoubtedly cite his latest projects, the refreshing summer exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery and the recently launched, more audacious event at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.It’s easier to imagine a Tillmans show in the city’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A near contemporary of the great jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who died last August, Don Hunstein has amassed a formidable collection of images of some of the most indelible names in music, from Miles Davis and John Coltrane to Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein. His work with Bob Dylan in the Sixties, when Hunstein was a staff photographer for Columbia Records and Dylan was the visionary folk singer daring to cross the frontier into rock'n'roll, have become an indivisible part of the myth of the Bard of Minnesota.Proud Chelsea's Hunstein exhibition is aptly titled Read more ...
charlotte.macmillan
New photographs by Charlotte MacMillan of Russell Maliphant's expanded Afterlight, a mesmerising new dancework premiered at Sadler's Wells this week. The portfolio adds stills from the substantial new sections to ones she took a year ago of the opening solo created for a Diaghilev tribute programme.Russell Maliphant explains his original inspiration by Nijinsky's drawings to theartsdesk here. The dancers are Daniel Proietto, Olga Cobos and Silvina Cortés. Lighting is by Michael Hulls, conceived in combination with Es Devlin, costumes by Stevie Stewart, music by Andy Cowton and Erik Satie. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.An artist called Pordenone Montanari put his house in Piedmont on sale. The name won’t mean anything. Montanari, now in his seventies, had been exhibited Read more ...
theartsdesk
Chris Christodoulou has been honing his focus on conductors in past Proms seasons to wonderful effect, but this year has produced a galaxy of master portraits that outdoes even the immortal cartoons of Gerard Hoffnung in entertainment value. We’ve featured many of them throughout our reviews of two months of Proms. Here Chris makes his selection of favourites. Click on a picture to enter the slideshow. All pictures © Chris Christodoulou.
fisun.guner
A playful, subversive mood dominates the shortlist for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Most of the six proposals, in what is a very strong shortlist, play on notions of British identity, probing themes of heroism, heritage and conquest. The models, which include a cock (the winged variety), a cake and a kid on a rocking horse, were unveiled yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson. Two winners will be selected next spring, with the first appearing on the Plinth at the end of next year. The six are: 1. Mariele Neudecker It’s Never Too Late and You Can’t Go Back A fictional mountainscape which, when Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Life changes at such speed in cities that it seems as if all the world must move at the same pace. Photographs prove otherwise. Looking at the two portfolios of West Country photographs below, you could surely not readily believe that more than a century separates them. James Ravilious's Devonian sheepfarmers and John Wheeley Gutch's Cornish fishermen have worked natural resources for centuries - the fact that the images lie 130 years apart are purely an indication that while technique changes, human interest does not. James Ravilious The son of the renowned engraver and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Charlotte MacMillan took these exclusive pictures last week of the Bolshoi corps de ballet in class. The pictures brought back memories of his training to English National Ballet's Kirov-trained principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev, as he prepares to perform Michael Corder's Cinderella at the Coliseum next month. A regular coach for younger dancers after 17 years in the company, he has a keen eye for the training differences between his native land and his adopted country.DMITRI GRUZDYEV: "Looking at the pictures I see some familiar things from my training - the open shoulders, standing tall, and Read more ...
mark.hudson
Terry Setch can lay claim to being the most underrated artist in Britain. Not that the Cardiff-based Londoner has been entirely neglected: acclaimed as one of Britain’s most powerful painters by his contemporary John Hoyland, he’s been garlanded with awards, granted a retrospective at The Serpentine and was recently made an RA. Yet Setch (born 1936) has still had nothing like the recognition he deserves as one of Britain’s most intelligent and inventive painters. And the crime for which he’s been sentenced to this relative obscurity: simply, not being based in London, but in Wales.If the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the Read more ...