London galleries
mark.hudson
How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully qualifies for that currently fashionable status "outsider artist", there’s nothing remotely edgy about him. He’s as cuddly and quintessentially English as Thora Hird. Anyone likely to have an opinion on him will long since have formed it. Everyone else will simply be indifferent.While the Cornish primitive Alfred Wallis, with whom Lowry has obvious Read more ...
fisun.guner
Whilst acknowledging the huge impact the Frieze Art Fair has made on the cultural landscape of the capital since its inception in 2003, the frenzied annual event definitely doesn’t float every art lover’s boat. With about 170 – mainly blue-chip – galleries occupying a sprawling 20,000 square metres, the posh Regent’s Park marquee can make the experience of looking at contemporary art feel like a trip to Westfield. And unlike the designer shopping mall, if you’re planning on seeing it all in a day it’ll cost you £27 just to window shop.There are a few satellite fairs hoping to catch Read more ...
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. Photographs of the end results are breathtaking, but even more gripping is watching the development of the processes over the years.The very Read more ...
josh.spero
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 artists' studios, imaginings of authors' libraries, tiny real rooms and tiny fake rooms. As well as the craft and the beauty, they challenge our very idea of seeing, space, reality.These are grand claims for what Read more ...
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. Some would not be out of place in a contemporary sculpture show: life-size predatory creatures include David Mach’s King Silver Gorilla made out of silver wire hangers, Shauna Richardson’s life-size crocheted brown Crochetdermy Bear (pictured below), while Ji Yonf Ho’s shark made out of tyres swims in the air above us.Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the Read more ...
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. You’ve guessed it, I’ve got the builders in and while the scaffolding was up, I spent days nose to wall repointing the brickwork, restoring the pediment and painting the windows.What a relief to escape from such squalor to a gallery – only to find that Phyllida Barlow’s exhibition is much like home! Bog-standard building materials are her stock-in-trade and Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 angry. Hence the protestation: “A six-year-old could have done that.” And indeed, that may well be true. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
For her latest project, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, American photographer Taryn Simon spent four years searching out families the world over whose lives have been defined by circumstances largely beyond their control – not natural calamities like floods, fires or earthquakes, but events orchestrated by other people. The stories are extraordinary.The title refers to the Yadav family from Utah Pradesh, India (pictured below). Four family members were declared dead by relatives intent on appropriating their farm. Land is in such huge demand there that the practice Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In Düsseldorf in the 1970s there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers – and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a proud art city, and published at the time a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great messianic leader Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter (and Gotthard Graubner among others) taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography and photographed anonymous industrial architecture in black and white. Germany rejoined and even led the avant-garde that it had destroyed in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
We are still acknowledging our 21st-century debts to the energy, curiosity, determination and passion for discovery of a host of Victorian polymaths, and here is another. Sir Charles Eastlake (1793-1865) was a painter, scholar, author, collector and translator – fluent in German, French, Italian – and the first director of the National Gallery, rising above disputes with trustees and the government to set the scene for the role it plays today.A small exhibition in Room 1 shows us Sir Charles’s travel diaries and notes, his annotated guidebook to the art collections of Venice and a half-dozen Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hadie Shafdie, Iranian-born and now living in America, uses phrases and words taken from mystical Sufi poetry, incantations of sequences of the names of the divine. She handwrites and prints the devotions, usually spoken or chanted, on thousands of tiny scrolls in a broad spectrum of beguiling colours. The paper is rolled into circles of varying sizes, with the Farsi script almost entirely hidden, and tightly packed into wall-hanging glazed wooden vitrines. The resulting two pieces – 22500 Pages and 26000 Pages, both created this year - are captivating, echoing in stasis the physical Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The National Gallery has in recent years made a speciality of examining the hitherto unexamined. Just for starters, a surprise hit some years ago was Spanish Still Lifes, 2007 saw Renoir Landscapes (who knew?), last year there was the ravishing Christen Kobke, star of the Danish Golden Age, and just this spring New York’s Ashcan School, all with committed scholarship throwing light on the internationally disregarded. In a gallery full of stormy seas, Alpine passes (with the occasional mountain goat), fast-moving streams and huge skies, two more unfamiliar geographies are on view. We may Read more ...