painting
Katherine Waters
There are two moons in Night Bathers, 2019 (pictured below) One is set in the sky, a great soupy plate with a greenish fringe creating an ugly smear of white across the night. The other is a treacherously hazy rectangle, floating like a cloud above a reclining bather — so inexplicable it could double as a cataract. The latter is, perhaps, a reflection of the former, but at a surreal remove — no reflection looks like that, no reflected light would fall there. The twinned moons, however — real and oneiric — neatly explain the power of Doig’s paintings.Fourteen are now on show across two Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In a photograph taken in 1962, Frank Bowling leans against a fireplace in his studio. His right hand rests on the mantlepiece which bears books, fixative and spirit bottles, his left rests out of sight on the small of his back. His attire is somewhat formal but decidedly casual — trousers loose enough to bend in, a striped jumper with the sleeves rolled up, workman-like, and a shirt which looks like it has several top buttons undone. From the floral wallpaper, cornice rail and mantel mouldings, it’s clear this is a London residence, yet over patterned posies, he has mapped out his theory of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The times they are a-changin’. On show at the Barbican is a retrospective of Lee Krasner’s stunning paintings and, for the first time ever, Tate Modern is hosting two major shows of women artists. At last, the achievements of great women are being acknowledged and celebrated.Russian artist Natalia Goncharova was both a trailblazer and a powerhouse of creative energy. 1913 was the year she took Moscow by storm. The first avant-garde artist to be given a retrospective at the Mikhailova Art Salon, she was determined to make a big impression. The exhibition was hugely ambitious – nearly 800 Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is a commonplace to describe Leonardo as an enigma whose genius, and perhaps even something of his character, is revealed through his works. But as his works survive only in incomplete and fragmented form, it is drawing, the practice common to all his various endeavours, that brings coherence and perhaps even a comprehensive view of a lifetime’s labours.The 200 drawings on display at the Queen’s Gallery are a selection from the Royal Collection’s peerless Leonardo holdings. They were left to his pupil Francesco Melzi on his death and have remained together ever since, having been acquired Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This brilliantly conceived and executed show is about provenance in art. It’s also about our perceptions of the truth. However, it’s a show where it would be churlish to reveal too much of what goes on. This is, of course, perverse since some will be reading to find out exactly that, but the brain-frazzling thrill of True Copy, alongside the story it tells engagingly and with humour, is delivered by the stunning twists and turns it throws in, which would be ruined if even hinted at.Berlin are the most perversely named, unGoogleable company. They’re from Belgium and major in multimedia pieces Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There are children screaming in a nearby playground. Their voices rise and fall, swell and drop. Interspersed silences fill with the sound of running, the movement and cacophony orchestrated by a boy who leads on the catch tone. It's simultaneously otherworldly and juvenile, adept and improvised – a fitting soundtrack to Anish Kapoor's latest exhibition at Lisson Gallery. While Kapoor is best known for his perception-manipulating sculptures, his painting practice spans four decades and is the explicit focus of this exhibition. Three groups of paintings occupy three rooms; the first Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Either side of a doorway, framing a view of Turner’s The Evening Star, c. 1830 (Main picture), Sean Scully’s Landline Star, 2017, and Landline Pool, 2018, frankly acknowledge their roots. Abstract as they are, Scully’s horizontal bands of colour read as landscapes – or rather seascapes – in which the meeting points of earth and sea, sea and sky provide a compositional and conceptual scaffold. This exhibition of new work by Sean Scully is the latest in a series of encounters between contemporary artists and works in the National Gallery. Irish-born Scully pays homage to paintings he Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died in 2012 aged 101 – but as so often happens, she was eclipsed by her famous husband, German Surrealist Max Ernst. They met in New York; he was scouting for artists to include in an exhibition staged by his then wife, Peggy Guggenheim. On the easel in Tanning's studio was Birthday, 1942 (pictured below right) a newly finished self portrait. The Read more ...
Florence Hallett
“Slow looking” is the phrase du jour at Tate Modern, an enjoinder flatly contradicted by the extent of this exhibition, which in the history of the gallery’s supersized shows counts as a blow-out. Unless you plan to camp overnight, much will need to be skipped through if you are to cast more than a cursory glance over the paintings, drawings and photographs included in this survey of Bonnard’s later career.It’s not just that it sets ludicrous expectations about the amount of looking to be done in one hit: somewhere in this endless assault by colour is a note linking Bonnard’s reliable market Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Reckless, unstoppable, one step ahead of everyone else, a hell of a lot of fun, utterly charming, street smart – descriptions of the artist Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) poured out from colleagues, rivals, curators, art historians and dealers, not to mention friends and family, in this persuasive film. One remarked with rueful admiration that the painter’s acute survival instincts involved a little bit of clawing here and there. Even his appreciative grandchildren saw him as a vital force, with a sly Irish sense of humour.All agreed you could not compare this working-class original with anybody Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In the autumn of 1892 Émile Bernard wrote home to his mother that, following the summer decampment to Pont-Aven of artists visiting from Paris and further afield, there remained "some artists here, two of them talented and copying each other. One mainly copies the other." Most likely he was writing about Irish painter Roderic O’Conor and the younger Swiss artist Cuno Amiet who stayed on in the Breton village long after the summer’s artistic cavalcade had left.There are indeed striking similarities and borrowings between O’Conor’s and Amiet’s canvases, but what the National Gallery of Ireland’ Read more ...
Roger Neill
The well-known portrait of New Zealand’s greatest writer, Katherine Mansfield, is exactly 100 years old on 17 June 2018 (main picture). It was painted by the American artist Anne Estelle Rice. At that time, Mansfield and Rice were both staying in Cornwall, the writer at the Headland Hotel at Looe on the south-east coast of the county, and the artist, together with her husband, theatre and art critic Raymond Drey, nearby.In December Mansfield had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, at that time incurable, and from which she died five years later, but in May, her very brief marriage to George Read more ...