painting
Sarah Kent
In 1967 when she produced Syncopated Rhythm (main picture), Sonia Delaunay was 82; far from any decline in energy or ambition, the abstract painting shows her in a relaxed and playful mood. Known as The Black Snake for the sinuous black and white curves dominating the left hand side, this huge, two and a half metre wide canvas is deliciously varied. The arcs of rich colour so familiar in Delaunay’s work are joined by triangles, squares and rectangles articulated with vigorous cross-hatching, see-through washes and solid blocks of pigment in a gorgeous array of vibrant hues. This Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Iranian-born New York resident painter YZ Kami, now in his mid-fifties, continually plays with our hunger to look at “reality” while being seduced by abstraction and repetition. In 17 canvases, painted over the past two years, Kami explores two distinct and recognisable styles or idioms that however much in common they have with contemporary concerns he has made his own. The results are both powerful and pleasurable. He uses oil on linen when painting blurred portraits based on photographs or, presumably when the subject is named, based on a person known to the artist; acrylic on Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At 86, Jo Baer is still painting vigorously. In the mid 1960s, she was an established New York Minimalist along with artists like Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt; but while they continued to explore abstraction, she changed tack – dramatically, or so it seemed. In the mid 1970s, she turned toward figuration declaring that the “naivety” of Minimalism (its refusal to engage with events in the real world) no longer made it relevant. Yet she still thinks of herself as an abstract painter and this survey, which spans 55 years, allows us to guage what she means by the claim.In the early days, her Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
MK Gallery has a knack for showcasing mid-career artists before any other public space and this is Ellen Altfest’s first survey in the UK. There are 22 paintings here which, given their demands on her time, represent a significant proportion of the 44-year old’s output to date. Most of the pieces come from private collections, representing her commercial success with White Cube. And while the blue chip gallery showed her in the modest setting of Hoxton Square, these works couldn’t be further from the epic installations which appear to characterise the gallery’s new space in Bermondsey. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Look at me, and think of England. This marvellous array of quirky, idiosyncratic watercolours by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) from the 1930s until his premature death during wartime when his plane, on an air sea rescue mission for which he had volunteered, crashed in Iceland. It is full of memorable and haunting pictures. Drawing on a profound understanding of the history of the English watercolour and its concentration both on domesticity and majesty, Ravilious utilised the conventional response – in part the English distrust of grandeur and ambition – to produce a subtle assault on such Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Opening It’s All About Piano!, a short but packed festival shared between Kings Place and the Institut français in Kensington, Mikhail Rudy made a rare appearance in the UK. The premise was unusual if hardly revolutionary, a meeting of music and film in which it was not obvious which was the accompanying medium. Was Rudy the silent-film pianist, or were the movies illustrative of latent narratives in Janáček and Musorgsky? Neither. And therein lay the recital’s success.It was back in 2012 that the Cité de la Musique in Paris commissioned from the Quay Brothers a film adaptation of Kafka’ Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The grand but domestic setting of Hertford House, home of the Wallace Collection, makes a fitting backdrop to an exhibition of paintings by Joshua Reynolds. The Marquesses of Hertford acquired some 25 paintings by Reynolds in the artist's lifetime, and after it, and the 12 that remain in the collection form the focus of this exhibition. Not only does the Wallace Collection give an impression of the way that paintings were collected and viewed in the 18th century and beyond, but in its wealth of Old Master and 18th-century French paintings, for example, it shares characteristics with Reynolds' Read more ...
fisun.guner
Made an Honorary Royal Academician just a few months before he died, in 1993, it’s taken till now for a posthumous Royal Academy survey to finally bring one of the absolute greats of American postwar painting to a UK audience. Of course, for those with long memories, there was the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of 1991, but though it provided the impetus for the belated honour, it seemed to do little to bring the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn into the public realm.Diebenkorn, who spent most of his life in California, finally settling in Santa Monica in the mid-Sixties where he began his Read more ...
fisun.guner
So, Picasso’s last words turned out not to be, “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore” – yes, those famous last words that inspired a Paul McCartney dirge – but were, according to this TV biography looking at Picasso’s women and how each significant relationship informed the direction of his work, “Get me some pencils”. A more prosaic request, certainly, but he died in bed, aged 93, his pencils delivered and drawing to the last. It was a good and fitting end.It was, however, an unpromising beginning, for when Picasso entered this world it was feared he was still born Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"My fatherland is South Africa, my mother tongue is Afrikaans, my surname is French, I don’t speak French. My mother always wanted me to go to Paris. She thought art was French because of Picasso. I thought art was American because of Artforum... I live in Amsterdam and have a Dutch passport. Sometimes I think I’m not a real artist because I’m too half-hearted and I never quite know where I am." (Marlene Dumas)Marlene Dumas is an artist alright; one of the best. If her paintings weren’t so exceptionally beautiful, this mid-career retrospective would feel overwhelmingly melancholic. This is Read more ...
fisun.guner
From an apparently simple idea stems a very confusing exhibition. Here’s the idea: taking the seminal black square painted by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich as its starting point – in fact, a rectangle, with the small and undated Black Quadrilateral the first of three Malevich paintings – we are invited, over the span of a century and across a number of continents, to explore the evolution of geometric abstraction and its relation to “ideas of utopia”. So far so good. Or maybe not. Perhaps the time frame hints at the problem: the way it jumps, without pause, from those modernist isms Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The ebullient presenter, writer and director Waldemar Januszczak opens his enthusiastic and proselytising hour-long film on Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) by reading out a series of disparaging quotes from other artists. William Blake thought Rubens’s shadows looked like excrement, that Rubens was a fool and his paintings were slobberings. Picasso thought Rubens was gifted but unusually nasty, whilst Thomas Eakins also thought him the nastiest painter, and Byron referred to his infernal glare of colours. Januszczak can even be pretty disparaging himself, discussing Read more ...