sculpture
Mark Sheerin
It may seem like a long way from Shakespeare to Siegfried and Roy, but John Napier has had a remarkable career in which high and low art come together and share the applause. So not only has the theatre designer staged a magic show in Vegas, he’s worked a more subtle magic in his time at the RSC. And in a world where musicals run for decades, Napier’s stage sets have been among the most consistent and celebrated factors in the success of many of our best-loved West End shows.So if you’ve ever seen Cats or Starlight Express, Les Misérables or Miss Saigon – or caught Nicholas Nickleby in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.We were shown his career from work to work, interspersed with questions and answers between Gormley and Alan Yentob (pictured below, with Gormley), the presenter here diffident and attentive. Tim Marlowe, once connected with Gormley’s gallery White Cube (not referred to – the business of art did not get a look in, although we were told that Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Any number of puzzling and fantastical stories were told by Alberto Giacometti in the construction of a personal mythology that helped secure his reputation as an archetypal artist of the avant-garde. Less heroic than the oft-quoted accounts of his transformative, visionary experiences, the story of his return to Paris after the Second World War is no less poignant, nor significant for all that. Having stowed his most recent works under the floorboards, Giacometti left his studio in 1941 returning four years later to find it – miraculously – just as he had left it. Due less to some Read more ...
fisun.guner
Things you might know about Oslo: it’s expensive and the cost of a beer, wine, dinner for two – whatever your tourist yardstick – might make your hair stand on end (the cost of living is currently second only to Singapore city, according to a 2014 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit); it’s small (population: 600,000), yet it’s also the fastest growing capital in Europe, thanks to both overseas immigration and the fact that many Norwegians are now moving to the capital; its most celebrated son is, of course, Edvard Munch.Luckily, it’s art, not the beer or the exchange rate, that’s Read more ...
Florence Hallett
One of the earliest surviving sculptures by Barbara Hepworth is a toad made from a khaki-coloured, translucent stone; you can imagine it cool and heavy in your hand, not so very different from the animal itself, in fact. Made nearly 30 years later, the monumental sculptures carved from African guarea wood are almost unbearably touchable, each one with its dark, glossy exterior cracked open to reveal an inside as creamy as a conker. But while we are denied the pleasure of touching these objects, looking at Hepworth’s work is in itself a gloriously tactile experience.This almost synesthetic Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In an oft quoted moment of self-deprecation, WH Auden once described his own face as looking like “a wedding cake left out in the rain”. But the poet might have thought twice if confronted with the Porcelain confections of Rachel Kneebone. The London-based artist has brought three of her sculptures to the gallery of the University of Brighton; each one piles flora, vines and body parts onto a tomb-like plinth. They are as grand as wedding cakes, sugar white, and slick with a wet-looking glaze. Look closer and delicate flowers dissolve into less seemly clumps of undergrowth. Tendrils look Read more ...
fisun.guner
We think we know it when we see it. But how, pray, do we define beauty? The ancient Greeks thought they had the measure of it. In the 4th century BC, the “chief forms of beauty,” according to Aristotle, were “order, symmetry and clear delineation.” A century earlier, during the golden age of Athens, Polykleitos, one of the ancient world’s greatest sculptors, set out the precise ratios for the ideal male form in a treatise he called The Canon. And a century before him, Pythagoras instructed that it was numbers that revealed the hidden order of the world – a perfection revealed through an Read more ...
fisun.guner
The unveiling of the Fourth Plinth has, since his election to office, been an opportunity for Mayor Boris Johnson to work the press pen with a comic turn. So, the commission, sponsored by the mayoral office, gets a media-chummy spokesperson whose art critiques add a note of gaiety to proceedings, even if they’re self-evidently at odds with what the artist had in mind. See them as an ongoing election campaign. Hans Haacke’s Gift Horse, which was unveiled yesterday, is a larger than life-size bronze skeleton of a horse, modelled on an anatomic etching by George Stubbs, the 18th-century Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recent attitudes to Victorian Britain have changed radically. The popular view used to be of a period filled with a kind of smug imperial confidence, underwritten by the increasing wealth of the industrial age. This ingrained assumption was perhaps epitomised by Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians, which saw the eminences as bungling hypocrites. And although secret lives might have been as wild as may be, one characteristic myth was that even piano legs had to be obscured with frilly covers for decency. This simplistic summary was leavened by acknowledging geniuses from Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The septuagenarian American sculptor Richard Serra can treat the most massive sheets of steel as though they are handy pieces of paper for his version of origami; or he can decide to stack huge dense metal blocks as though they were children’s play bricks. He can playfully balance huge slabs of steel held just so by a perfectly judged tension, and he almost persuades us that one huffing breath might bring the whole thing down, particularly so in London Cross, which is just what it says it is: two huge elevated steel planks crossing each other at an oblique angle in a specially constructed Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.Pulled and gathered at points, the towering red central section of this vast new sculpture sometimes resembles Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The windows of Hepworth Wakefield command some attractive views, and for the present show looking out the window might even be a valid alternative to looking at the work. Curator Eva Badura-Triska reports that Austrian artist Franz West was a believer in the aura or the atmosphere of an art work. It hardly matters where you look. As if to prove the point there are installations which include chairs facing away from the work, or sofas angled to provide little point of focus. Sit still for as long as you want and soak up this extensive exhibition.Where is My Eight is the gallery’s largest Read more ...