sculpture
mark.hudson
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken. It left Kiefer and his fellow New Imagers overshadowed and, in a paradox that is absolutely typical of the art Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in favour of Edinburgh’s better attractions. Built in 1889 by Robert Rowand Anderson as the world’s first dedicated portrait gallery – paid for by the proprietor of The Scotsman, John Ritchie Findlay, and inspired in part by the Doge’s Palace in Venice – the SNPG had, in fact, shared over half the building with the Scottish Society of Antiquaries.The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In his catalogue essay, Peter Osborne discusses the meaning of epithets such as “new” and “contemporary” when applied to current art, yet no one in this year’s New Contemporaries seems to be striving to make work that is “new”, “different”, “radical”, “challenging”, “avant-garde” or even “eye-catching” – to name just a few of the attributes supposed to make an artwork significant, relevant or desirable. As a result, this show of work by recent graduates is remarkably free of melodrama, posturing, narcissism, self-pity or self-importance – tedious qualities so often found in recent art. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Until recently, on YouTube, you could watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992), one of the funniest and most transgressive videos ever made. In a Swiss chalet, the children Heidi and Peter are being “educated” by their abusive grandfather, who freely indulges his propensity for bestiality, incest, onanism and scopophilia. Played out with the help of masks, inflatable dolls and numerous props, life in this dysfunctional family reveals both childhood innocence and parental responsibility to be a myth. Recently, though, even a cleaned-up version of this black comedy has been deemed too Read more ...
mark.hudson
You might think that a sharp-talking, cross-dressing potter-artist with a teddy bear obsession would present a challenge to the British public. Not a bit of it. Grayson Perry is music hall, he’s pantomime – there’s even a touch of Brideshead in the teddy bear thing. One of Britain’s most intelligent and articulate artists, Perry was barely in the public eye before he was hived off into that comfort zone the British reserve for the loveable eccentric. And his articulacy is itself a problem: the fact that most of what he says makes perfect sense means he can’t hide behind waffling Read more ...
josh.spero
Art about art is one of my favourite kinds of art. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, films - works of art which talk about what art is, what the image is, what art can represent and what it can't - all appeal. It is not just a picture of some prostitutes and some African masks - it is Les demoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso and it blows apart the boundaries of painting by cramming three dimensions into two. And then there is Frank Stella, in a new survey of his career at Haunch of Venison, the ultimate modern artist-about-art - and I'm left cold.I know that Stella is someone contemporary art Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"The sheer adventure and life of the touch is the only relevancy," wrote Barry Flanagan in his graduation thesis for St Martin’s School of Art in 1966. "I must allow my hand to touch and feel, my eyes to look and see, my tongue to lick and taste, my nose to sniff and smell, my ears to listen and hear."Clearly a sensualist, his approach to art-making was exploratory; a fascination with materials and processes led to objects whose forms were arrived at through simple actions that are clearly visible in the end product. The first sculptures in this exhibition at Tate Britain are made from sand. 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 ...
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 ...
caroline.boyle
A few days visiting the Edinburgh Art Festival and the city itself becomes the encircling gallery. Under great canvases of lowering grey cloud, plunging up and down the different levels of the Old Town and the New, things unfold against the intense hues of emerald-green spaces, the coppery contrast of the beeches, the cold hardness of the towering walls of stone and the eddying flow of the crowds. Within this frame is the opportunity to see a wide diversity of exhibitions and events in almost 50 museums, non-profit, commercial and artist-run spaces, plus specially commissioned site-specific Read more ...
fisun.guner
It begins in a so-so fashion. The ground-floor gallery at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard features a sea of Constructivist sculptures on plinths. These are made from bits of torn cardboard and loo rolls, sloppily painted. Jake and Dinos Chapman love corny art jokes, but this gag feels like it’s already a little flat. And I’m disappointed to be disappointed. Chapman exhibitions are always something to look forward to, and I was looking forward to this one, especially since they had in mind a game. And the game in this instance was that they had worked independently for the first time - in separate Read more ...