Tate Britain
Sarah Kent
I’ve just spent four hours in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain. The shortlisted artists all show films or videos, which means that you either stay for the duration or make the decision to walk away, which feels disrespectful. For unlike paintings, drawings or photographs, which allow you to decide how long to spend in their company, the moving image tends to deprive you of agency and hold you captive.Luke Willis Thompson chose specialist macro lenses to film a sculpture by Donald Rodney who died in 1998 from sickle cell anaemia, an inherited disorder particularly affecting Africans Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship during the war combined with the traumatic human toll meant that lone helmets and ravaged trees came to stand easily for the dead, while wrecked landscapes and crumbling buildings questioned the senselessness of such utter destruction.In one photograph the cathedral crouches like an abject creature, low and painful behind a foreground strafed with Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray far from the brutal and disturbing. No such survey could be without them, and their echo is heard in almost every room: Jenny Saville mines the possibilities of the body as base flesh from a specifically female viewpoint (main picture); Cecily Brown confronts us with forbidden sexuality. But if the prominence of Bacon and Freud suggests a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eureka! A programme about a woman artist that doesn’t define her as a wife and mother first and an artist second. In fact, Rachel Whiteread’s husband and two sons were mentioned only briefly in this excellent documentary that followed her career from 1988, when she began making plaster casts of furniture, through to the monumental public sculptures that have attracted so much controversy over the years. The beginning was horribly predictably, though. First we saw footage of the Turner Prize ceremony in 1993, when Whiteread became the first woman to win the £20,000 award. Earlier that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Perhaps not household-name Impressionists, but the subtitle of Tate Britain's exhibition, French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, makes things clearer: this is really an examination of cross-channel conversations occasioned by the drastic military and political crisis in France in 1870-1871 – the Franco-Prussian war, followed by the Commune.Not only did some 230,000 or more combatants and civilians die, but many a familiar landmark was pulverised as central Paris was profoundly Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The gallery walls of Tate Britain have been taken down so turning a warren of interlinking rooms into a large, uncluttered space in which Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are arranged as a single installation. What a challenge! And curators Ann Gallagher and Linsey Young are to be congratulated for pulling off this difficult feat so seamlessly. Seeing the work altogether has a profound effect, though. It reveals the exceptional beauty of everything Whiteread has produced and emphasises the uniformity of her vision. After all, she has spent the last three decades making casts in plaster Read more ...
David Nice
"Good for the history of music, but not for music," one of Prokofiev's professors at the St Petersburg Conservatoire used to say of artistically dubious works which created a splash, according to the composer's diaries. I'm not even sure that this show is good for the history of art, though it's certainly enriching for the burgeoning discipline of queer theory, and food for thought whether or not you agree with the choices and the stance of the curator, Clare Barlow. And it's especially admirable that it's happening while the Tate is also showing major exhibitions of gay artists David Hockney Read more ...
Alison Cole
As the UK prepares for a particularly severe cold snap, the opening of David Hockney’s major retrospective at Tate Britain brings a welcome burst of Los Angeles light and colour and Yorkshire wit and warmth. The exhibition, which opens in the lead-up to Hockney’s 80th birthday, will be deservedly popular – for many people, Hockney’s work is simply bright and beautiful. But the show also seeks to reveal the serious and consistent nature of Hockney’s interrogation of the meaning of picture-making, and his preoccupation with the joyous and rather subversive business of “looking”.The curators Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and spectacular events like Lumiere London, and London’s Burning bringing light in dark times. 2016 leaves an impressive legacy of museum-building, too: Tate Modern opened its much needed extension in the summer, and the new Harley Gallery at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire provides a fittingly magnificent home for the treasures of the Portland Collection.The Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Monster Field, 1938, fallen trees appear like the fossilised remains of giant creatures from prehistory. With great horse-like heads, and branches like a tangle of tentacles and legs, Paul Nash’s series of paintings and photographs serve as documents, bearing witness to the malevolent lifeforce that, unleashed by their undignified end, has taken hold of these apparently dead trees.Like the trees of Monster Field, piles of wrecked World War Two aircraft at Cowley Dump, removed from their proper environment in the sky, take on a new and disturbing life of their own, shifting and stirring, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
While the Turner Prize shortlist can reasonably be expected to provide some sense of British art now, the extent to which British art can or should attempt to reflect a view of British life is surely a moot point. Art that is socially or politically engaged can all too easily tend towards the artless, its functionality placing it uncomfortably close to pamphleteering, with the certainties of propaganda drowning out the possibilities of art. Curious then, that the best of this year's four finalists are loosely united by an unmistakeable sense of life now, an engagement with the status quo that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The wilder shores of contemporary visual art are now ephemeral or time-based: performance, installation, general carry-on and hubbub. But once upon a time – say, the 1960s – it was the nature of objects, pared down to essentials, and often made from real materials sourced from the streets, builders’ yards and shops, that startled: the idea made manifest without old-fashioned notions of the hand-made, craft or manual skill.The making could even be outsourced, and one critic called minimalism “ABC art”, reduced almost literally to building-block art: form or colour representing nothing but Read more ...