Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again.
Undoubtedly the strangest thing in this exhibition dedicated to Rodin’s works in plaster is a rendition of Balzac’s dressing gown, visibly hollow, but filled out nevertheless by the ghostly contours of an ample male form.
The focal point of Matthew Barney’s Hayward exhibition is Redoubt, a two-and-a-quarter-hour film projected on a giant screen that invites you to immerse yourself in the rugged terrain of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, where he grew up.
David Hockney has a new toy, an app designed specially for him that allows him to work on an iPad with fine brushes. He spent the first five months of lockdown In Normandy making daily records of the coming of spring; the results are displayed in a large show at the Royal Academy (★★). Seamless animation turns his still images into a continuum.
Eileen Agar was the only woman included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which introduced London to artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. The Surrealists were exploring the creative potential of chance, chaos and the irrational which they saw as the feminine principle, yet they didn’t welcome women artists into their group.
When Turner’s Modern World opened at Tate Britain last autumn only to close again days later, we might have felt then an echo of sensations and sentiments powerfully expressed in the exhibition itself. Its subject is the dirty cacophony of newly industrial Britain, the startling modernity of which is often neglected in discussions of Turner that focus instead on the visionary aspects of his style.
They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by conical horns that emanate a gentle angelic howling or lower end drone-hums. Eyes closed – and being music-geeky about it – this carefully calibrated tonal concerto assails the ears somewhere between US mystic Laraaji’s processed gong experiments and the final ethereal works of Spacemen 3.
Sheds have flourished in lockdown: they’ve always been places to escape to and in the past year, when spruced up as home offices, even more so. They’re also emblems of isolation.
It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.
Sustainability and the environment are watchwords for the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize now in its ninth cycle. Since its launch in 2008, it has responded to the state of the world with urgency and compassion, its shortlists all the more intriguing for their oscillations between the universal and the personal, the global and the local.