abstract art
The Discovery of Mondrian review - the most comprehensive survey everMonday, 05 June 2017
Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved. Returning from Holland to France after the First World War, he lived and worked in what... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Bilbao: The School of Paris at the Guggenheim MuseumSunday, 29 May 2016
Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces... Read more... |
Hilma Af Klint, Serpentine GallerySaturday, 05 March 2016
Celebrating the four ages of man, eight huge, semi-abstract paintings create a carnival atmosphere in the Serpentine’s central gallery. The freshness of Childhood is characterised by flowers, petals and stamens floating on a blue ground. The... Read more... |
The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium, Parasol UnitMonday, 14 September 2015
From its title, you could be misled into dismissing this show as narrow and self-referential: a small exhibition in a small gallery curated by a Belgian artist concerned only with his own countrymen. In fact, it is something of a survey, featuring... Read more... |
Barbara Hepworth, Tate BritainWednesday, 24 June 2015
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,... Read more... |
Philip Guston, Timothy Taylor GallerySunday, 21 June 2015
Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his... Read more... |
Sonia Delaunay, Tate ModernWednesday, 15 April 2015
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... Read more... |
YZ Kami, Gagosian GalleryTuesday, 14 April 2015
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... Read more... |
Sotto Voce, Dominique LévySaturday, 14 February 2015
Sotto Voce is a collection of white paintings, sculptures and reliefs made by European, British and North and South American artists from the 1930s to 1970s. An accompanying book explains why this non-colour has appealed to so many artists in so... Read more... |
Kraftwerk: Pop Art, BBC FourSaturday, 31 January 2015
Some documentaries can feel like trying to view a desert landscape through a telescope. The need for tight focus on too large a subject can leave you constantly aware that there’s important stuff going on out of eyeshot. The stuff you can’t see... Read more... |
Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, Whitechapel GalleryFriday, 16 January 2015
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... Read more... |
Anthony Caro: The Last Sculptures, Annely JudaMonday, 22 September 2014
Late Titian, Late Rembrandt, Late Picasso, Late Matisse…. What is it with Late that seems to give some artists a Golden Age irradiated by a kind of sublime carelessness, a genuine sense of anything goes? A life spent learning means that in the end... Read more... |
