abstract art
The Rules of Abstraction with Matthew Collings, BBC FourTuesday, 09 September 2014
Artist and critic Matthew Collings purported to set out the rules of abstraction through taking the viewer on a very bumpy ride through 20th century painting, with a nod to Cézanne to get us started. He set the scene by telling us that abstraction... Read more... |
Mondrian, Turner Contemporary/ Tate LiverpoolSunday, 13 July 2014
It’s 70 years since Mondrian died in New York, leaving unfinished his last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie, an ebullient title quite at odds with the buttoned-up asceticism we normally associate with this artist. The Courtauld Gallery showed a small... Read more... |
Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings, David ZwirnerFriday, 27 June 2014
Bridget Riley’s mural for St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, which was unveiled in April this year, is something I’ve seen only in photographs. And on seeing it for the first time my reaction, I’m afraid, was, “Oh no". It obviously didn’t help that... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Basel: More than MinimalismSunday, 20 April 2014
In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I... Read more... |
theartsdesk in New York: The Armory Show at 100Sunday, 22 December 2013
Walk up Central Park West, past the Dakota building and all those plush-looking podiatrists’ offices with their gold plaques, and just before you get to the Museum of Natural History you’ll find the New-York Historical Society and Museum at 77th... Read more... |
We Went to WarThursday, 28 March 2013
In his 1970 television documentary for Granada, I Was a Soldier, British filmmaker Michael Grigsby was one of the first to look into the experience of US soldiers returning home from Vietnam. “Vietnam syndrome” may have been a few years away... Read more... |
Stewart Lee presents John Cage's Indeterminacy, Cafe OTOWednesday, 26 September 2012
John Cage is funny: this much we know. The deadpan prankster at the heart of 20th-century artistic experimentalism was always about the inadvertent punchline, the chuckle that comes from unexpected disjunction, the relief that comes from reminders... Read more... |
CD: Oberman Knocks - Beatcroff SlabsWednesday, 25 July 2012
Sometimes a record tells you whether you're going to like it before you've even hit play. With electronica this goes double: track titles like "Scanlon's Leaping Gore Pull", "Pneuquonsis on Return" and "Fewton Tension Chords" are either going to... Read more... |
Caro at Chatsworth, Chatsworth HouseSunday, 08 April 2012
The first and most unusual aspect of Caro at Chatsworth is that it is there: 15 outstanding sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, placed in an irregular pattern around the formal 950ft early-18th-century Canal Pond, situated facing the southern vista... Read more... |
Mondrian || Nicholson in Parallel, The Courtauld GalleryMonday, 20 February 2012
Conversations between artists both verbal and visual are the flavour of the month: the big voice of Picasso is almost but not quite drowning out a septet of British artists over at Tate Britain. Now joining the chorus is a fascinating exploration of... Read more... |
Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 19 October 2011
There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist... Read more... |
Frank Stella: Connections, Haunch of VenisonFriday, 30 September 2011
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... Read more... |
