painters
Turner Prize 2011, Baltic, GatesheadFriday, 21 October 2011The Turner Prize has headed to the North East. It’ll be back in London next year, thence to Derry for 2013. Tate Britain plan to host the prize biennially, with a regional public gallery presenting it in the years in-between. This must be hailed as... Read more... |
Colouring Light: Brian Clarke - An Artist ApartFriday, 14 October 2011My relationship with the artist Brian Clarke, the subject of my forthcoming film, goes back a long way: when I first filmed him for a documentary I made for BBC Two in 1993 - a film about windows as symbols and metaphors in the series The... Read more... |
Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate ModernFriday, 07 October 2011In recent years it seems we have seen an awful lot of Gerhard Richter. There have been three major exhibitions in London well within the last seven or eight years. One is hardly complaining, since there is always a demand to see “the world’s most... Read more... |
Frank Stella: Connections, Haunch of VenisonFriday, 30 September 2011Art 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... |
Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual ArtsMonday, 12 September 2011There 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... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Musician MaximThursday, 08 September 2011Maxim (b. 1967) who is known for, amongst other things, his mesmerising, somewhat unnerving stage presence (he has a penchant for cats-eye contact lenses and is not adverse to wearing a skirt) is a founder member of the electronic dance group The... Read more... |
Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum, New YorkMonday, 29 August 2011If one comes away with any certainty from the New York exhibition Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum (until 10 October) it is that the Golden Age Dutch master (1582/3-1666) keenly understood and sympathised with his fellow human beings. Whether... Read more... |
Edinburgh Art Festival: A Festival woven together by the city itselfFriday, 26 August 2011A 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... Read more... |
Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, LondonTuesday, 23 August 2011The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and... Read more... |
Extract: Stealing RembrandtsTuesday, 23 August 2011On October 10, 1994, a burglar with a sledgehammer smashed a window at the Rembrandt House Museum and stole a single painting, Man with a Beard (1647). The work had once been considered a Rembrandt, but is now attributed to an unidentified student... Read more... |
Stanley Spencer and The English Garden, Compton VerneyThursday, 18 August 2011In his later years, Stanley Spencer cut quite a figure in his native village of Cookham in Berkshire: he would often be seen pushing his rickety pram, with its battered umbrella, paints and canvas, and a hand-painted sign requesting all curious... Read more... |
Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, Tate LiverpoolThursday, 28 July 2011Dalí may have the edge on Magritte for instant recognition and popularity, but how easily the Belgian beats the Spaniard as the more interesting Surrealist. Armed with his small repertoire of images – the nude, the shrouded head, the bowler hat, the... Read more... |