fri 20/09/2024

painters

Turner Prize 2011, Baltic, Gateshead

The 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...

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Colouring Light: Brian Clarke - An Artist Apart

My 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...

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Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate Modern

In 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...

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Frank Stella: Connections, Haunch of Venison

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...

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Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual Arts

'Francis Bacon's Studio' by Charles Matton

There 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...

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My Summer Reading: Musician Maxim

Maxim (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...

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Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum, New York

Hals's 'The Fisher Girl': 'The passage of time has placed her on equal footing with the movers, shakers and roisterers of the Dutch Republic'

If 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...

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Edinburgh Art Festival: A Festival woven together by the city itself

David Mach's 'Precious Light' responds to the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible

A 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...

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Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, London

Laura Knight's 'Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring': a famously captivating image of the Home Front'

The 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...

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Extract: Stealing Rembrandts

On 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...

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Stanley Spencer and The English Garden, Compton Verney

'Wisteria, Cookham,' 1942: 'Fecund, exuberant nature can barely be contained by anything manmade'

In 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...

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Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, Tate Liverpool

Dalí 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...

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