Visual arts
Rachel Whiteread: Internal Objects, Gagosian Gallery review - apocalyptic shedsThursday, 06 May 2021
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. Poltergeist (main picture) and Doppelganger, the works that... Read more... |
This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist, Netflix - the last word (for now)Thursday, 08 April 2021
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... Read more... |
Prix Pictet: Confinement review - a year in photographsThursday, 18 March 2021
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... Read more... |
Pioneering Women, Oxford Ceramics Gallery online review - domestic pleasuresWednesday, 03 March 2021
Pioneering is an attractive adjective in this context, alerting the spectator to what has been, over the past half century, an extraordinary body of contemporary ceramics produced by women. Underlying the notion of a gender-defined exhibition is a... Read more... |
Best of 2020: Visual ArtsTuesday, 29 December 2020
Unhappy as it is to be ending the year with museums and galleries closed, 2020 has had its triumphs, and there is plenty to look forward to in 2021. Two much anticipated exhibitions at the National Gallery were delayed and subject to closures and... Read more... |
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tate Britain review - enigmatic figures full of lifeWednesday, 16 December 2020
A person in a brown polo neck turns away, looking down (pictured below right). The encounter feels really intimate; we are almost breathing down this beautiful neck and exquisitely painted ear. Yet the subject retains their privacy; you can’t even... Read more... |
Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch, Royal Academy review - juxtapositions that confuse rather than clarifyTuesday, 15 December 2020
Even before going to art school, Tracey Emin discovered the work of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. And even though he was born 100 years before her, she embraced him as a kindred spirit. One can see why. Whether painting figures,... Read more... |
Zanele Muholi, Tate Modern review - photography as protestWednesday, 02 December 2020
Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is a powerful celebration of black identity. These dramatic assertions of selfhood are more than just striking self portraits, though. South African artist Zanele Muholi uses the pronouns they and... Read more... |
Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, Barbican Art Gallery review - mould-breaker, ground-shakerMonday, 12 October 2020
It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment... Read more... |
Sin, National Gallery review - great subject, modest showFriday, 09 October 2020
Sin, what a wonderful theme for a show – so wonderful, in fact, that it merits a major exhibition. The National Gallery’s modest gathering of 14 pictures, mainly from the collection, can’t possibly do it justice; yet it’s worth a visit if only to... Read more... |
Bruce Nauman, Tate Modern review - the human condition writ large in neonTuesday, 06 October 2020
"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths” reads the neon sign (pictured below right) welcoming you to Bruce Nauman’s Tate Modern retrospective. The message is tongue-in-cheek, of course. How on earth could an artist cope with such... Read more... |
Artemisia, National Gallery review - worth the waitMonday, 05 October 2020
It takes nerve to throw a shadow across the face of your heroine, still more to banish to the margins the severed head that might so easily dominate the painting’s centre ground. Instead, in imagining the aftermath of Judith’s beheading of... Read more... |
