tue 01/07/2025

Visual Arts reviews, news & interviews

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages of love and support

Tom Birchenough

We are bowled over! 

Abstract Erotic, Courtauld Gallery review - sculpture that is sensuous, funny and subversive

Sarah Kent

The Courtauld Gallery’s Abstract Erotic is a delight for two reasons – because an institution that has often seemed locked in the past is now embracing change and also because the sculptures on show are clever, suggestive and subversively funny.

Edward Burra, Tate Britain review - watercolour...

Sarah Kent

It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to...

Ithell Colquhoun, Tate Britain review -...

Sarah Kent

Tate Britain is currently offering two exhibitions for the price of one. Other than being on the same bill, Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun having...

Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons, Dulwich Picture...

Sarah Kent

I first came across Rachel Jones in 2021 at the Hayward Gallery’s painting show Mixing it Up: Painting Today. I was blown away by the beauty of her...

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Yoshitomo Nara, Hayward Gallery review - sickeningly cute kids

Sarah Kent

How to make millions out of kitsch

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, Whitechapel Gallery review - cool, calm and potentially lethal

Sarah Kent

The YBA who didn’t have time to become a household name

Bradford City of Culture 2025 review - new magic conjured from past glories

Mark Sheerin

City, mill and moor inspire the city's visual arts offering

Bogancloch review - every frame a work of art

Sarah Kent

Living off grid might be the meaning of happiness

Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, Tate Modern review - memories are made of this

Sarah Kent

Home sweet home preserved as exquisite replicas

Ed Atkins, Tate Britain review - hiding behind computer generated doppelgängers

Sarah Kent

Emotions too raw to explore

Echoes: Stone Circles, Community and Heritage, Stonehenge Visitor Centre review - young photographers explore ancient resonances

Mark Sheerin

The ancient monument opens its first exhibition of new photography

Hylozoic/Desires: Salt Cosmologies, Somerset House and The Hedge of Halomancy, Tate Britain review - the power of white powder

Sarah Kent

A strong message diluted by space and time

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Mickalene Thomas, All About Love, Hayward Gallery review - all that glitters

Sarah Kent

The shock of the glue: rhinestones to the ready

Interview: Polar photographer Sebastian Copeland talks about the dramatic changes in the Arctic

Rachel Halliburton

An ominous shift has come with dark patches appearing on the Greenland ice sheet

Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, Whitechapel Gallery review - absence made powerfully present

Sarah Kent

Illness as a drive to creativity

Noah Davis, Barbican review - the ordinary made strangely compelling

Sarah Kent

A voice from the margins

Best of 2024: Visual Arts

Sarah Kent

A great year for women artists

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review - an exhaustive and exhausting show

Sarah Kent

Flashing lights, beeps and buzzes are diverting, but quickly pall

ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetime

Sarah Kent

Despite anticipating disaster, this mesmerising voyage is full of hope

Vanessa Bell, MK Gallery review - diving into and out of abstraction

Sarah Kent

A variation of styles as the Bloomsbury artist breaks free from Victorian mores

Lygia Clark: The I and the You, Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation, Whitechapel Gallery review - breaking boundaries

Sarah Kent

Two artists, 50 years apart, invite audience participation

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, Tate Modern review - adolescent angst indefinitely extended

Sarah Kent

The artist who refused to grow up

Monet and London, Courtauld Gallery review - utterly sublime smog

Sarah Kent

Never has pollution looked so compellingly beautiful

Michael Craig-Martin, Royal Academy review - from clever conceptual art to digital decor

Sarah Kent

A career in art that starts high and ends low

Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers, National Gallery review - passions translated into paint

Sarah Kent

Turmoil made manifest

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent, Whitechapel Gallery review - photomontages sizzling with rage

Sarah Kent

Fifty years of political protest by a master craftsman

Dominique White: Deadweight, Whitechapel Gallery review - sculptures that seem freighted with history

Sarah Kent

Dunked in the sea to give them a patina of age, sculptures that feel timeless

Footnote: A brief history of british art

The National Gallery, the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Collection - Britain's art galleries and museums are world-renowned, not only for the finest of British visual arts but core collections of antiquities and artworks from great world civilisations.

Holbein_Ambasssadors_1533The glory of British medieval art lay first in her magnificent cathedrals and manuscripts, but kings, aristocrats, scientists and explorers became the vital forces in British art, commissioning Holbein or Gainsborough portraits, founding museums of science or photography, or building palatial country mansions where architecture, craft and art united in a luxuriously cultured way of life (pictured, Holbein's The Ambassadors, 1533 © National Gallery). A rich physician Sir Hans Sloane launched the British Museum with his collection in 1753, and private collections were the basis in the 19th century for the National Gallery, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the original Tate gallery and the Wallace Collections.

British art tendencies have long passionately divided between romantic abstraction and a deep-rooted love of narrative and reality. While 19th-century movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian Gothic architects paid homage to decorative medieval traditions, individualists such as George Stubbs, William Hogarth, John Constable, J M W Turner and William Blake were radicals in their time.

In the 20th century sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers embody the contrasts between fantasy and observation. More recently another key patron, Charles Saatchi, championed the sensational Britart conceptual art explosion, typified by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The Arts Desk reviews all the major exhibitions of art and photography as well as interviewing leading creative figures in depth about their careers and working practices. Our writers include Fisun Guner, Judith Flanders, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Sue Steward and Josh Spero.

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