Visual arts
Sarah Kent
This must be the first time a black artist has been honoured with a retrospective that fills the main galleries of the Royal Academy. Celebrating Kerry James Marshall’s 70th birthday, The Histories occupies these grand rooms with such joyous ease and aplomb that it makes one forget how rare it is for blackness to be given centre stage.“I’m trying to establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally black and beautiful,” explains Marshall. “What I’m trying to do in my work is establish presence with a capital P.” And boy does he succeed! Gallery after gallery is filled with pictures that Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
A rare cloud form envelopes the headland and to the east and the west Folkestone is cut off from the known world. This mist shortens the visual range, drawing attention to the chalky soil, the sea gorse and the looping swifts. It also softly frames 18 site specific works of contemporary art that work in sympathy with this historic settlement. Folkestone is, as the Triennial shows, rich in local inspiration. One emblematic work is Oceans Tree of Life (all works 2025) by Jennifer Tee, installed above a coastal landslide known as the Warren (main picture). It is adjacent to a dig site where Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, after a long illness. He was one of the most original British artists of our time – wide-ranging, ground-breaking and influential. His painting was first-class, but it was in the field of architectural stained glass, which he approached as a fine artist, and in a radically innovative manner, that he truly made a name for himself. I first met Brian, when I was making a series for BBC Two, “The Architecture of the Imagination” (1994). It was bravely commissioned by Clare Paterson and Alan Yentob, at a time when such off-piste arts explorations were Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took until the last room of her exhibition for me to gain any real understanding of the work of Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Given that Tate Modern’s retrospective of this highly acclaimed painter comprises some 80 paintings and batiks, the process had been slow! To relate to her imagery, it was as though I had first to slough off all expectations about art, and even my world view. Gazing at Winter Awely I 1995, (pictured right) the very last painting in the show, I was suddenly transported back to the Northern Territories, north east of Alice Springs, where Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When he was a callow youth of 18, German artist Anselm Keifer got a travel grant to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. Some sixty years later, work by the two artists has been brought together at the Royal Academy in a show that highlights Van Gogh’s influence on his acolyte and invites you to compare and contrast.In the intervening years, Keifer has gained a huge international reputation with gargantuan paintings, sculptures and installations. His obsession with Van Gogh led him, in 1992, to move to the south of France where he transformed a former silk factory and the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When in the 1990s, Jenny Saville’s peers shunned painting in favour of alternative media such as photography, video and installations, the artist stuck to her guns and, unapologetically, worked on canvases as large as seven feet tall. While still a student at Glasgow School of Art, she painted Propped, 1992, one of the most challenging and memorable female nudes in the history of art (pictured below right). This enormous painting confronts you on entry to her retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, and it is still a knock out. Perching awkwardly on a tiny pedestal is a Read more ...
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.For the first time since 1966, the exhibition brings together Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams and Eva Hesse – the three women included by New York critic Lucy Lippard in a show of artists using offbeat materials like plaster, latex, rubber and papier maché. Reacting against the clean lines and sharp edges of the Minimalism currently in fashion, they were Read more ...
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 achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...
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 nothing in common other than being born a year apart and being oddballs – in very different ways. And since both reward focused attention, this makes for a rather exhausting outing – I’m reviewing them separately – so gird your loins.I’ve always been intrigued by Scylla (méditerranée) 1938 (pictured below right) a painting by Ithell Colquhoun that Tate Modern has shown with Surrealists such as Salvador Dali. It’s a double image that, like a “ Read more ...
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 huge oil pastels; rivulets of bright colour shimmied round one another in what seemed like a joyous celebration of pure abstraction.Yet hidden within this glorious maelstrom of marks were brick-like shapes representing teeth; Jones is fascinated by mouths and the dentures that, literally and metaphorically, guard these entry points to our interior being.The 34-year-old is the first living artist to show in the main exhibition space at the Dulwich Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s been a long time since an exhibition made me feel physically sick. The Hayward Gallery is currently hosting a retrospective of the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara and the combination of turquoise walls and oversized paintings of cute kids turned my stomach over. Kitsch has that kind of power.It can also command high prices on the international market and Nara’s pictures sell for vast sums. In 2019 Knife Behind Back, a slick rendition of a grumpy girl in a red dress, sold at auction for £20 million. Since then, his prices have shrunk to a mere £9 million – still not bad for a product that Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his Whitechapel retrospective feel like a rediscovery – incredibly fresh and immediate.Stepping into the main gallery, you are infused with a supreme sense of calm. Hanging from the ceiling is a Newton’s cradle – 18 glass orbs suspended a few inches apart on fine wires (main picture). Glowing golden yellow, these fragile vessels are serenely beautiful. Read more ...