Visual arts
Sarah Kent
The night after visiting Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders I dreamt that a swarm of wasps had taken refuge inside my skull and I feared it would hurt when they nibbled their way out again.If I painted a self-portrait with wasps escaping from my eyes, nose, ears and mouth it would be a striking image; but would it make me a Surrealist? According to this exhibition, the answer would be a resounding “yes”, since its goal is to chart how Surrealism spread across the globe and how, since the 1920s in Paris, this radical way of thinking has taken root in the collective unconscious ( Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Barbican’s Postwar Modern covers the period after World War Two when artists were struggling to respond to the horrors that had engulfed Europe and find ways of recovering from the collective trauma.Perhaps inevitably, a considerable amount of sturm und drang was produced by artists such as Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and Francis de Souza. Melodrama may have seemed appropriate as an expression of the despair and fatigue they experienced, but the work has weathered badly and now feels decidedly overblown.You could say that, as people emerging from a global pandemic, the last thing we need Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition opens with Cell IX, 1999 (pictured below) one of the wire cages that Louise Bourgeois filled with memories of her dysfunctional family. This one contains a block of marble carved into hands. A tender portrayal of the mother-daughter bond, it is under scrutiny via three circular mirrors.The sculpture embodies Bourgeois’s dilemma as an artist. While paying tribute to her main source of inspiration – her childhood – it also proclaims her need to protect her memories from prying eyes. Once, when Alan Yentob probed her with questions for a television programme Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Louise Bourgeois didn’t throw anything away and, during the last 20 years of her life, she used her own and her mother’s old clothes to create theatrical tableaux which revisit painful childhood memories. “These garments have a history,” she explained. “They have touched my body and they hold memories of people and places. They are chapters from the story of my life.”Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001 (pictured below, right) is like a scene from an Ibsen play with dresses standing in for people. Three female characters are trapped inside a wire cage, caught in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
America in Crisis revisits an exhibition staged in 1969 soon after Richard Nixon was elected President. Pictures taken by 18 Magnum photographers including Elliott Erwitt and Mary Ellen Mark cast a critical eye over American society and capture many of the key events that preceded Nixon’s election.The addition of photographs taken in 2020 and 2021 bring the exhibition up to date and invite comparison between the Trump and Nixon eras. The juxtaposition is pretty devastating, since it reveals the degree to which many of the problems revealed by the first exhibition have got worse over the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Francis Bacon Man and Beast fills most of the main galleries at the Royal Academy. Thankfully, five of the rooms are empty. The exhibition is such a dispiriting experience, I’d have been hollering like a howler monkey if there’d been any more. And as it was, I came out feeling emotionally numb.It’s not what Bacon intended. He hoped his paintings would “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently.” Maybe you need a penchant for violence to respond as he hoped since, for him, living life violently was the norm. When his military father discovered his Read more ...
Jack Barron
It might be said that Paula Rego’s subject is light: but rather than painting it, she gives it. She paints deep into social corners, affording generous and often unnerving representation to worlds forgotten or forced out of sight. This isn’t always a comfortable experience, and her figures are frequently refracted or distorted, bent out of shape in a desperate need to be seen. They are, in many ways, acts of resistance. Take, for instance, her suite Dog Woman, 1994, which depicts a series of women bestially poised: crouched and self-grooming, cornered, supine and submissively wide-eyed Read more ...
theartsdesk
Despite its much delayed start, 2021 was a great year for the visual arts, and institutions and artists alike showed their resilience in agile and sensitive responses to unprecedented conditions. The plastic arts took on a new significance as people adjusted to life without human touch; equally, the experience of viewing art online revealed the extent to which tactile qualities are experienced through looking. Here are some of our thoughts on the best of the year just gone.*Seeing paint on canvas, walking around a sculpture and looking at the textures of plaster, stone, metal and wood was as Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The exhibitions of the German artist Anselm Kiefer have always been spectacular: large works with a numinous presence, often breath-taking and always mysterious. His new installation in Paris’s Grand Palais Ephémère, the temporary structure at the end of the Champ de Mars which stretches south from the Eiffel Tower, is perhaps the most ambitious work he has ever presented in a museum space.As in the Grand Palais, which is undergoing a major restoration, this is a cavernous space, one that invites artworks of gigantic scale. “Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan” belongs to the tradition established Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American artist Kehinde Wiley may be best known for his photo-realist portrait of Barack Obama, but painting powerful black men is not the norm. More often he elevates people met on the street in Brooklyn, Dalston or Dakar to positions of pseudo authority by inserting them into pastiches of history paintings honouring the rich and powerful.A black guy replaces Napoleon, for instance, in Wiley’s take on Jean-Auguste Ingres’ 1806 portrait of the Emperor seated on his throne. Wiley’s model sits on Napoleon’s gorgeous ermine cape, but the red velvet robes and laurel wreath have been replaced by Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The Courtauld Gallery’s dark corners have gone, and with them a certain apt melancholy, that effortlessly summoned the ghosts of Gauguin’s Nevermore, 1897, – the abused and exploited girls of Tahiti; and Delius, who had this painting in his house at Grez-sur-Loing. In the gallery’s murky half-light, the alcohol-softened face of Toulouse-Lautrec’s In a Private Dining Room at the Rat Mort, c.1899, became still more poignant, and Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom, 1889, seemed still more luminous.Nostalgia is all well and good, but now that the Courtauld’s impressionist and post- Read more ...