Visual arts
josh.spero
When people talk incessantly of freedom of speech, it means they are proud to have it or desperate to have it or desperate to defend it, or a mixture of all three. In Hong Kong, where I went at the end of May for the fourth edition of ART HK, people in the art world are constantly mentioning how free their speech is or else using a symbol to prove it - Ai Weiwei, the artist now imprisoned by China for "economic crimes" (ie subversive art). By speaking of Ai and displaying his work, one might almost get the impression China was not just to the north and three decades away from total Read more ...
judith.flanders
Fred Sandback is one of the great overlooked of the Minimalist movement that developed in the 1960s. Both those words are important – “great” and “overlooked”: his work is genuinely great, and part of its greatness is the way it has overlooking built into it.At its most basic, Sandback created geometrical shapes out of string (pictured below right: photo, Fred Sandback Archive). Using mostly an acrylic yarn, slightly fuzzy, and coloured as appropriate, Sandback “built” sculpture with volume but without mass, sculpture that, unlike traditional works, had no interior. Instead, the yarn builds Read more ...
howard.male
The world of artist and entomologist Tessa Farmer really is a world, wholly self-contained and free of human kind – unless you see her tiny warring fairies as symbolic of mankind’s conscience-free decimation of our planet’s environment and co-inhabitants. And it’s hard not to when you see them relentlessly picking over the corpse of a bird, mugging a mouse, or scrapping with a hornet, their tiny skeletal forms so industriously yet somehow amusingly destructive.Working more as a mischievous Dr Frankenstein or Surrealist taxidermist than as a sculptor, Farmer (pictured right) assembles her Read more ...
fisun.guner
By anyone’s standards this is an obscure year for the Turner Prize shortlist: you should consider yourself a contemporary art aficionado if you’ve heard of even one of the artists. And if this is indeed the case, that artist is likely to be George Shaw; in recent years his work has featured regularly in group displays at Tate Britain. Shaw, a Coventry-born painter, was nominated for his Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art show, The Sly and Unseen Day. A pared-down version of this exhibition has now travelled to London, where it is beautifully and very simply hung in just one gallery space, at Read more ...
josh.spero
Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls. But don't let that dissuade you from seeing one of the shows of the year.Schiele instantly summons up consumptive young women, déshabillées, angular, all the colours of livid bruises. His pencil marks are as sharp as the malnourished women's ribs. This show, however, shows why he was able to turn tawdry subject material into transporting art.
The Read more ...
fisun.guner
One of the highlights of this year’s Brighton Festival, curated largely via web chats and long-distance phone conversations by Aung San Suu Kyi, is Kutlug Ataman’s silent film installation Mesopotamian Dramaturgies. The leading Turkish artist, a favourite of international biennales and arts festivals, has taken over the town’s Old Municipal Market to show two multiple-screen works. And in this vast, disused space, as gloomily dark and dank as it is cavernous, we find the perfect backdrop against which Ataman’s films shine.Ataman responds to this year’s festival theme, freedom, with a deluge Read more ...
Mark Kidel
All aboard! 4000 visitors a day are queuing up for a voyage in the belly of a whale. Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan, a commission for the Monumenta series at the Paris Grand Palais, is a runaway success, one of those Zeitgeist-attuned mega-installations that double up as fairground attraction and religious experience.The crowd walks straight into the giant inflatable from the entrance, each person admitted to the inner sanctum, one by one, through an air-locked revolving door. The rosy light and foggy atmosphere have an otherworldly quality. The punters are awestruck. Even the camera-phone addicts Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A town in desperate need of regeneration commissions David Chipperfield, the architect of the moment, to build an art gallery in the hope of attracting visitors with deep pockets. In case you are suffering an attack of déja vu, this is not an action replay of the opening of Turner Contemporary in Margate a month ago, but Wakefield’s turn to use the same tactics. The two scenarios appear similar yet the distinctions are significant enough to make the difference between failure (in the case of Margate’s half-baked efforts) and success, which is guaranteed by the intelligent planning of Read more ...
judith.flanders
Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at full strength less than 20 years ago could have a past that is so strongly entwined with these legendary names – hard to imagine, that is, until one looks at the work displayed in this fine retrospective, which even so manages to encompass only five decades of a nearly seven-decade-long career.A Swiss artist (he was one of the few, or perhaps Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit. “Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,” recalled George Borrow, author of the prolix Victorian classic Wild Wales, “none made a greater impression upon me.” He was not alone. Arenig Fawr, a southern outcrop of Snowdonia, was also the entry point for British art into Post-Impressionism. This at any rate was the claim of a scenic documentary which joined Augustus John and his young protégé James Dickson Innes on their productive two-year sojourn at the foot of the mountain.It’s a mountain in the Welsh sense of the word mynydd, being at 854 m/2 Read more ...