Visual arts
Jasper Rees
Last weekend something happened that, to me at least, would once have been unimaginable: I slipped into a museum in Florence just after 10 o’clock on a Saturday night. Familiar paintings from the city’s great store lined the walls. Normally they’d have been tucked up for the night by five in the afternoon, and not seen again till Tuesday morning. But no, in a city where the word “chiuso” is as ubiquitous as postcards of David’s genitalia, the doors to Bronzino: Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici were scheduled to shut at the same time as a British pub.OK, so the circumstances were Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"There's a similarity between being a soldier and a photographer. They are both looking intensely for the moment." Bran Symondson would know. He served with the British Army in Afghanistan before returning to document the world of the Afghan National Police. A less sensitive photographer might have alighted on the parallel between the action of a rifle barrel and a camera lens. But Symondson's pictures visit a perilous environment where, like that tiny butterfly in All Quiet on the Western Front, a fragile beauty survives and even prospers.These images bring back a different story from the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Who could not love Martin Creed? The tweed-encased harumphers of the world adore him, because they can say, “That’s not art,” and, “My cat could do that,” and have an all-round wonderful time. Conceptualists have it easy: what could be more fun than his Turner Prize-winning Work No 227, a light going on and off in a room? And lovers of abstract art love him because his work is just there. “Take it or leave it,” it seems to say. And they love him because, well, because his work is lovable.
Creed’s new show is in two of Hauser & Wirth’s new galleries on Savile Row – you have to go Read more ...
fisun.guner
Austere, elegant, impressive. Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph is a thing of beauty, a monument that embodies permanence in the face of all that is impermanent, and solidity in the face of all that is ephemeral. It’s an inspired decision to bring it indoors, for inside a hushed gallery, away from the rush of traffic and stripped of its flags and sculpted wreathes, Lutyens’s memorial can at last be properly admired as a work of art.Of course, it’s only a replica, three-quarters the size of the original. But it seems less of a reproduction, more of a ghostly doppelgänger, its sheeny Read more ...
josh.spero
The first thing to make clear is that Robert Mapplethorpe, notorious for his photograph of himself with a bullwhip up his arse, is not really a photographer: he is a sculptor who works in the medium of photography. What else can explain the marble and ebony of his chiselled subjects, or the fact that most of the works selected for this show as responses to Mapplethorpe are sculptures?The Derrick Cross series is a perfect example. A nude, athletic black model looks like he has been hacked out of marble and then smoothed to a sheen by a loving creator, and the simple, still setting Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Mahler, Mahler and anyone who even remotely knew Mahler. There is, of course, more to the South Bank's 2011 season listings than this but the great symphonic agoniser (and his many chums) forms the bedrock of the classical programming as we all go wild for the centenary of his death this year. In contemporary music big names such as Rumer, Elaine Paige and Brian Wilson will pack them in, while newcomers like Josh T Pearson and Melissa Laveaux have first Southbank exposure. The London International Mime Festival in January leads off dance and performance, which has a child-friendly look this Read more ...
judith.flanders
The show opens with his iconic 1991 piece, My Hands are My Heart, a double photograph of Orozco’s naked torso. In the first photograph his hands clutch a hidden object at chest-height; in the second the hands splay open to present to the viewer a piece of clay, now impressed with his fingermarks in the shape of a heart. In two simple images, Orozco encapsulates the artist’s act of creation, and then of offering the creation to the viewer. It is simple, and touching in its simplicity.Much of his work relies on this type of essentialism: he uses found materials, recycled objects, to make Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Joseph Mallord William Turner - Billy to his intimates, such as he had - is the notional centre of The Painter, a snapshot of the great British landscape artist as a young iceberg. Toby Jones is the main draw in this world premiere of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's new play, and he emanates quiet charisma and sardonic wit. But it's the women in his life who get the better scenes and who steal the show.Success came early to Turner. In 1799, when the play begins, he was still in his mid-twenties but had been exhibiting watercolours at the Royal Academy for nearly a decade – possibly buying his paints Read more ...
fisun.guner
Radio interviewer: “Are you Royalists?” George: “Of course! We’re not weird.” Gilbert & George may have been accused in the past of being coprophiliac pederast fascists (owing to their love of turds, anuses, young men with cropped hair and bovver boots and the Union Jack), but this art duo can certainly make you smile. In fact, Gilbert & George can often be quite irrepressibly funny – definitely "ha ha" as well as peculiar. And since they and their art seem as one, one senses they’d make excellent after dinner speakers.Why not? As fresh art-school graduates, they thoroughly convinced Read more ...
judith.flanders
One of the best things about a Cindy Sherman show is you never know what you’re going to get. And in this exhibition, of a new series of "Untitled" images, what you get is very surprising indeed. Sherman's photographs are not about her, but they are always her. Sherman has always used herself – or "herself", a manipulated, redacted representation – as the canvas on which she works. This time, however, the canvas itself has changed.For the first time, instead of framed photographs, Sherman has produced gigantic photographic murals, murals that take up two rooms of the 18th-century house Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rudy and Margot do intensely serious barre in an Italian garden, Lynn Seymour enjoys a "Loyal Ballet" poster on a 1962 Japanese tour, in Glasgow two ballet girls snatch some rest in uncomfortable chairs. The real world of ballet, as shot by the insider who became a world photographer, Colin Jones. Read the interview with him, describing the friendships and tragic dramas behind the exhibition of 50 years of his ballet pictures at Proud Chelsea Gallery - events as turbulent as anything onstage.
All photographs © Colin Jones/Arenapal.com. Click on an image to enter full view and slideshow.
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fisun.guner
A well-groomed, middle-aged woman walks into view and lights a cigarette. She stands, she smokes, the camera gives us a steady close-up of her face. As she appears to reminisce, her face subtly registers a range of emotions. Is she agitated, sad, irritated? She takes long drags of her cigarette. The film ends and she walks out of view. A second film begins. Same woman, same duration. A cigarette is smoked, the camera lingers on her face. She’s lost in recollection, but wait, there are subtle changes. A different backdrop.This time the sunglasses, which had been perched on her Read more ...