Visual arts
Jasper Rees
Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.An artist called Pordenone Montanari put his house in Piedmont on sale. The name won’t mean anything. Montanari, now in his seventies, had been exhibited Read more ...
judith.flanders
Museum shows don’t often evoke a sense of smell, but without even trying, this Ballets Russes exhibition has visitors’ nostrils flared. The show is – intentionally – a feast for the eye, and even for the ear, with ballet scores (sometimes rudely overlapping) playing in every room. But smell?True, Diaghilev was said to have worn Mitsouko perfume, and sure enough, a flacon sits in one of the galleries. But more to the point, look carefully at the costumes. The first response is – how incredibly gorgeous. Heavy with embroidery, with appliqué, with silk, with satin, velvets, lace, gilt wire, even Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Flux, the second in a trio of exhibitions devoted to images of women by women, immediately grabs your attention with an in-your-face animation by Swedish artist Natalie Djurberg. Clay figures enact grotesque stories that have a nasty, fairytale edge. A naked mother plays with her five children until, one after another, the youngsters climb into her vagina and disappear. This return to the womb proves problematic, though, for as the siblings jostle for space, their limbs begin to pop out through the mother’s back, belly and thighs, eventually turning her into a monstrous composite lumbering Read more ...
sue.steward
A soundtrack of "Purple Haze", "Hey Joe" and other eternal Jimi Hendrix hits, is currently drifting out of the Snap Gallery along the swanky Piccadilly Arcade in Mayfair. A boutique exhibition space, Snap sits incongruously amongst purveyors of "fine" jewellery and gentlemans’ tailoring and its front windows are transforming the chi-chi mall with Gered Mankowitz’s photographs of the Sixties guitar genius, Hendrix.Two large portraits shimmer under acid pinks and blues like sophisticated versions of Warhol’s negative/postive prints. “Soft-sharps”, as they are known, they cause colour tones and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Regulars of theartsdesk will be familiar with the work of Jillian Edelstein. Her portraits of cultural figures have adorned several of our series, theartsdesk Q&A. There is now a chance to see pictures from her most celebrated collection at a new gallery and bookshop in south London. Edelstein was the photographer charged with recording in her native South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Held all over the country across a four-year time span, the Commission afforded victims the chance to confront their perpetrators and through their confessions seek, if not Read more ...
judith.flanders
Rachel Whiteread is best known for her exploration of space, of presence and absence, of how we look at what is present – and absent – in the textures of our lives. House, her life-sized cast of a house in a derelict street in East London, first brought her to fame, and more recently Untitled (Plinth), her mockingly affectionate take on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, a resin-cast replica of the plinth itself, literally shaped a new viewpoint of that absence in the heart of the West End. Now in two exhibitions of (mostly) drawings and some sculpture, the viewer can follow along, looking Read more ...
sue.steward
Edward Weston was once obsessed with photographing "toilets" (his word) and did it repeatedly in pursuit of the perfect image. "That gloss enamelled receptacle of extraordinary beauty" is how he described the scuzzy lav at the Gold Circle Mine in Death Valley, and seemingly near-orgasmic with excitement, said it was "an absolute, aesthetic response to form". That statement wasn’t about toilets alone, of course; this legend of American photography was, understandably, a perfectionist in every thing he photographed. But he was also, during the early years of this collection of 37 prints (1920s Read more ...
alain.debotton
Judging from the success of interior design magazines and property shows, you might think that this country was now as comfortable with good contemporary architecture as it is with non-native food or music. But scratch beneath the metropolitan, London-centric focus, and you quickly discover that Britain remains a country deeply in love with the old and terrified of the new. Country hotels compete among themselves to tell us how ancient they are; holiday cottages vaunt that they were already in existence when Jane Austen was a girl. The draughty sash window shows no signs of retiring. Read more ...
sue.steward
Multiple images of silhouetted horses cantering against blank backgrounds in grids of movement are what most people associate with Eadward Muybridge. Made in the late 1880s, they have contributed to his lasting reputation as a pioneer of photography and the moving image. So it is astonishing to discover through Tate Britain’s magnificent exhibition of his life’s work, that horses were only part of a story packed with surprises.The show’s chronological arrangement is designed to build curiosity: you enter a horse-free zone and have to wait for the horses. But you become immediately immersed Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Darren Almond’s ongoing fascination with far-flung places where extreme weather conditions prevail provides the inspiration for his current show at White Cube. The Principle of Moments consists of over 10,000 tiny photographs cataloguing the ever-changing weather of the Faroe Islands and a three-screen installation of videos titled Anthropocene: The Prelude, filmed near the Siberian town of Norilsk, the most northerly city in the world. Facts about Norilsk speak for themselves. In winter, darkness prevails for six weeks and temperatures can plummet to -58 degrees C; snow storms rage 130 Read more ...
judith.flanders
Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work of the artist who painted her. Yet they - sitter and artist - are, finally, what matters: that one day, the (probable) Lisa Gherardini, wife of a silk-merchant, sat down in front of an artist, who began to paint her. Five hundred years later, another sitter, the art critic Martin Gayford, sits down in front of an artist, Lucian Freud, who likewise Read more ...
fisun.guner
To mark Pope Benedict’s controversial visit to Britain next week, the V&A have mounted an exhibition devoted to four of the 10 tapestries Raphael designed for the Sistine Chapel – the first time they’ve ever been seen in this country. Depicting the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, these bright, vivid works were made to hang on the lower walls of the Vatican’s principal chapel, below the older Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoBut even Raphael never saw the tapestries and his full-scale designs for them together: until now, they have never occupied the same space. Commissioned by Pope Leo X in Read more ...