Visual arts
Florence Hallett
When you stand in front of Helen Frankenthaler’s Freefall, 1993, in your mind you drop into its gorgeous, blue abyss. It is enveloping, vertiginous, endless and yet there’s none of the terror of falling into a void, only intense, velvety comfort as the bluest blue melts into emerald green.Its large scale, and gestural splashes of colour are supremely painterly, and yet this is not a painting but a print, its free flowing, spontaneous-looking marks the result of multiple, effortful iterations recorded in proof after painstaking proof (main picture: Freefall, 1993).Helen Frankenthaler was one Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s been described as “the most improbable story that has ever happened in the art market”, and The Lost Leonardo reveals every twist and turn of this extraordinary tale. In New Orleans in 2005, a badly-damaged painting (pictured below left) sold at auction for $1,175. It was listed as a copy of a Leonardo da Vinci, but the buyers – dealer Robert Simon and Alexander Parish, who searches for overlooked masterpieces – believed it might be the real thing, a painting known as Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) by the Renaissance master himself.Even Parish admits the idea was ludicrous. “ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sophie Taeuber-Arp gave her work titles like Movement of Lines, yet there’s nothing dull about her drawings and paintings. In her hands, the simplest compositions sizzle with tension and dance with implied motion. Animated Circles 1934 (main picture), consists of blue, grey and black circles on a white ground. The off-kilter design makes them appear to shuffle, nudge, float or bounce; you feel light-hearted and light-headed just looking at them.Even in wartime she could make her work sing. In Geometric and Undulating Lines 1941 spaghetti-like strings rise flame-like over sharp triangles; the Read more ...
Dora Neill
It is conventional for artists to reflect their surroundings, experiences and inspirations, whether this be in a subliminal manner or overtly. But Paula Rego is by no means conventional. She is a rebel, a nonconformist, a freethinker. Rego doesn’t simply reflect the world around her, but soaks it in like an emotional sponge, before squeezing every last feeling out onto the canvas with passion and vigour. This unparallelled exhibition at Tate Britain is not only a retrospective of the artist’s work, but of her life and times. It expresses a myriad of personal, political, social, emotional and Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
As Karla Black’s first retrospective opens to the public, the institution she has paired with, Fruitmarket, also reopens with a new £4.3 million extension. In lockdown, the Edinburgh gallery has had the builders in. And from the fragile yet powerful works in this new show, it would appear, despite peaking covid rates in the Scottish capital, that the art scene might have survived the worst.Black is avowedly a sculptor, and the first two exhibition spaces are given over to sculptural objects assembled into the type of exhibition one might have seen pre-lockdown. The works conform, loosely, to Read more ...
Simon O'Hagan
The domestic realm has moved to the forefront of our lives in recent times. It’s been doing service as our place of work and our place of entertainment. Eating in has replaced eating out. Our hopes and dreams have been largely limited to what’s attainable within our four walls.It’s probably fair to say that Ben Nicholson was a big fan of the domestic realm long before circumstances required the rest of us to re-think our relationship with it. When all the cups of tea and coffee one makes come out of one’s own kitchen and not the office canteen or a branch of Pret, we may find ourselves Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The boat ride lasts only a few minutes, but it takes you to another world. Orford Ness is an island of salt marsh and shingle banks off the Suffolk coast inhabited by birds, rabbits, hares and a few small deer.But the landscape is dotted with evidence of human activity – dangerous activity. “Prohibited Area. Photography and Sketching Forbidden” reads a notice in the Information Centre and, as you wander past the pink sea campions and delicate, yellow-horned poppies, signs reading “Danger Unexploded Ordnance” encourage you to keep to the designated pathways.Called “the island of secrets” by Read more ...
Dora Neill
Drawing is the cornerstone of artistic practice, but is often overshadowed by "higher" forms of visual art, such as painting and sculpture. When we walk into an art gallery, we find ourselves gravitating towards the large, impressive oil paintings. They are considered the "main event", the best representation of art and its history – but is this really the case? Drawing is more than just a preliminary step to painting; it can show us an artist’s thought process and ideas, depict deep emotion, expose intimate relationships and be innovative and timeless. A remarkable example of this is Read more ...
Robert Beale
Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again. Manchester Collective, true to their pioneering and resourceful nature, went one step further. They made films, in collaboration with others, whose viewing could happen in a venue as a kind of event in itself. The result is Dark Days, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Undoubtedly the strangest thing in this exhibition dedicated to Rodin’s works in plaster is a rendition of Balzac’s dressing gown, visibly hollow, but filled out nevertheless by the ghostly contours of an ample male form. Not surprisingly, the phantom dressing gown is sometimes given as evidence of Rodin’s modernist credentials – were it not 39 years too early, it would surely have qualified for the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936.The question of Rodin’s modernist intentions is the central one posed by this exceptionally beautiful show, which is also, by Tate standards, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The focal point of Matthew Barney’s Hayward exhibition is Redoubt, a two-and-a-quarter-hour film projected on a giant screen that invites you to immerse yourself in the rugged terrain of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, where he grew up. The entrance ticket allows you to watch the film at home, yet while I was there almost everyone stayed the course, which is remarkable given that there’s no dialogue.It’s winter so everything is deep in snow which makes it difficult for people, dogs and horses to get around. Only the most intrepid are out; there’s a hunter played by Anette Wachter, who is a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
David Hockney has a new toy, an app designed specially for him that allows him to work on an iPad with fine brushes. He spent the first five months of lockdown In Normandy making daily records of the coming of spring; the results are displayed in a large show at the Royal Academy (★★). Seamless animation turns his still images into a continuum. As you watch the gradual transition from bare branches to full flowering, it’s as if you were looking over the artist’s shoulder while he works, which is fascinating.Then come the inkjet prints of the iPad pictures; they have the uncanny luminosity of Read more ...