Visual arts
Sarah Kent
The fountains have been switched on at Somerset House, and I watched a group of tourists giggling as they picked their way through the water jets. They obviously hadn’t noticed the cheerful sound of running water coming from the edge of the courtyard, which encourages you to descend some narrow stairs down to the light wells that illuminate the lower floors of Somerset House.Loud gurgling and trickling noises conjure vivid images of babbling brooks and mountain streams tumbling headlong over glistening boulders – of water in its natural state, in other words, which is a far cry from the Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Next week sees the opening of an exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art of new work by Maggi Hambling, one of the most innovative and prolific - not to mention flamboyant - artists working in Britain today, which neatly coincides with a show of sea paintings at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. You can see a selection in theartsdesk's gallery. Born in 1945, she has a reputation for being fierce and she’s certainly imposing – had she opted for a career in the performing arts she’d have given Edith Evan’s Lady Bracknell a run for her money – but she’s also extremely good company. And she’s a grafter, Read more ...
hilary.whitney
To accompany theartsdesk Q&A with artist Maggi Hambling by Hilary Whitney, this is a selection of pieces from two new exhibitions of her latest work opening in London and Cambridge. Maggi Hambling: New Sea Sculptures at Marlborough Fine Art coincides with The Wave, an exhibition of Hambling’s wave paintings at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. These paintings, sculptures, etchings and reliefs (a new departure for Hambling) energetically capture the restless motion of the sea and demonstrate Hambling’s increasingly bold way of working.
Click on the images to view them in a slideshow. Read more ...
josh.spero
One can hardly imagine the spiky dervish Grace Jones sitting still for a second, let alone remaining motionless long enough to have photographs (and plenty of them) taken for her portrait. Nevertheless, Chris Levine has managed to pin her down - in a manner of speaking. Levine's exhibition at the Vinyl Factory - Stillness at the Speed of Light - captures the performance artist's restless activity in a very clever way: several of his portraits are in fact lenticular 3D portraits - holograms. Having shot many images of Grace's face in motion, Levine layers them and illuminates them with acid Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last year, visitors to Tate Modern’s Artists’ Rooms could see a room dedicated to Jannis Kounellis. It was filled with some of his most resonant work: a door filled up with drystone walling; burlap sacks of grain, rice, pulses; metal bells. For a founder-member of the Arte Povera movement, it was surprisingly bucolic.Now, in the bowels of the University of Westminster, past a car park and in what was probably once a series of machine rooms, the other side of Kounellis is on view. As always, he is working with everyday materials, but these are now industrialised – coal, metal, steel, and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Judith Clark is a fashion curator, Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and writer. In collaboration with Artangel, that font of innovative artistic commissions (including Rachel Whiteread’s House, Michael Landy’s Break Down), they have produced what is perhaps best described as an intervention, rather than an art installation, in Blythe House, the Hammersmith outpost of the V&A.This fortress-like Victorian monolith was once the Post Office Savings Bank’s administrative offices: intangible "savings" were processed here. Now it holds more tangible assets: the reserve collections of the V&A Read more ...
fisun.guner
This superb exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings, featuring 100 works and chosen from the outstanding graphic collections of the Uffizi and the British Museum, explores the evolution of the preparatory sketch in the 15th century. We learn how artists began to experiment with the medium in order to create finished paintings that were far more compositionally and stylistically ambitious, far more dramatic and full of movement, than anything that had come before. And though the drawings themselves were never meant to be seen outside the artist’s studio, we learn that by the early part of Read more ...
josh.spero
Thanks to the wonders of council applications, theartsdesk can bring you an exclusive preview of Marc Quinn's new sculptures to be placed outside the White Cube gallery on the grass of Hoxton Square.Quinn will be putting two colossal orchids (over two metres squared each), cast in bronze and painted white, in Hoxton Square as part of his new show Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela and Thomas (7 May-26 June).
According to the application, submitted to Hackney Council, The Archaeology of Desire is "based upon a naturalistic Phalaenopsis, a genus of the orchid family, which has Read more ...
fisun.guner
During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial International Festival of Visual Art. It’s a scheme that pays homage to the original Witte Fietsenplan (White Bike Plan) by radical Sixties Dutch movement Provos. Set up as a statement against consumerism, pollution and congestion, the action was predictably short-lived: most of the bikes were either stolen or trashed.But Glasgow is an optimistic Read more ...
fisun.guner
Born in 1954, Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst, literary critic and author. For 17 years he worked as a child psychotherapist in the NHS before moving into private practice to work with adults. As well as being a self-confessed "sceptical" psychoanalyst, he is also known as something of "the literati's analyst of choice". His many, often playfully titled books have included The Art of Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (1993); On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life (1995); and On Kindness (with Barbara Taylor, 2009). Read more ...
fisun.guner
Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.If you tuned in last night, you Read more ...
fisun.guner
Anthony Caro makes works with the human figure in mind. The venerated sculptor, who, at 86, remains seemingly unstoppable, came to prominence in the early Sixties with his brightly coloured abstract steel sculptures. These, such as his seminal 1962 work, Early One Morning – an open-form sculpture of welded steel plates and delicately balancing rods painted in bright red – chimed with an era of optimism and confidence. Any figurative references were entirely incidental.A different Caro emerged in the Eighties when he produced monumental works of solid mass and volume. Rich with references to Read more ...