Visual arts
fisun.guner
Walk into the gaping mouth of the metal container featured in Miroslaw Balka’s installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you are plunged into a disorientating darkness. Unnerved, you shuffle forward, passing and perhaps finding comfort in the ghostly presence of other limbs, other bodies which are also shuffling uncertainly, all awareness of spatial relationships denied in the enveloping blackness.Balka, a Polish artist born 13 years after the end of the Second World War, has become known as a Holocaust artist. He mines personal memories of growing up in post-war Warsaw, and mixes these Read more ...
Jasper Rees
After the opening earlier this autumn of the reconfigured Ceramic Galleries, the Victoria & Albert Museum's renovation continues. Here is a selection of exhibits on permanent display in the newly reopened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries - Fisun Güner reviews the display elsewhere in theartsdesk.
The Robinson Casket, from Kotte, Ceylon, c. 1557
The Burghley Nef salt cellar, Paris, 1527-8
Andrea Riccio: Shouting Horseman, Padua, c 1510-15
Giovanni Antonio Baffo: Harpsichord, Venice, 1574
Giovanni Pisano: Figure of the Crucified Christ, Italy, 1285-1300
Salamander Pendant, Europe, late Read more ...
fisun.guner
Perhaps we think we’ve got the whole thing more or less sewn up in the nurture versus nature debate. DNA profiling, gene studies, twin studies, inherited traits - this is the stuff we read about almost daily and it is all meant to tell us who we are. At any rate we seem to live in a culture obsessed with genealogy, which is perhaps as much to do with living as atomised units as it to do with the latest research about genes, or what used to be called heredity.Or perhaps the fixation that has more to do with the television series which gets expert genealogists to look into the family tree of Read more ...
josh.spero
If Andrew Graham-Dixon's arts career ever goes belly-up, there is surely a microphone with his name on it at Radio 4, so warm and confident and trustworthy is his voice. Judging, however, by his new three-part programme on BBC Four, The Art of Russia, there is no chance of this happening soon.The first episode is entitled "Out of the Forest", describing how the Russian people under Ivan the Terrible emerged from their wooded subjugation by the Mongols, but the story Graham-Dixon starts with - how they got there in the first place and how they survived - is at least as interesting.It was - as Read more ...
fisun.guner
From the façades of whole buildings to rosary beads intricately carved in ivory to depict the minuscule forms of ghouls and corpses, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries tell the extraordinary story of 1,300 years of European art, design and architecture.Covering the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the conclusion of the High Renaissance in 1600, the galleries offer a compelling journey. It begins, in fact, where the story ends, with a themed display called the Renaissance City. Here you’ll find 16th-century Italian street lamps, walls studded Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Richard Wright's work celebrates impermanence but his election last night as the 2009 Turner Prize winner - an award which brings with it a purse of £25,000 - has guaranteed it a sort of immortality. The Glasgow-based painter's major piece currently on display at Tate Britain is an enormous, luxuriant and ornate symmetrical fresco painted in shimmering gold leaf which commands the otherwise virtually empty room it occupies. Wright's is the most traditional of the four shortlisted shows at the Tate Britain. Conceived in response to the parameters of each individual space (a video on view at Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. So he turned a concert programme into a video show, focusing on Musorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kinderszenen, to which would be set a visual installation around him and his piano.There is already a CD and DVD set out of this, which I Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Though he has yet to make a perfect film, the director Tim Burton’s choice of Gothic and fantasy subjects and his deadpan, post-expressionist approach to them rightfully designate him an auteur of considerable genius. His 14 movies to date have earned him a cohesive retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But not content with this, the museum has also mounted an exhibition consisting of over 700 items, including scores of paintings and drawings, as well as costumes and figures from the films, Polaroids, videos and student films, and specially created installations; there's also a Read more ...
sheila.johnston
To accompany our review of the spectacular and extensive exhibition dedicated to Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, we present a tiny selection of the 700-plus works on display there until 26 April 2010. Click on any of the images below to open the full view.
The entrance to the MOMA exhibition (photograph: Michael Locasiano)
The Green Man (1996-1998), oil and acrylic on canvas
Creature Series (1992), acrylic on canvas
Picasso Woman (1980-1990), pen and ink and watercolour on paper
The Nightmare Before Christmas: Sally (1993), Polaroid
Ramone (1980-1990), pen and ink, marker Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A 15ft aardvark constructed from raw timber with a light-up robotic face and gigantic hands is climbing up one of the support pillars of the Westway, next to the body of a full-sized helicopter the front of which has been shaped into a grinning skull. Life-size rearing horse torsos made of white marble-like resin, with real horse skulls instead of heads, are mounted on the wheels of Victorian perambulators, while a man rides a clanking, hissing, fire-spitting motorised beast with stamping front legs and huge rear wheels around through the crowd as children caper about and their parents drink Read more ...
terry.friel
Rising spectacularly from the warm turquoise waters of Doha Bay, the building which is probably I.M. Pei’s final and perhaps his greatest work, the iconic Museum of Islamic Art, symbolises the cultural arms race among the Islamic Emirates strung out along the Gulf, on the flank of Big Brother Saudi Arabia.Pei, now 92, journeyed through the Muslim world in search of the inspiration to be able to reflect its artistic traditions. The result is an austere cubist design - the crowning level a minimalist limestone version of a woman’s veiled face that catches the changing light of the sun. On Doha’ Read more ...
william.ward
The rapturous reception for Zaha Hadid’s groundbreaking, breathtaking new confection in Rome, Il Museo dell’Arte del XXIesimo Secolo - the 21st-Century Art Museum (MAXXI for short) - has reopened for the umpteenth time one of Italy’s favourite cultural debates. Why the hell does it take so long to build anything decent in our capital city, especially when we have one of the finest traditions - if not the finest - in architecture, civil engineering and construction, of anywhere in the whole world?Well, “Rome,” as the old expression counselling patience in all things has it, “wasn’t built in a Read more ...