Visual arts
Sarah Kent
Eileen Agar was the only woman included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which introduced London to artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. The Surrealists were exploring the creative potential of chance, chaos and the irrational which they saw as the feminine principle, yet they didn’t welcome women artists into their group.Agar wasn’t easily discouraged, though. At the tender age of six, she’d been sent away to boarding school, an experience that made her fiercely independent. Later she studied at the Slade, but rebelled against the art school’s academic approach. A Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When Turner’s Modern World opened at Tate Britain last autumn only to close again days later, we might have felt then an echo of sensations and sentiments powerfully expressed in the exhibition itself. Its subject is the dirty cacophony of newly industrial Britain, the startling modernity of which is often neglected in discussions of Turner that focus instead on the visionary aspects of his style. Conceived as a counterpart to 2014's Late Turner: Painting Set Free, also at Tate Britain, this exhibition, by the same curatorial team, considers Turner as a creature of his age, when the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by conical horns that emanate a gentle angelic howling or lower end drone-hums. Eyes closed – and being music-geeky about it – this carefully calibrated tonal concerto assails the ears somewhere between US mystic Laraaji’s processed gong experiments and the final ethereal works of Spacemen 3.But this is about the experience. Artist Ray Lee Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Sheds have flourished in lockdown: they’ve always been places to escape to and in the past year, when spruced up as home offices, even more so. They’re also emblems of isolation. Poltergeist (main picture) and Doppelganger, the works that dominate Internal Objects, Rachel Whiteread’s powerful and moving new show at the Gagosian Gallery, imply isolation and are a vision of sheds destroyed, broken apart – structures that speak of a post-apocalyptic, unpeopled world. No home offices there.These are not her typical inside-out interiors cast in concrete, resin or steel, negative spaces Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.Speaking to the press soon afterwards, Hawley (main picture) was visibly shellshocked, desperation and disbelief mingled painfully in her comment that “I have to operate under the assumption that we are going to get these Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Sustainability and the environment are watchwords for the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize now in its ninth cycle. Since its launch in 2008, it has responded to the state of the world with urgency and compassion, its shortlists all the more intriguing for their oscillations between the universal and the personal, the global and the local.Last year, four of the 88 living photographers shortlisted for the prize to date were commissioned in a joint project with The Guardian, their brief to move beyond fast emerging Covid tropes, of “deserted cityscapes, overflowing hospitals Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pioneering is an attractive adjective in this context, alerting the spectator to what has been, over the past half century, an extraordinary body of contemporary ceramics produced by women. Underlying the notion of a gender-defined exhibition is a question: are there feminine characteristics to be looked for in an art form, if so what are they? Pots and bowls don’t sound very glamorous, alluring or exciting, rather prosaic, dull and quotidian. This is so in spite of the exalted sphere oriental ceramics have historically inhabited, or the recent flurry of interest surrounding artists such as Read more ...
theartsdesk
Unhappy as it is to be ending the year with museums and galleries closed, 2020 has had its triumphs, and there is plenty to look forward to in 2021. Two much anticipated exhibitions at the National Gallery were delayed and subject to closures and restrictions, but these seem relatively trivial inconveniences in the long lives of Titian’s "poesie", reunited after four centuries, or the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, brought together for the gallery’s first major exhibition dedicated to a female artist. These works of art, so fragile and yet so long-lived, helped to maintain a long view Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A person in a brown polo neck turns away, looking down (pictured below right). The encounter feels really intimate; we are almost breathing down this beautiful neck and exquisitely painted ear. Yet the subject retains their privacy; you can’t even be sure if this is a man or a woman.Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints people, yet her pictures are not portraits. They are not drawn from life, but from her imagination and the store of images inhabiting her mind. Her subjects are not sitters, posing at her behest, but characters minding their own business and getting on with their lives. Such an Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Even before going to art school, Tracey Emin discovered the work of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. And even though he was born 100 years before her, she embraced him as a kindred spirit. One can see why. Whether painting figures, buildings or landscapes, Munch projects onto his subjects the intense feelings of desolation, loneliness and abandonment which haunted him most of his life.When he was just five, his mother died of TB, his favourite sister following nine years later. Brought up by a neurotic father obsessed with death, he recalled an unhappy childhood in which, “The angels Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is a powerful celebration of black identity. These dramatic assertions of selfhood are more than just striking self portraits, though. South African artist Zanele Muholi uses the pronouns they and them and refers to themself as a visual activist, since the photographs are a form of protest against the prejudices faced by the queer community of which they are a part.In this series begun in 2012, Muholi ratchets up the contrast, so their skin becomes ebony black, and decks themself in mundane materials such as raffia, rope, electric cables, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment strand in Britain’s recent history but who is virtually unknown to today’s under-40s. Michael who? was the common reponse to my own admittedly fairly narrow survey. But Clark deserves a place in the pantheon of 20th-century movers and shakers for the same reason as, say, Andy Warhol or Jean Cocteau. Like them, he operated at the intersection of many Read more ...