Visual arts
theartsdesk
At a festive ceremony on Tuesday night at The Hospital Club in central London, the winners were announced for this year's h.Club 100 Awards. The distinguished broacaster John Simpson (pictured below) gave an impassioned keynote address about the value of the UK's creative industries which concluded with amusing advice on the wisdom of eating kedgeree. The comedian Stuart Goldsmith compered with wit, flair and sangfroid. The undoubted star of the night was Lady Leshurr, who accepted her award in the Music category - presented to her by theartsdesk's Thomas H. Green - with a speech that Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The best way to see Marc Quinn’s exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum is to begin at the end, in a room explaining the process of casting the sculptures’ moulds from the entwined bodies of him and his partner, dancer Jenny Bastet.Alongside text explanations and studio photographs, the moulds are displayed in glass cases. They look like strange pinioned butterflies, irregular vivisections, anthropological exhibits confected of kitsch and gusto (the dental gum used is electroshock pink). Carved-open interiors reveal inverted breasts, nipples, elbows, shoulders, genitals, and mazes of linked Read more ...
theartsdesk
In July we launched a competition in association with The Hospital Club to unearth talented young critics. We were clear about what we were looking for: “We want to read reviews that make us think – provocative, entertaining writing that gets under the skin of the art it addresses, that dares to ask uncomfortable questions and offer new answers. We’re looking for a review we wish we’d written ourselves. Surprise us, shock us, enrage us.”Entrants, who had to be between 18 and 30, had a month to submit a review of 500 words. It was very pleasing to see young critics writing about all the art Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Royal Academy has a winning line in spectacular exhibitions that have become essentials in London, theatrically and dramatically revelatory presentations in themselves. Here is another winner, the American star Jasper Johns, a collaboration with the world’s newest gallery of contemporary art, the Broad in Los Angeles.Johns makes iconic objects from simple domestic items, from brooms and torches to the American flag (normally untouchable: in America’s officially secular society schoolchildren still swear an oath of allegiance to it). He even includes, as is perhaps inevitable, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Beautiful, shy, charming and talented, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a shining star who streaked across the New York skyline for a few brief years in the early 1980s before a heroin overdose claimed his life at the age of only 27. I’ve introduced him as a phenomenon rather than an artist, because that’s how the Barbican exhibition presents him. The upstairs space charts his meteoric rise to fame from the graffiti writer, SAMO © (same old shit) to the painter whose 1982 canvas of a skull fetched over $110 million at Sotheby’s last May. The highest price ever paid at auction for an Read more ...
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell Collection review - guilty pleasures at the National Gallery
Florence Hallett
If only a modest fuss is being made about the rare and prestigious loan currently residing in Trafalgar Square, it could be that the National Gallery is keen to forget the role of its former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, in a row about art transportation that centred on the very collection to which these objects belong. Of the 13 Degas pastels that form the core of this small but wondrous exhibition, most have never been seen outside Glasgow, where they are among the highlights of the magnificent art collection bequeathed to the city in 1944 by the shipping magnate Sir William Burrell.In an Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The gallery walls of Tate Britain have been taken down so turning a warren of interlinking rooms into a large, uncluttered space in which Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are arranged as a single installation. What a challenge! And curators Ann Gallagher and Linsey Young are to be congratulated for pulling off this difficult feat so seamlessly. Seeing the work altogether has a profound effect, though. It reveals the exceptional beauty of everything Whiteread has produced and emphasises the uniformity of her vision. After all, she has spent the last three decades making casts in plaster Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions. But these documentaries, several supported or commissioned by the Arts Council, concentrate on the visual arts.The longest, Every Picture Tells a Story, is a 1983 biopic based on the early life of his northern Irish father, William Scott (1913-1989) who moved from Scotland to Enniskillen as a teenager, studied art in Belfast, then went on to London and a vastly successful career. The Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Art, design and craft is such a broad category that it is no surprise – even less a criticism – that most of the nominees comfortably inhabit just one of these areas of endeavour. Nominated principally in recognition of The Caged Bird’s Song, made in collaboration with Chris Ofili over a period of two and a half years and the star of a recent exhibition at the National Gallery, Dovecot Tapestry Studio is unique in answering happily to art, design and craft and can genuinely claim its place as a leading light in each.Designed by one of our most celebrated contemporary artists, The Caged Bird’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sue Steward, who died suddenly last week from a brain haemorrhage, was one of theartsdesk’s most loved members, her free spirit and her double specialism in world music and photography making her an intrinsic asset to this pioneering critics’ site in 2009. Her unfussy eye for colour and composition also influenced the early design of The Arts Desk and traces remain today.With her talent for friendship she naturally drew other new music explorers into her circle of enthusiasm, as well as the photographers whose work she wrote about and curated with lilting sympathy. She made friends wherever Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of art historical study that often surrounds such a major figure as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Hamilton is positively in love with his subject, and writes with verve and enthusiasm, yet grounds it on vast research with primary and secondary sources, all impeccably noted.The whole, organised into 40 pithy chapters with titles such as “In the Painting Room”, is like a piece of stage craft come to life. Hamilton sweeps the reader into the world of 18th century Suffolk, smoke-filled Bath – all those coal fires Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A 19th-century silver and wood pot in which to make chocolate, pertly graceful; 17th-century blue and white Delftware; a Chinese calligraphy panel; a 19th-century carved wooden god from the Ivory Coast; a bronze and gold earth goddess from South-East Asia. These are but a tiny sampling from the multitude of objects with which Matisse surrounded himself in his studio(s). A treasure trove of objects that Matisse once owned has been brought together for this Royal Academy show, combined with the work that they inspired.Matisse thought to ennoble the humblest of objects, to find delight in the Read more ...