Visual arts
Alison Cole
As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Michelangelo – Love and Death, directed and edited by David Bickerstaff, which is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s Michelangelo/Sebastiano exhibition (just! – it closes on 25 June) duly attempts to rise to the challenge, with the publicity promising a “dramatic retelling of the life and creative journey of the original celebrity artist” and a film Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors. If Grayson Perry is to top that, as the title of his Serpentine Gallery show optimistically predicts, his exhibition will have to attract a throng of 5,900 visitors a day!Even though his current Channel 4 series Divided Britain and earlier ones like In the Best Possible Taste and All Man have turned him into a household name, I doubt if Perry’s celebrity status gives him that much pulling power. The exhibition title is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved. Returning from Holland to France after the First World War, he lived and worked in what seem like impossibly cramped conditions, a narrow and unforgiving-looking bed the only comfort in a room dedicated to the rigorously geometric compositions for which he had become famous. Walls, furniture and even books were painted white, with selected features like the stove and an ashtray left black, and squares of primary colour pinned here and Read more ...
Alison Cole
This summer the wonderful Kröller-Möller museum in Otterlo hosts the first major Dutch retrospective of the works of Hans (Jean) Arp since 1960 – an exhibition that will travel in a marginally smaller version to Margate’s Turner Contemporary later this year. The exhibition sits slightly tangentially within a celebratory year marking 100 years of Dutch design, from the founding in 1917 of De Stijl – an artist magazine and school of thought/movement founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg, and whose most famous member is Piet Mondrian – to the present day.In this context, the German-French Arp Read more ...
Florence Hallett
With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art. First seen outside Japan in the 1880s, Van Gogh was one of the first Europeans to really engage with the print, and he was one of a number of 19th-century artists who tried to incorporate aspects of Japanese style into their work.For all that, The Great Wave is the result of Hokusai’s longstanding interest in European art, its use of perspective and the pigment Prussian Blue Read more ...
Bill Knight
At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography. This year the show is said to be the subject of a "rigorous curatorial process" designed to show rare historical treasures, new work by established masters, and work by the brightest new stars. But surely I saw that print here last year? And didn’t I see that Karsh portrait of Winston Churchill on a five-pound note?There are great Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
As befits a festival with a spoken word artist as its guest curator, storytelling is at the heart of the visual arts offer in the 2017 Brighton Festival. It is not known if performance poet Kate Tempest had a hand in commissioning these four shows, but she can probably relate to the four artists in town right now. Among their tales are stories from Turkey, the Australian Outback and, closer to home, the Sussex village of Ditchling.One soon realises that everyone has their own narrative. Turkish artist İpek Duben (pictured below) gives a voice to several compatriots, each of whom materialises Read more ...
Alison Cole
Riveting and bewildering, the 57th Venice Biennale has just opened its myriad doors to the public with several thousand exhibits spread across Venice and its islands. The preview days were thronged with the art world and its coterie of high and low life, with queues stretching outside the two main venues at the Giardini and the Arsenale, and people jostling to enter the national pavilions (86 in all).A line of people waited expectantly to climb a set of steps and poke their head through an opening in the base of the Japanese Pavilion, only to find themselves, embarrassingly, the centrepiece Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Even today, the perception of Venice as a city only half-rooted in mundane reality owes a great deal to Canaletto (1697-1768), an artist who made his name producing paintings for English tourists visiting Italy in the 18th century. Recognisable views are subtly altered, the gently improving instincts of the artist shifting the scene almost imperceptibly away from real life, and into the realms of the imagination.In the days of the Grand Tour, the effect must have been even more pronounced, and Lucy Whitaker, co-curator of a new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, compares the paintings to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chain-smoking and charismatic, the painter, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived much of his life in Paris from his arrival there in his twenties. He was just in time for post-war cubism and pre-war surrealism, the energetic noisiness of the avant garde. And although he was almost always a realist, it was absolutely on his own hard-won terms, leading to his characteristically elongated human figures, based always on unbelievably extended sittings (even when figures were standing) of his nearest, close friends, family, his wife and his mistress.He was an Read more ...
Alison Cole
At 93, Picasso’s revered biographer, Sir John Richardson, has curated a vital new celebration of the artist’s life and work, focusing on one of his most enduring and delightful subjects, the Minotaur. The exhibition at the Gagosian in fact charts two magnificent obsessions: one is, of course, Picasso’s passionate identification with this savage, absurd and tragic mythological creature (the Minotaur is the half beast/half human offspring of a bull and the wife of King Minos of Crete); the other is Richardson’s own inexhaustible study of the artist himself, whom he describes as “intensely funny Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title of this exhibition is typical of Pink Floyd’s mordant view of the world, not to mention their sepulchral sense of humour. Needless to say, the band that took stage and studio perfectionism to unprecedented lengths have pushed the boat out here, memorialising over 50 years of their collective history with thoroughness and fanatical attention to detail.The event was four years in the planning, with all three surviving members pitching in and giving it their blessing, and drummer Nick Mason attending “many a long meeting” as he coordinated the event with curator Victoria Broackes and Read more ...