Visual arts
Simon Martin
Art collectors are rarely what one might expect. Everyone has their particular enthusiasms, quirks and foibles, which make their collections unique and reflective of their tastes. In my career as a curator I have learnt never to have preconceptions when visiting collectors. The best pictures can often be found in the most modest of homes. Nothing can beat the buzz of encountering an iconic artwork in the most unlikely of settings. It is a lesson in how important it is not to make judgements about individuals before meeting them properly.Such was the case with Michael Woodford, perhaps one of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an international reputation for work which features non-art materials in a raw state (hence the name "Poor Art"), Mauri has languished in relative obscurity – until now, that is.Oscuramento, his first solo show in London for 20 years, provides the chance to catch up; but there is a problem – how to contextualise work which feels dated, because it was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of breathless frontloading in television documentaries. The headlines promising shock and awe coming up are posted in the opening edit as a way of hooking in the remote-wielding viewer. Very often as presenters stump around history’s muddy digs or leaf through dusty old tomes, the revelations vouchsafed turn out to be a bit iffy, a bit yeah but no but so what? The hyperventilation is often a precursory guarantee of bathos. You’d be better off reading the book. So Andrew Graham-Dixon had to draw on an extra reserve of superlatives to sell Secrets of the Mona Lisa.“These Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern and contemporary western art. There are not only her massive donations to a variety of museums, but the legendary Peggy Guggenheim collection in her Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal, one of the most visited modern museums in the world, with some 326 works of art by 100 different artists. La Read more ...
theartsdesk
Walls that are floors, floors that are walls, and stairs that go up to go down: in the brain-befuddling art of MC Escher (1898-1972) the mundane everyday meets a world of paradox in which the rules of gravity, space and material reality are thrown into disarray. From his fantastical architectural spaces with flights of stairs that lead nowhere, to dazzling tessellations that fade into infinity, Escher is synonymous with queasy optical illusions that fascinate and nauseate in equal measure.Astonishingly popular, the art of Escher is some of the most widely recognised and well-loved ever made, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual and physical energy, and stamina. Stubborn and ambitious, for her class and gender she was unusually interested in business. She sold her work, which indeed she copyrighted, through the printsellers Colnaghi’s, and she was always experimenting and thinking of ways to promote her achievement.One of the seven Pattle sisters – classical Victorians Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"Exhibition on Screen" is a logical extension of the recent phenomenon of screenings of live performances of opera and theatre. Initiated with the Leonardo exhibition of 2012 at London’s National Gallery, this is its third season, and the format remains unchanged: a specific show provides the pretext for a bespoke film that goes beyond the gallery walls. Acting as an introductory biography, it interweaves the narration of an artist’s life and work with an illuminating visit to the exhibition; the high-definition, large-screen experience of the cinema more than trumps television, computer or Read more ...
Florence Hallett
There are some wonderful things in this exhibition, and that’s no surprise: the British Empire endured for over 500 years and at its peak extended across a quarter of the world’s land mass. Preparing an exhibition of corresponding reach must have involved considering a vast range of objects, but choosing well is another matter entirely. Severely overfilled, this is a show hampered by too broad a scope, but also by the sensitive nature of its subject; in its eagerness to present points of view other than that of the British colonists, there is a crippling reluctance to omit anything at all.So Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The strikingly architectural space that forms the upper portion of Botticini’s Palmieri altarpiece is well-suited to an entrance, forming as it does a sort of triumphal arch heralding great things beyond. And so it is that for years this painting hung over the entrance to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, oddly well-placed, but in truth of course, entirely out of place. In its new, albeit temporary position, we have a better sense of how this painting might have been seen some 500 years ago, when it adorned the altar of the funerary chapel dedicated to the humanist scholar, poet, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries are currently filled with a hauntingly beautiful sound installation by Susan Philipsz (main picture). The Scottish artist won the Turner Prize in 2010 for a sound piece that didn’t really work at the Tate. Intended to be heard under the bridges spanning the River Clyde in Glasgow, the recording of Philipsz's fragile voice singing sad folk songs was largely drowned out by ambient noise.This time, though, she has been able to design the installation especially for this awesome space, which stands empty for the occasion. A central line of speakers hanging from the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“High Spirits” is a multi-layered title: the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) was himself a heavy gambler and a heavy drinker, continually using up his material assets in such pursuits. His high spirits extended to the Georgian society he satirised with such robust good humour; high society and even low society attracted his interests, while he also expended enormous energy detailing political and sexual intrigues.So while the 17th century Dutch are busy drinking and eating and being in general enthusiastic consumers in several gorgeous rooms at The Queen’s Gallery, this is a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This is Susan Hiller’s first exhibition since her Tate retrospective in 2011, and as it includes work from the 1970s to the present, it can also be seen as a retrospective of sorts. But since the selection was obviously governed by what was available for sale, it inevitably offers a piecemeal view of her achievements.Nor can I do full justice to the work, which is complex and multi-layered, so I’ll concentrate on one aspect – the importance of unorthodox views and marginal voices (especially those of women who have been silenced for centuries) that challenge the hegemony of received opinion Read more ...