Visual arts
fisun.guner
Face Value – heh, who’d have thought to come up with that title for an exhibition of portraits? Yeah, it’s not particularly clever, but there’s something of the contrarian mischief-maker in it all the same, for in the 50 years that Bob Dylan has been making music, giving interviews and being lionised as the son of God, there’s never been much danger of anyone taking him at face value. Or at least there shouldn’t be. And the same could be said of the 12 portraits that make up this exhibition.Who are they? We’re told they’re an amalgam of real people and fictive people, created, Dylan has said Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Had the wealthy William Burrell had a son, Glasgow might not have acquired the world-class art collection that the shipping entrepreneur amassed during his long life. But with the birth of a sole daughter came both ambitions and suspicion – he raised Marion to succeed to his art empire, then imagined every suitor to be a gold-digger, breaking off her third engagement with a public announcement in the newspaper that took even her by surprise.Father and child were never reconciled, and upon his death at 95, Burrell, by now the owner of top quality Chinese and Islamic artefacts, as well as Read more ...
fisun.guner
Poetry has always inspired artists. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy are two of the most enduring. And according to Art Everywhere, of which I will say little here but have written about elsewhere (see sidebar), the nation’s favourite painting is inspired by a more recent poem: JW Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott shows the ill-fated heroine of Tennyson’s famous verse moving inexorably towards her watery death “like some bold seer in a trance”. The second favourite is, incidentally, another narrative illustration of an ill-fated heroine on the point of meeting her watery fate – Read more ...
Toby Saul
There was an unmistakable trend within Modernism to try and record absolutely everything about ordinary life. Think of Joyce and his attempt to set down all of Leopold Bloom’s thoughts, or the cubists and their use of even the tiniest scrap of newsprint in a collage. The Photographers’ Gallery has had the excellent idea of revisiting Mass Observation, the movement from the Thirties and Forties that wanted to document the mundane to an unprecedented degree. Formed in 1937 at the height of totalitarianism, Mass Observation sounds like it might have been a tool of the police state. Instead Read more ...
fisun.guner
What happens when art is everywhere? Does it become wallpaper? Visual white noise? I'm struggling to see the point of Art Everywhere, though I can see it's a nice idea on paper: if the people won't come to the gallery, then the gallery must come to the people. Now there's a rallying cry. What's more, it's the people who've done the curating, or at least voted on Facebook for the 57 works of art that we'll see on 22,000 billboards across the UK, from JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire ( Read more ...
caroline.boyle
The highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is undoubtedly Peter Doig’s No Foreign Lands. As you enter the beautifully proportioned and wonderfully hung rooms of the Scottish National Gallery (until 3 November) the spirit of last year’s Festival exhibition of European Symbolist Landscape seems still to linger and has found its modern echo.The rooms are flooded with colour and dramatic atmosphere. On large canvases the layers of colour appear to billow, bleed, swirl, drift and fade into one another, tonally quivering and shimmering. They awake spectral memories of other paintings from Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last time I encountered a work by Conrad Shawcross, it made me feel sick. His kinetic light sculpture, Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV, occupied a room the size of a broom cupboard at the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show. Inside a dense metal cage on spindly legs was a metal armature on which a high-wattage bulb was fixed. It looped the air at speed and the room, which was marked by lines that warped one’s sense of perspective, appeared to shrink and expand at a dizzying rate, or perhaps as if you yourself were growing and shrinking. It was hugely disorientating, but also – in between the waves of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Richard Rogers is addicted to colour. His wardrobe dazzles, and this biographical anthology opens with a selection of Rogers’ aphorisms and statements in bold black on a wall painted a coruscating knock-out fuschia. And then there are the buildings. Rogers, 80 this month, is now a world-famous multi-honoured “starchitect”. He has successfully practised for over 50 years. He is a leader in collaborative high-tech designs, some of them painfully expensive and difficult to maintain, and simultaneously a passionate ecologist. Throughout the show there is an emphasis on the life as well as Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s a huge cock! The Brits love double entendres. Maybe the Germans do too, but the Brits have cornered the market. Katharina Fritsch, the German artist behind the huge cock on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, has certainly played to our humour, but says she didn’t give a thought to the idea that the cockerel is a symbol of France. Hence, one giving the eye to Nelson, in the square that’s named after his decisive victory in 1805, might give it a double frisson, and perhaps even ruffle a few feathers – though you’ve got to be an incredibly stuffy bore not to enjoy that sense of friction Read more ...
fisun.guner
Undines, mermaids, selkies, nixies, kraken. You’ll encounter such imaginary creatures in Aquatopia, an exhibition which delves into the myths of the ocean deep, and thereby to the murky, fathomless depths of our subconscious. But more often than imaginary beings you’ll encounter real ones who’ve touched our imaginations by their unearthly appearance and tapped into our deepest fears and desires, which means, naturally, our sexual desires. There’s a lot of octopus love going on.Katsushika Hokusai’s famous erotic print of 1814, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (pictured below), shows a woman Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
The capital of Mozambique pulls no punches. Parked at the old airport among sheaves of wild grass are old MiG fighter planes, as sculpturally beautiful as the massive monument made from decommissioned weapons a few hundred metres away. The new airport, a multi-million pound effort completed last year with significant Chinese help, has Dom Perignon champagne for $230 a bottle. That’s twice the national annual wage. Sculptures made from decommissioned weaponry are known as war art. Mozambique’s most famous son is the war artist Gonzalo Mabunda, a sculptor in his thirties who has exhibited Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Laura Knight’s wartime masterpiece Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring (1943) is a subtly glamorous picture, strikingly composed. A frieze of blue-clad women at an armament factory workbench are in the background, highlighting the profiled figure of Ruby tending her elaborately complex machine, at an oblique angle to the picture plane. Unashamedly a celebration of a positive triumph over inescapable necessity, the image emphasises achievement, and doesn’t indicate the inescapable monotony, noise and general rough hub-bub of the working conditions.Ruby is beautifully made up with bright red Read more ...