Visual arts
Sebastian Merrick
I can’t wait to check out Istanbul’s galleries in a couple of years. Already endowed with an exploding arts and design scene, with Istanbul Modern in its unique location hanging over the Bosphorus, the retrospectively-looking Santral half integrated into an Ottoman power plant, and the area around Tophane sprouting art boutiques and design outlets like nobody’s business, its creative output has just been given a huge boost.The boost comes thanks to, of all things, an ex-footballer Prime Minister who has overseen protests throughout Turkey not by trying to calm the situation but by toughing it Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Alternative Guide to the Universe, an exhibition of work mainly by self-taught practitioners, encourages one to speculate on the merits of orthodox art and science compared with the wild schemes pursued by these eccentrics and visionaries, some of whom are inspirational while others bludgeon you with their offbeat ideas. Bodys Isek Kingelez builds immaculate models of imaginary buildings that make Dubai’s waterfront hotels look positively boring. Resembling a rhino horn, Dorothe, 2007 (pictured below right, courtesy André Magnin, Paris) arcs into the sky, one facade zigzagged by Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Charming” is undoubtedly a double-edged word. Along with its perfumed allure, it carries a whiff of insincerity, of something slick and not quite earned. Add “whimsical” and you know you’re in danger of saccharine overload. Chagall is both, plus he’s one of the most popular artists of the 20th century. Does it get any worse?Marc Chagall was born Moyshe Shagal in Vitebsk, a region now in modern-day Belarus with a big Hassidic population. And though he absorbed some of the ideas of Cubism during his three years in Paris as a young man, his paintings are infused with the mystical and the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How writers change their tune. When Robert Capa died in Vietnam in 1954, having trodden on a landmine, Ernest Hemingway was chief among those paying tribute. “It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him,” he wrote. “It is especially bad for Capa. He was so much alive that it is a hard long day to think of him as dead.” Spool back, however, to Omaha Beach, 69 years ago to the month, when they came under enemy fire. Hemingway sought cover in a ditch and later accused Capa of putting him in danger so that he might “take the first picture of the famous writer’s dead body Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sir Anthony Caro, OM, is wowing them in Venice with his masterly retrospective, but for those of us who can’t get there, there is a generous helping of his characteristic late work in his first show in Gagosian’s airy large gallery. Late Caro (he’s 89, a titan of sculpture) is a revelation in the irresistible vitality with which he imaginatively and consistently finds new things to say using one of his favourite materials: rusted mild steel.There is a palpable communication of the artist’s own enjoyment, his intelligence and his delightThe 10 constructions are massive and once were envisioned Read more ...
Zsuzsanna Ardó
Cornelia Parker came to prominence with various acts of destruction/resurrection. Some of the most famous examples include a blown-up garden shed in Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, the charred remains of churches in Mass (Colder Darker Matter),1997 and Anti-Mass, 2005, and pearls fired through a shotgun in Suit, Shot by a Pearl Necklace, 1995. But within the ambiguity of creation by destruction, there is also the artist as archeologist.These angular pieces of urban archeology are hovering above the ground as if frozen in spaceIn Subconscious of a Monument, 2005, shown at the Royal Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s the centenary of the birth of William Scott, once considered to be in the pantheon of British postwar artists. But where’s the hoopla and fanfare? Like so many British painters who had their glory years in the Fifties – before the explosion of Pop art and all that – his name no longer carries much weight. Having represented Britain in the Venice Biennale of 1958, he was left out of the Royal Academy’s ambitious survey British Art of the 20th Century some 30 years later. To what do we owe so much neglect?From the two earlier artists he took a distilled sense of domestic space and intense Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) is the greatest late 20th-century British painter the international art world has never heard of. This quietly magnificent exhibition of about 35 paintings, most of them very large, may at last bring about a satisfactory reversal of fortune. Although some of the paintings are 50 years old, they could have been painted tomorrow. Their style, wit, irony and melancholy, tempered by contradictory moods of quiet cynicism and sensual pleasure in the observed world, seem utterly contemporary.The images are theme and variations: flatly painted blocks of bold colour – Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Lady Barber (1869-1933) née Hattie Onions, had her portrait painted in sumptuous style about 30 times, mostly in a sub-Orpen vein, and almost all by the unknown Belgian Nestor Cambier. But that was the very least of her occupations. Her husband, the lawyer Sir Henry Barber (1860-1927), had made a fortune in Birmingham property, and became quite the gentleman. Retired in his thirties, he took to riding to hounds and judging horses in the company of royalty, while his wife created a nationally known alpine rock garden around their mansion in Henley-on-Thames.Their largesse funded what in fact Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Michelangelo evidently regarded drawing as the foundation of not only painting and sculpture but of “architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all science”. His all-encompassing claim is subtly demonstrated in this captivating exhibition of five centuries of western European drawing. The anthology sweeps through the years from the old masters to 20th-century stars, concentrating indeed on mastery. The unifying factor is that all the work on view is concerned with elements from the observable world: landscapes, portraits, domesticities, fantasies set in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It's 17 years since Helen Chadwick died without warning of heart failure at the tragically early age of 42 and nine years since the Barbican staged a retrospective of her work. Time, then, for a reappraisal and this small but beautifully presented exhibition at Richard Saltoun’s gallery contains enough gems to remind us of the beauty, wit, intelligence and originality that made the artist and her work so very inspiring. Showing total disregard for boundaries, she used anything from flowers and rotting vegetable matter to meat, chocolate, fur, wood and bronze, and from photocopies to Read more ...
fisun.guner
Much of Michael Landy’s work concerns destruction or decay. The British artist, who recently turned 50 and is part of the YBA generation, came to prominence in 2001 with the Artangel commission Break Down, which saw all his worldly possessions destroyed in an industrial shredder. His next project saw him scale right down, surprising everyone with an exhibition of beautifully executed drawings of weeds.Landy’s love of close observational drawing continued with a series of arresting portraits. But then we saw the cathartic destruction of Art Bin, in 2010, where he'd invited members of the Read more ...