Visual arts
fisun.guner
There are two films in the Turner Prize exhibition and taken together and watched end-to-end they last just under three hours. That sounds gruelling for an art exhibition, but they’re from the strongest two candidates on this year’s shortlist. And since neither is one of those poorly filmed and edited pieces that are best viewed as moving wallpaper as you drift in and out of the gallery, both are worth devoting time to.The first is by Elizabeth Price, which is 20-minutes long. The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (image below left) is a beautifully constructed and rather captivating, as well as Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On the evidence of this Serpentine exhibition of huge sculptures, small sculptures, photographs, drawings, watercolours and prints, the German artist Thomas Schütte is obsessed, but obsessed, with faces. It is billed as the first show to focus entirely on his portraiture, of himself, his friends, and from the imagination. And the focus helps the visitor to grasp how playfully serious – or seriously playful – the artist is. He shows us he can do any idiom in various media. He can distort representation making faces almost unbearably malleable. Are these people menacing, sneering, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alonso Berruguete, Vicente Carducho, Juan Antonio Conchillos y Falco and Pedro Machuca are hardly familiar names in the Anglophone art world, but their drawings are on view in a revelatory exhibition. The British Museum is showing nearly all its Spanish drawings and a fine, succinct collection of prints, in an anthology called From the Renaissance to Goya. It makes for a particularly piquant sequel – or rather, prequel - to the high art of that temperamental genius, the Spaniard Picasso, whose Vollard Suite has just been on view. The milestones it encompasses are various. There was the Read more ...
fisun.guner
A Dancing Satyr leaps into the air, his head thrown back in ecstasy. His alabaster eyes appear like two pinpoints of illumination in the dimly lit gallery. The bronze figure, which is the first work you encounter in an exhibition spanning 5,000 years of bronze sculpture, is believed to be the work of the famous Greek sculptor Praxiteles, who was active in the second half of the fourth century BC. Having lain on the seabed for millennia, the reveller, now with only one limb intact so that he appears suspended in balletic mid-flight, was recovered off the coast of Sicily only in 1998.Bronze, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the 35th anniversary of the year punk met the mainstream, it’s to be expected that retrospection and nostalgia are in the air. Television has had a go, albums are being reissued and old soldiers are telling their stories. By its very nature an anniversary suggests that things were cut and dried, that 1977 was a beginning or a marker in the sand. But the exhibition Someday All the Adults Will Die: Punk Graphics 1971-1984 at the Southbank’s Hayward Gallery Project Space and the publication of the related book Punk: An Aesthetic both underline that things aren’t and weren’t so clear.Both the Read more ...