Visual arts
Glyn Môn Hughes
There is something surreal about emerging from an underground station in Liverpool and being confronted by an enormous giant lumbering its way up the street. Even coming up the escalator it is possible to hear the band accompanying this gigantic being merging with the roar of delight from the crowd. And crowds there have been. Over the three days of the Sea Odyssey it is estimated that 600,000 people have seen the latest street theatre creation from Nantes-based Royal De Luxe.The cost of the epic - £1.5m of legacy funding from Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 – is Read more ...
fisun.guner
Manchester was once known as Cottonopolis, since the city was once at the centre of the vast global industry reponsible for its growth and prosperity.The Whitworth Art Gallery, which is part of Manchester University, has in its collection a wealth of textiles, providing not just a colourful history of local cotton manufacture, but tracing the trade’s international links. However, this exhibition is less historical overview, more discursive exploration of the cotton trade’s social impact.The exhibition provokes questions surrounding the ethical production of what had become, by the end Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
There was something perverse about the opening of Liza Lou’s show at White Cube in Hoxton Square on a wet Thursday evening. It was as quiet as I’ve ever known it inside, while outside, barred from drinking among Lou’s fragile works, a throng of people guzzled free beer on the other side of the street in the rain.From the second floor where the most plaintive works shimmer against the white walls, you could look down and wonder why White Cube insists on plying them with beer. It seems to add the same kind of crowd-fuelled bluster to the event as movie premieres, to make the invited feel Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Yesterday I fell in love with a black boy less than half my age and half my size – or, rather, a sculpture of a black boy. At just over two feet tall, Ron Mueck’s Youth is utterly beguiling. His silken skin, slender fingers, low-slung jeans and paisley patterned underpants are seductive enough; what made me lose my head, though, was the suggestion of dirt under his neatly clipped toenails. This beautifully observed detail made me want to kiss his exquisitely modelled feet.Mueck’s hyper-real sculptures have the same presence as Madame Tussaud’s waxworks; this is scarcely surprising since Read more ...
josh.spero
I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics, intellectuals, paint applied by the artist himself. The shame is that it's all a hoax, and not in the manner of Shovlin's earlier projects concerned with fictional people: the maths is cod, the belief absent - even the pauses for thought are artificial.The original covers of the Fontana series are distinctive - Vasarely-ish geometrical designs in the Read more ...