Visual Arts Galleries
Best of 2024: Visual ArtsMonday, 30 December 2024![]()
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them. Read more... |
The Most Expensive Paintings Ever SoldThursday, 16 November 2017![]()
Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting which some doubt is by Leonardo at all. One doubter insists that Leonardo the great scientist would have refracted the light through the orb in Christ's hands. That won't bother the buyer, whose identity is unknown. Salvator... Read more... |
Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, British MuseumTuesday, 30 May 2017![]()
With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art. Read more... |
Highlights from Photo London 2017 - virtual reality meets vintage treasureSaturday, 20 May 2017![]()
At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography. Read more... |
Fourth Plinth: How London Created the Smallest Sculpture Park in the WorldWednesday, 22 March 2017![]()
I have always felt very lucky to have been working as an artist in London during the period when it transformed into the capital of the art world. It has been a beautiful, fascinating and profitable ride. Read more... |
Photo Gallery: Aberdeenshire Sand DunesFriday, 20 January 2017![]()
These photographs of sand dunes were taken by Brian David Stevens in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, along a stretch of pristine Scottish coastline. The pictures themselves, while captivating and beautiful in their own right, also have political freight. For it is dunes such as these over which a long and ugly battle raged for several years. Read more... |
The Best of Frieze Masters 2016Saturday, 08 October 2016![]()
The fifth edition of the highly popular Frieze Masters – the quieter sibling of the boisterous contemporary Frieze Art Fair London – is underway in Regent's Park, London. This year, the fair features 133 leading galleries from around the world. Read more... |
Les Rencontres d'Arles 2016Friday, 08 July 2016![]()
Nous avons Brexité but we are still welcome at the 47th Rencontres d'Arles. Each summer this beautiful French town gives itself over to an international photography festival which this year features around 40 exhibitions of varying sizes with countless lectures, parties, book signings and fringe events. Read more... |
Venice Architecture Biennale 2016Tuesday, 31 May 2016![]()
Arts festivals the size of the Venice Biennale are inevitably patchy. The appointed directors are hardly ever given enough time to curate and fill absolutely vast volumes of space. They can exhort the many national and individual participants to follow their lead, and yet they have no editorial control over them. Read more... |
Sunken Cities: Egypt's lost worlds rediscoveredTuesday, 24 May 2016![]()
In a gallery darkened to evoke the seabed that was its resting place for over a thousand years, the colossal figure of Hapy, the Egyptian god of the Nile flood, greets visitors just as it met sailors entering the busy trading port of Thonis-Heracleion some 2,000 years ago. Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
![Tight-knit ensemble: Anjli Mohindra, Deborah Findlay, Gina McKee, Romola Garai, Harmony Rose-Bremner in 'The Years'](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Years%201.jpg?itok=Tc5XqxSD)
Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical book Les Années charts a woman’s life across time and space, history and memory, through...
For all its passing British sea shanties and folksongs, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony does Walt Whitman’s determinedly global-oriented...
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig....
![Bringing unhinged joy](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/NINA_CONTI_LIVE-07236%28Credit_Paul%20Gilbey%29.jpg?itok=G1I9o9NW)
“I really am the repository for all your shit,” Nina Conti’s famous Monkey hand puppet tells her. Monkey may have a point.
The brilliance of...
![Folk and furious: Braimah Kanneh-Mason, Plínio Fernandes, Hadewych van Gent](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/noisenight198%20braimah_plinio_hadewych-3%20%281%29.jpg?itok=0h5c1mgB)
It was the sonically adventurous, shiveringly atmospheric cello piece by Latvian composer Preteris Vasks that proved to be the first showstopper...
![Deus ex machina: Dionysus (Tommy Franzén) takes pity on grieving Ariadne (Kristen McNally) in Minotaur](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Tommy%20Franze%CC%81n%20%28Dionysus%29%20and%20Kristen%20McNally%20%28Ariadne%29%20in%20Minotaur%20%C2%A92025%20Tristram%20Kenton%20%281%29.jpg?itok=GHMuDnZY)
Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world...
![Cyndi Lauper was as colourful as ever on the first night of her European tour](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Rebecca_Miller_Photo_Credit%201.jpg?itok=dRjt79yL)
Cyndi Lauper was preceded onstage by a brief video that zipped through her career, which she drily declared was just in case someone was at the...
![The Lurkers in 1978. Left to right: Pete “Manic Esso” Haynes, Nigel Moore, Pete Stride and Howard Wall.](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/The%20Lurkers_header_1000.jpg?itok=SVrHqgvo)
On its own, the second session The Lurkers recorded for the BBC’s John Peel show on 18 April 1978 is arguably a curio, a footnote. Four tracks of...
![Making faces: Junyan Chen, Sarah Brandwood-Spencer, Ruth Gibson, Eva Thorarinsdottir and Nick Trygstad in Hidden Mechanisms by Héloïse Werner](https://theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail/public/mastimages/Manchester%20Collective%20%28Eva%20Thorarinsdottir%20Violin%2C%20Sarah%20Brandwood-Spencer%20Violin%2C%20Ruth%20Gibson%20Viola%2C%20Nick%20Trygstad%20Cello%2C%20Junyan%20Chen%29%20in%20Hidden%20Mechanisms%20by%20He%CC%81loi%CC%88se%20Werner%20%20Sozosei%20Photography.jpg?itok=gkXMzLSu)
When a piece of music is heard for the first time ever, there’s always the delicious hope that, just by being there, an audience might witness...