Visual Arts Galleries
The Best of Photo London 2016Thursday, 19 May 2016
Asking theartsdesk's theatre photographer to review Photo London is like asking a car mechanic to review the London Motor Show. "Remember the big picture!" I kept telling myself as I tried to deconstruct the lighting of a particular shot or measure the depth of field. Read more... |
Avedon Warhol, Gagosian GalleryThursday, 25 February 2016
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John. Read more... |
Lumiere London 2016Monday, 18 January 2016
To liberate traffic-choked city streets for pedestrians, to suspend phantasmagorical, literally high art above their heads and give a sense that London belongs to them: that’s an admirable vision, surely. Artichoke has been wowing the crowds since it brought Royal de Luxe’s The Sultan’s Elephant to town in 2006. Its festivals of light have drawn crowds and prestige to Durham in three alternate years, and to Derry-Londonderry. Could Lumiere work in as diffuse a city as London? Read more... |
Søren Dahlgaard’s Dough PortraitsSunday, 03 January 2016
Can a portrait really be a portrait if we can’t see a person’s face? And what if the reason we can’t see their face is that it is covered with a lump of dough? Is it a joke? And if it is a joke, is it on us or them? Or perhaps it is a joke about art itself: doughy masks aside, Dahlgaard’s portraits are in every other way conventional, and dough is not so dissimilar to clay, a venerable material in the history of art. Read more... |
The Amazing World of MC Escher, Dulwich Picture GalleryTuesday, 08 December 2015
Walls that are floors, floors that are walls, and stairs that go up to go down: in the brain-befuddling art of MC Escher (1898-1972) the mundane everyday meets a world of paradox in which the rules of gravity, space and material reality are thrown into disarray. Read more... |
High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson, The Queen’s GalleryFriday, 20 November 2015
“High Spirits” is a multi-layered title: the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) was himself a heavy gambler and a heavy drinker, continually using up his material assets in such pursuits. His high spirits extended to the Georgian society he satirised with such robust good humour; high society and even low society attracted his interests, while he also expended enormous energy detailing political and sexual intrigues. Read more... |
Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer, The Queen’s GallerySaturday, 14 November 2015
What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. It’s true that there are a handful of other artists with that charisma, but none so rare as Vermeer. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only the subject of a recent novel and a film, but also a kind of poster for Holland as a whole, and the star of the recently reopened Mauritshaus in the Hague. Read more... |
Portraits from the 2015 Taylor Wessing PrizeSaturday, 14 November 2015
At first glance David Stewart’s Five Girls 2014, the winning entry in this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, is a very ordinary scene. Five young women sit behind a table, obligatory mobile phones within reach and lying amongst the remains of a rather dismal-looking lunch. Read more... |
Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 07 November 2015
Every object tells a story, nowhere more so than in a museum. The Victoria & Albert has been busy retelling as many stories as it can by rearranging, refurbishing, adding and subtracting from the millions of objects it has at its disposal to display, study and conserve. Read more... |
The World of Charles and Ray Eames, BarbicanFriday, 06 November 2015
Chairs, chairs, chairs, as far as the eye can see. Plywood or plastic shells, some decorated with hilarious drawings of jolly nudes by Saul Steinberg (main picture), others in all the colours you can imagine – stacks, in rows, alluring and all so familiar. As it is an exhibition, there is an air of reverence – heaven forbid that you actually have a chair to sit on! - but these chairs have been design icons for well over half a century. Read more... |
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