fri 04/07/2025

Visual Arts Galleries

Graffiti Gallery: Crack & Shine International

theartsdesk

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Art Gallery: The Worlds of Mervyn Peake

Fisun Güner Peake's 'The Mad Hatter's Tea Party', 1945

Best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968 and whose centenary is celebrated this year, was also an artist, an illustrator and a poet. As well as illustrating his own fiction (images 5-9), some of his finest drawings were for books by other authors. For grotesque satiric humour and Gothic sensibility he found a perfect match in Dickens, as his rather creepy illustrations for Bleak House beautifully attest.

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Marcel van Eeden, Sprueth Magers London

Josh Spero

An article in this week's New Yorker bemoans the death of drawing in art. Why has the emphasis on craft, Adam Gopnik writes, been replaced by concept? He has evidently not seen the fantastic noirish drawings of Marcel van Eeden at Sprueth Magers in Mayfair.

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Photo Gallery: Moby, Destroyed

Thomas H Green 'Unattended Luggage Will Be Destroyed': Moby makes stark photographic use of an airport sign

As well as a new album, Destroyed, Moby is putting out a book of photographic prints under the same title. The idea of the book is to capture the essence of being on a global tour, from the mundanity of waiting in airports to the majesty of landscapes and cities, from the explosive excitement of stadium-sized crowds to the solitude of hotel rooms at night. The images will also be on display in the Proud Gallery in Camden Town, north London. theartsdesk showcases a...

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Photo Gallery: Figures and Fiction - Contemporary South African Photography, V&A

Fisun Güner Jodi Bieber's photographs from her series 'Real Beauty' can feel uncomfortably voyeuristic

It’s been 17 years since apartheid came to an end in South Africa, and the transition to democracy has not been an easy one, for while political systems may change, social attitudes may prove yet more difficult to shift....

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Art Gallery: The Wellcome's Dirt - The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life

Fisun Güner 'Monster Soup, commonly called Thames Water' imagines what pestilent creatures may be found in the Thames

There have been exhibitions, indeed even a whole museum, dedicated to cleanliness: the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, for instance (image 9), which was founded for the purpose of public education in hygiene and health, but which later embraced and diffused racist theories during the Nazi era. Yet there haven’t been many – or any, as far as I’m aware – devoted entirely to dirt. It’s all around us, yet historically we seem to have considered the subject unworthy of...

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Cob Studios & Gallery: Is north the new east?

Hilary Whitney 'Les Amants (Cascade )', 2009,  Noemie Goudal: The Cob Gallery opens with an exhibition that contemplates our modern relationship with nature

A burgeoning North London art scene, which includes the Zabludowicz Collection in Chalk Farm and one of the London outposts of the Gagosian Gallery, suggests that the art world has the North firmly in its sights and tomorrow sees the opening of its latest addition, Cob Studios & Gallery, based in the heart of Camden Town. Cob is jointly run by playwright Polly Stenham and Victoria Williams and aims to be a truly collaborative venue exhibiting work by emerging and established artists and...

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Art Gallery: Guitar Heroes - Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York

theartsdesk String theory: Detail of a guitar by James D'Aquisto

From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s...

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Photo Gallery: The Best View of Heaven is From Hell

Jasper Rees Graffiti in Helmand: One of ex-soldier Bran Symondson's Afghan photographs taken in 2010

"There's a similarity between being a soldier and a photographer. They are both looking intensely for the moment." Bran Symondson would know. He served with the British Army in Afghanistan before returning to document the world of the Afghan National Police. A less sensitive photographer might have alighted on the parallel between the action of a rifle barrel and a camera lens. But Symondson's pictures visit a perilous environment where, like that tiny butterfly in All Quiet on the...

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Photo Gallery: 50 Years of the Ballet, By Colin Jones

Ismene Brown 1999: English National Ballet corps warm up in Hong Kong before 'Swan Lake'

Rudy and Margot do intensely serious barre in an Italian garden, Lynn Seymour enjoys a "Loyal Ballet" poster on a 1962 Japanese tour, in Glasgow two ballet girls snatch some rest in uncomfortable chairs. The real world of ballet, as shot by the insider who became a world photographer, Colin Jones. Read the interview with him, describing the friendships and tragic...

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