mon 13/01/2025

Visual Arts Galleries

Photo Gallery: Ballet in Focus

Fisun Güner

A display of rarely seen photographs of key ballet dancers from the start of the 20th century goes on display at the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery holds the largest surviving archive of the once-fashionable Bassano Studio, London, including portraits of Anna Pavlova and the great classical dancers Adeline Genée (6), Phyllis Bedells (main) and Ninette de Valois (2), founder of the Royal Ballet.

Read more...

Art Gallery: Unseen Salvador Dalí

Fisun Güner

The unseen Dalí? Surely not. Anyone who ever popped into Dalí Universe, the now defunct gallery on the South Bank which was devoted to the flamboyant Surrealist's work, might well ask. Since there have been so many editions of his well-known sculptures, cast in prodigious numbers both during his lifetime and after his death in 1989, it seems only right and proper to raise a sceptical eyebrow: what more, indeed, is there to discover? And not just this. There’s a further thorny question of...

Read more...

Art Gallery: GSK Contemporary - Aware: Art Fashion Identity

Fisun Güner A masked lace dress by the late Alexander McQueen, from 1998, turns the catwalk into pure theatre

Fashion and conceptual art come together, sometimes awkwardly, often provocatively, in the Royal Academy’s third and final annual GSK Contemporary exhibition. Instead of celebrating glamour and excess, designers and artists – as well as those, such as Helen Storey (1) and Hussein Chalayan, who have successfully made a fashion to art crossover -...

Read more...

Photo Gallery: Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010

Fisun Güner

The winner of the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Prize was announced yesterday, and as with most prizes you know there must be an element of compromise when it comes to selecting the shortlist. David Chancellor’s winning portrait of a 14-year-old game hunter from Alabama, mounted on a horse with a dead buck draped across its neck (2), is certainly striking. So too, are the second and third prize-winners - the second, Portrait of My British Wife by Panayiotis Lamprou (9...

Read more...

Fashion Gallery: Future Beauty - 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican Gallery

Mark Hudson

Exhibitions about fashion tend to divide the public. Those passionately interested in fashion go to them; everybody else doesn’t. There’s a prevailing view that we already hear enough about top models, superstar designers and their attendant dramas through the media, the high street and the imposition of having to go and buy the stuff, without extending the experience into the art gallery.

Read more...

Art Gallery: The Museum of Everything

Fisun Güner 'Squirrels who smoke cigars, squabble and get up to mischief are among the many, some might say macabre, delights of Walter Potter’s world'

Whether you think the weird world of Walter Potter is cute or creepy, there’s little doubt that the Victorian taxidermist, and creator of humorous tableaux in which...

Read more...

Frieze Art Fair, Regent's Park

Josh Spero Damián Ortega's globe constructed from rocks of different sizes and colours at Kurimanzutto Gallery

Contemporary art can, unsurprisingly, become dated pretty quickly – the clue is in the name. Another of Damien Hirst’s mirrored cabinets of pills or of Gavin Turk’s piss-takes of Andy Warhol at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park is hardly the sort of sight which will enthuse hardened art-gallery goers.

Read more...

Interview: Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans

sue Steward

The 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial has seen unprecedented numbers of visitors flock to the coast, and tonight will host a talk by one of the most original fine-art photographers working in Britain today.

Read more...

Photo Gallery: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

Adam Sweeting A legend in the making: Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo in Greenwich Village, 1963

A near contemporary of the great jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who died last August, Don Hunstein has amassed a formidable collection of images of some of the most indelible names in music, from Miles Davis and John Coltrane to Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein. His...

Read more...

Art Gallery: Pordenone Montanari, An Italian Discovery

Jasper Rees Pordenone Montenari: 'Il Pittore a la modella' (1978)

Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

American Primeval, Netflix review - nightmare on the Wild Fr...

It seems The Osmonds may not have been the worst outrage perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by the Mormons. American Primeval is set...

Chamayou, BBC Philharmonic, Wigglesworth, Bridgewater Hall,...

Top Brownie points for the BBC Philharmonic for being one of the first (maybe the first?) to celebrate the birth centenary of Pierre Boulez this...

The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre review - new broom sweeps c...

There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to...

Gala Preview Show, De Montfort Hall review - Leicester Comed...

Europe's biggest comedy festival, which showcases established stars, works in progress, workshops and competitions, kicks off next month, and this...

Album: Moonchild Sanelly - Full Moon

Rooted in South African electronic styles such as...

The Second Act review - absurdist meta comedy about stardom

Can any line from The Second Act be taken at face value? Not really. “I should never have made this film,” confides Florence (the starry...

Music Reissues Weekly: Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedr...

Yeti Lane’s second album The Echo Show was released in March 2012. The Paris-based duo’s LP was stunning: holding together overall, as...

Album: Lambrini Girls - Who Let the Dogs Out

Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira are furious. Livid with the rapist...