Visual Arts Reviews
Goldsmiths: But is it Art? BBC FourTuesday, 13 April 2010
Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making... Read more...
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Anthony Caro: Upright Sculptures, Annely JudaMonday, 12 April 2010
Anthony Caro makes works with the human figure in mind. The venerated sculptor, who, at 86, remains seemingly unstoppable, came to prominence in the early Sixties with his brightly coloured abstract steel sculptures. These, such as his seminal 1962 work, Early One Morning – an open-form sculpture of welded steel plates and delicately balancing rods painted in bright red – chimed with an era of optimism and confidence. Any figurative references were entirely incidental. Read more... |
Angela de la Cruz/ Anna Maria Maiolino, Camden Arts CentreFriday, 02 April 2010
Acts of wanton destruction appear to have taken place at Camden Arts Centre, as canvases lie crushed, ripped, crumpled and broken. Monochrome and minimalist works have had their stretchers, their very backbones, ripped and cracked in two, and their once taut, painted surfaces hang, in some instances, like flayed skin. Their broken carcasses are arranged in a seemingly haphazard fashion, hanging precariously from walls or stuffed into corners. They lie forlornly on the floor, or are pushed with... Read more... |
NightwatchingFriday, 26 March 2010
How might a portraitist, working in oils, describe Martin Freeman's face? If one were a novelist, heavy with description, perhaps the following: fleshy, boneless features; pasty Northern European pallor; flesh the texture of sweaty suet pudding. Not, then, conventionally handsome, but still, we have those plaintive, expressive eyes and that rumpled yet quietly dignified presence. Read more... |
Quilts 1700-2010, Victoria & Albert MuseumWednesday, 24 March 2010
The notion of women’s work has undergone a revolution, and yet that revolution has, in many ways, come comfortably full circle. We may now celebrate the work of generations of women who, limited to the domestic realm, were perhaps also liberated by the creative potential of the domestic crafts, and specifically, needlecraft. Which is a fairly radical notion in itself. |
Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters, Serpentine GalleryThursday, 18 March 2010
Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work repeating the same image in paint, in collage, in photography and in mixed media. Read more... |
The Culture Show: Henry Moore, BBC TwoThursday, 18 March 2010
What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity. |
From Floor to Sky: British Sculpture and the Studio Experience, Ambika P3Monday, 15 March 2010
From Floor to Sky looks at a relatively little known, but pivotal, moment in the development of British sculpture: the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when tutors and students at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College worked together in challenging traditional attitudes to the medium. New ways of teaching and thinking about sculpture were evolved, and new materials such as fibreglass and plastic introduced. This exhibition focuses on the students of one particular... Read more... |
Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield StMonday, 15 March 2010
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the... Read more... |
English Journey Revisited, AV Festival, NewcastleMonday, 15 March 2010
The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the guitarist from drone doom band Sunn O))), expectations were hard to form. The organisers must have realised the mystery - four sheets of A4 were thrust into our hands last night by ushers upon entry as a means of explanation, although the... Read more... |
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