Visual Arts Reviews
Yayoi Kusama, Victoria MiroTuesday, 07 June 2016
Pure euphoria! The lady, a mere 87, her stature diminutive, her hair and lipstick a blazing scarlet, is a painter, but also a draughtsman, a sculptor, a creator of environments and installations, a performer, a designer of objects and clothing (affordable too at UniQlo) an illustrator, a writer, a poet, and an all-round polymath. Kusama has lived by choice for nearly 40 years in a psychiatric hospital in her native Japan, working indefatigably. Read more... |
Found, The Foundling MuseumFriday, 03 June 2016
Cornelia Parker invited over 60 fellow artists to join her in exhibiting at the Foundling Museum in London. Titled Found, the show spills out from the basement gallery to infiltrate every room in the building and remind us that, when the Foundling Hospital was set up as a charity for destitute children in 1739, artists made an important contribution. 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... |
theartsdesk in Bilbao: The School of Paris at the Guggenheim MuseumSunday, 29 May 2016
Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces indistinct but for red-slit mouths and coal-black eyes. We seem to be in the room with them, and yet we are isolated. Read more... |
Jeff Koons: Now, Newport Street GalleryThursday, 26 May 2016
The second exhibition staged by Damien Hirst in his stunning Newport Street Gallery is of work from his collection by the American artist, Jeff Koons. Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths when, in 1987, Charles Saatchi showed Koons and other young Americans at his gallery in St John’s Wood. Hirst was blown away by the freshness and ambition of work that took Warhol’s love affair with consumer culture one stage further. 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... |
Grayson Perry: All Man, Channel 4Friday, 20 May 2016
You are a massive cock. A gigantic tool. You are a monumental prick. Grayson Perry did not mince his message as he concluded his portrait of modern maleness with a tour of the City of London. At the end of each programme he has presented the subjects of his study with an artistic response to their world. Read more... |
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... |
Painting with Light, Tate BritainThursday, 12 May 2016
Today we amuse ourselves with Facebook clips of talking cats, but in the 1850s they had stereographs, pairs of identical photographs that, viewed through special lenses, become suddenly and gloriously three-dimensional. Vistas open up as if by magic, the illusion of space all the more beguiling for its transience. Read more... |
Mona Hatoum, Tate ModernThursday, 05 May 2016
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut of Palestinian parents. She came to London to study at the Slade School in 1975 and got stuck here when civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning home. In effect, she has been living in exile ever since and the sense of displacement and unease induced by being far from home permeates much of her work. Read more... |
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