thu 24/07/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Visions of Paradise: Botticini's Palmieri Altarpiece, National Gallery

Florence Hallett

The strikingly architectural space that forms the upper portion of Botticini’s Palmieri altarpiece is well-suited to an entrance, forming as it does a sort of triumphal arch heralding great things beyond. And so it is that for years this painting hung over the entrance to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, oddly well-placed, but in truth of course, entirely out of place.

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Susan Philipsz: War Damaged Musical Instruments, Tate Britain

Sarah Kent

Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries are currently filled with a hauntingly beautiful sound installation by Susan Philipsz (main picture). The Scottish artist won the Turner Prize in 2010 for a sound piece that didn’t really work at the Tate. Intended to be heard under the bridges spanning the River Clyde in Glasgow, the recording of Philipsz's fragile voice singing sad folk songs was largely drowned out by ambient noise.

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High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson, The Queen’s Gallery

Marina Vaizey

“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.

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Susan Hiller, Lisson Gallery

Sarah Kent

This is Susan Hiller’s first exhibition since her Tate retrospective in 2011, and as it includes work from the 1970s to the present, it can also be seen as a retrospective of sorts. But since the selection was obviously governed by what was available for sale, it inevitably offers a piecemeal view of her achievements.

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Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer, The Queen’s Gallery

Marina Vaizey

What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. Its 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.

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Alexander Calder, Tate Modern

Fisun Güner

Sculpture that moves with the gentlest current of air! Sculpture that makes you want to do a little tap dance of joy! Or maybe the Charleston – swing a leg to those sizzling Jazz Age colours and shapes and rhythms. Look, that’s the queen of the Charleston right there – the “Black Pearl” of the Revue Nègre, Josephine Baker. She’s a freestyle 3D doodle in space, fashioned out of wire: spiral cones for pert breasts, that sinuous waist described by a single serpentine line.

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Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art, Victoria & Albert Museum

Marina Vaizey

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.

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The World of Charles and Ray Eames, Barbican

Marina Vaizey

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.

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Chantal Akerman: NOW, Ambika P3

Sarah Kent

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman used her camera to record, with a sympathetic eye, the world around her – both in the immediate surroundings of her Paris flat and in the wider world. The news that she died last month, apparently by her own hand, sadly makes this retrospective of the installations she began creating in 1995 all the more timely.

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Imagine… Antony Gormley: Being Human, BBC One

Marina Vaizey

Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.

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