Visual Arts Reviews

The World of Charles and Ray Eames, Barbican

Marina Vaizey Friday, 06 November 2015

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.

Chantal Akerman: NOW, Ambika P3

Sarah Kent Thursday, 05 November 2015

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.

Imagine… Antony Gormley: Being Human, BBC One

Marina Vaizey Wednesday, 04 November 2015

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.

theartsdesk in Mons: The turbulence of Verlaine

Mark Sheerin Sunday, 01 November 2015

Poetry is everywhere in Mons, with 10 kilometres of verse painted along the city streets. You’ll even find it on the walls of the city’s imposing 19th-century prison, at odds with the arrow slits, the crenellations, and the towering nets preventing family or friends throwing contraband into the exercise yards.

Sonica 2015, Glasgow

David Kettle Sunday, 01 November 2015

Sometimes it’s visual art with a sonic slant; sometimes it’s music with a visual slant. Glasgow’s Sonica – created by producers Cryptic, now in its third year and bigger than ever – feels like a thoroughly modern festival, defying genre boundaries and instead focusing squarely on the intersection of the sonic and the visual. That might make some of its offerings hard to categorise, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

In Sol LeWitt's head is a machine that makes art

Fisun Güner Saturday, 31 October 2015

Any exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s work raises an interesting question. Why go and see it if it’s the idea that’s the most important aspect of the work? In his 1967 essay, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, he clearly outlined the predominance of the idea over material form, which may seem an obvious statement to make about conceptual art (the label’s on the tin) but LeWitt went further. “All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair,” he wrote.

The Face of Britain by Simon Schama, BBC Two

Marina Vaizey Thursday, 29 October 2015

This was the fifth and last in a series of hour-long programmes amounting to a vivid, varied and extraordinarily lively history of Britain. Although ostensibly a history of portraiture, the images have been hooks for Simon Schama, that most ubiquitous historian who bears a rather charming resemblance to Tigger – very bouncy, very chatty, very enthusiastic, a little self-regarding – to subtly engage us in a journey through the political and social landmarks of British history.

Jean-Etienne Liotard, Royal Academy

Marina Vaizey Sunday, 25 October 2015

Unswervingly confident, relaxed and assured, the élite of the 18^th century are currently arrayed on the walls of the Royal Academy, gazing down at us with the utmost assurance of their unassailable place in the world, bright eyed and dressed to match.

Lee Miller, Imperial War Museum

Marina Vaizey Tuesday, 20 October 2015

What a woman. Does the news that Kate Winslet is to play the polymath Lee Miller in a Hollywood biopic mean a kind of sanctified apotheosis of Miller's quite extraordinary life? The story is so dramatic it transcends any fiction. Her path was controversial, imaginative, accomplished, and in many ways profoundly sad, an emotional roller-coaster. But the legacy is astonishing, as more and more of her achievement as a photographer is revealed.

Giacometti, National Portrait Gallery

Florence Hallett Sunday, 18 October 2015

Any number of puzzling and fantastical stories were told by Alberto Giacometti in the construction of a personal mythology that helped secure his reputation as an archetypal artist of the avant-garde. Less heroic than the oft-quoted accounts of his transformative, visionary experiences, the story of his return to Paris after the Second World War is no less poignant, nor significant for all that.