Visual Arts Reviews
Mariko Mori: Rebirth, Burlington Gardens, Royal AcademyWednesday, 12 December 2012
The Royal Academy’s spacious white galleries at Burlington Gardens are flooded with mystic light and filled with New Age baubles. You are bathed in a trippy purple haze as you enter one gallery which contains a giant glowing pod. The translucent pod is meant to resemble an ancient monolith but instead looks more like an oversized Ikea lamp. The work derives its title, Tom Na H-iu II, from the Celtic “Tom na h-iubhraich” – a site of “spiritual transmigration”. Read more...
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Carving in Britain from 1910 to Now, Fine Art SocietySunday, 09 December 2012
Carving in Britain from 1910 to Now is an accurate but unalluring title for what is a seminal show. Read more... |
Francesco Clemente, Blain SouthernWednesday, 05 December 2012
The Neapolitan Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 into a patrician Italian family, the son of a judge. He studied classics in school and architecture in Rome, became a photographer, and then turned, as a fine art autodidact, to painting and drawing. He has spent substantial time over several decades in Madras, where he had a studio, and in Varanasi, with its continual burning pyres for the dead before they are floated off into the Ganges. Read more... |
Artes Mundi Prize, National Museum Wales, CardiffFriday, 30 November 2012
An award for artists whose work engages with "social reality, lived experience and the human condition" has been won by a Mexican forensic technician whose works deals intimately with her country’s brutal drug wars. Britain’s most valuable art award to a single artist, the Cardiff-based Artes Mundi Prize, saw nominees this year from Cuba, England, India, Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden. Read more... |
Jean Dubuffet/ Gwen John and Celia Paul, Pallant House Gallery, ChichesterTuesday, 27 November 2012
Pallant House Gallery is an extraordinary hybrid, an elaborate and magnificent early 18th-century town house on a narrow Chichester street in the heart of the city, with a soberly elegant extension by Colin St John Wilson (2006) which houses one of the finest collections of 20th-century British art anywhere in the country. Nothing could be more powerful and intelligently surprising than its present unusual combination of shows. Read more... |
Death: A Self-Portrait, Wellcome CollectionSunday, 25 November 2012
Death terrifies and fascinates in equal measure: we fear both the journey and the void, but can’t help but poke and prod its weary carcass. That’ll be us soon, as sure as taxes. The promise of eternal life offers to take out death’s sting, and one wonders whether art, rather than offering a straightforward memento mori, really might have a similar function. Read more... |
Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, British LibraryFriday, 16 November 2012
A photograph from 1858 shows a feeble and frail octogenarian who happens to be the last Mughal emperor. Bahadur Shah II (pictured below right), reclining in his wretched prison in Delhi, awaiting trial, is about to be exiled to Burma. Many of his family and his retinue would be summarily executed, the civilian population murdered, and a number of the great Mughal monuments of Old Delhi ruined. Read more... |
A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance, Tate ModernThursday, 15 November 2012
A Bigger Splash... opens with Hans Namuth’s famous 1951 film of Jackson Pollock balletically dripping, flicking and pouring paint onto the canvas at his feet. Beneath the screen a long, scroll-like painting by Pollock lies on the gallery floor. The arrangement implies that this could be the painting the artist is creating on film while, subliminally, another message is being conveyed. Read more... |
Light from the Middle East: New Photography, Victoria & Albert MuseumWednesday, 14 November 2012
This compilation of nearly 90 photographs by 30 photographers from 13 different countries of the Middle East is literally and metaphorically illuminating. The Paris-based Iranian photographer Abbas puts it thus: “I write with light.” Read more... |
The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein, The Queen's GalleryFriday, 09 November 2012
In what ways was the Northern Renaissance distinct from the Italian one? When we look at a painting by Holbein we’re struck by the painting’s rich surface: we admire the finely delineated weave of a Turkish rug, the individual hairs of fur lining a heavy coat, the intricate calligraphy of musical notation in an open hymn book. Since all is sumptuous surface and detail, our eyes feast upon the mass, weight and texture of objects firmly rooting us to the material world. Read more... |
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