Visual Arts Reviews
Ivor Abrahams, Mystery and Imagination, Royal AcademyWednesday, 27 April 2011
In this month of royal weddings, endless bank holidays and (possibly?) equally endless good weather, it can be hard to focus, so perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to catch up with a show that nearly got away. Instead of winsome blockbusters like Tate Modern’s Miró, or the V&A’s The Cult of Beauty, Ivor Abrahams' print show is tart as well as sweet, small but perfectly formed, the ideal restorative after too much sugar, whether in wedding cakes or art galleries... Read more... |
Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals, Freud MuseumSunday, 24 April 2011
Freud’s West Hampstead house is tied up in a cat’s cradle of thick rope. The rope is the same colour as the brick, a deep orange but with a sheeny lustre. It makes the house look not quite real, a Brobdingnagian doll’s house transplanted to this unsuspecting corner of leafy west-London suburbia. It’s an uncanny impression heightened by the pristine condition of its squat, many-windowed façade. Read more... |
Jean-Marc Bustamante, Timothy Taylor GalleryWednesday, 20 April 2011
Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a merger of the two, and for the last few years these shockingly vivid “paintings” (I use the scare quotes intentionally) on Plexiglass. Read more... |
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate ModernTuesday, 19 April 2011
I used to love Joan Miró. Those cute biomorphic forms; those elegantly elusive doodles; those engagingly befuddled, cartoonish faces, each staring forlornly out of the cosmic soup of Miró’s playful imagination; and, of course, those bright, jazzy colours. But I used to love all that in the way that I loved Millais’s Ophelia floating in her deathbed weedy pond, or in the same way that I was taken in by...
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Revealed, Turner ContemporaryThursday, 14 April 2011
The opening of Turner Contemporary is being heralded as one of the most important cultural events of the year. Described as "a national and international venue in the regions" the gallery, it is hoped, will attract visitors from London and abroad and transform Margate’s flagging fortunes by stimulating new businesses such as commercial galleries, as well as cafés, restaurants and bars. Read more... |
Turner Contemporary, MargateThursday, 14 April 2011
The opening of Turner Contemporary is being heralded as one of the most important cultural events of the year. Described as "a national and international venue in the regions" the gallery, it is hoped, will attract visitors from London and abroad and transform Margate’s flagging fortunes by stimulating new businesses such as commercial galleries, as well as cafes, restaurants and bars. Read more... |
Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011, Ambika P3Thursday, 07 April 2011
You hardly expect to turn out for an exhibition of cutting-edge photography because of what the images are of. You go for the style, for the technique, for what’s being said about the medium and the, er, beauty. Yet at least one of the nominees for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize – an event that seems to be emerging as a kind of Turner... Read more... |
The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, V&ASaturday, 02 April 2011
A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of artists grew to inspire ideas not only about soft furnishings and the House Beautiful, but to influence a whole way of life, teaching the aspiring Victorian bohemian how, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “to live up to the beauty of one’s teapot... Read more... |
Chantal Joffe, Victoria Miro GalleryMonday, 28 March 2011
Chantal Joffe first came to attention in the 1990s with a series of paintings reproducing pornographic images, using a typically thick, impastoed paint and heavy brushstroke to depict hard-core acts in a defiantly flat, emotionless tone. Since then she has moved on, first to paintings reproducing fashion photographs, and now, in her new show, to images that re-imagine 19th-century aspects of femininity and femaleness in a 20th-century mash-up of psychology, anthropology and literary and art... Read more... |
Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, Wellcome CollectionWednesday, 23 March 2011
Weeds, memorably, have been described as merely being plants that grow where we don’t want them. Walking through the Wellcome’s fine new exhibition, we can conclude that the “dirt”, too, is merely material appearing out of its appropriate location. One man’s waste is another man’s fertiliser; one civilisation’s dust-heap another’s city foundations. Children first planting a window box learn that “dirt” is alchemy: stick in a seed, out of the dirt comes dinner. Read more... |
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