sat 14/06/2025

contemporary art

Helen Chadwick, Richard Saltoun

It's 17 years since Helen Chadwick died without warning of heart failure at the tragically early age of 42 and nine years since the Barbican staged a retrospective of her work. Time, then, for a reappraisal and this small but beautifully presented...

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Gallery: Art Projects and The Catlin Guide at the London Art Fair

The London Art Fair may not have the international heft or VIP glamour of Frieze, but for 25 years it’s been the place to see and buy the best of British modern art. While the main fair features 100 established galleries – including Browse and Derby...

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Artes Mundi Prize, National Museum Wales, Cardiff

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...

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Turner Prize 2012, Tate Britain

There are two films in the Turner Prize exhibition and taken together and watched end-to-end they last just under three hours. That sounds gruelling for an art exhibition, but they’re from the strongest two candidates on this year’s shortlist. And...

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Thomas Schütte: Faces and Figures, Serpentine Gallery

On the evidence of this Serpentine exhibition of huge sculptures, small sculptures, photographs, drawings, watercolours and prints, the German artist Thomas Schütte is obsessed, but obsessed, with faces. It is billed as the first show to focus...

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Lindsay Seers: Nowhere Less Now

Lindsay Seers is one of the most exciting artists to have emerged in Britain over the last 10 years. Preoccupied with big philosophical questions, her work explores notions of truth, memory, imagination and history. Nowhere Less Now, commissioned by...

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theartsdesk in Kiev: The International Biennale for Contemporary Art

Giving his press conference speech at the opening of Kiev’s first international art biennale, David Elliott, the seasoned British curator charged with its organisation, looked exhausted, though far from triumphant and more than a little irate. “It’s...

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Liza Lou, White Cube Hoxton

There was something perverse about the opening of Liza Lou’s show at White Cube in Hoxton Square on a wet Thursday evening. It was as quiet as I’ve ever known it inside, while outside, barred from drinking among Lou’s fragile works, a throng of...

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Jamie Shovlin: Various Arrangements, Haunch of Venison

I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics,...

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Damien Hirst: Genius or Con Artist?

As Damien Hirst’s Tate retrospective looms large on the horizon, the million-dollar question is whether the work has withstood the test of time. Will exciting and provocative sculptures like the pickled shark, which became an icon of Brit Art the...

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Gillian Wearing, Whitechapel Gallery

The first major retrospective of the videos, photographs and sculptures of Gillian Wearing is a deeply disturbing experience. Her videos can be just a few minutes, or as long as an hour, but are not sequential narratives. They can be dipped in and...

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Mixed Media, Haunch of Venison

Group shows can be strained: the rubric can be so narrow that it has to be stretched to accommodate the artists at hand. That is one reason why Haunch of Venison's new show, Mixed Media, is so pleasing: it features contemporary sculpture with an...

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