sat 06/09/2025

Visual arts

The Jameel Prize, Victoria & Albert Museum

Hadie Shafdie's '26000 Pages' echoes the physical act of ecstatic recitation

Hadie Shafdie, Iranian-born and now living in America, uses phrases and words taken from mystical Sufi poetry, incantations of sequences of the names of the divine. She handwrites and prints the devotions, usually spoken or chanted, on thousands...

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theartsdesk in Kuala Lumpur: Culture as a Weapon

As hot, sweaty tourists dangle their feet in pools for Thai Nibble Fish to eat the dead skin from their feet at Kuala Lumpur’s quirky Art Deco Central Market, a small theatre upstairs is packed for a play about racial divisions and the myth of...

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Lucian Freud, 1922-2011

Lucian Freud, who died aged 88 at his west London home on Wednesday, was often described as Britain's greatest living artist. In the six decades he was active, figurative painting went in and out of fashion - though mostly it was out - but...

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Forests, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes, National Gallery

The National Gallery has in recent years made a speciality of examining the hitherto unexamined. Just for starters, a surprise hit some years ago was Spanish Still Lifes, 2007 saw Renoir Landscapes (who knew?), last year there was the ravishing...

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The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution, BBC Two

Who could argue that television isn’t a great medium for learning about art? In its pared-down, visually literate way it delivers what dull, theory-laden extrapolations often can’t (if only because artists don’t think that way when they make things...

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Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton

'They Teach us Nothing': The Chapman children gather round an artwork

It begins in a so-so fashion. The ground-floor gallery at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard features a sea of Constructivist sculptures on plinths. These are made from bits of torn cardboard and loo rolls, sloppily painted. Jake and Dinos Chapman love corny...

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Hiroshi Sugimoto, Edinburgh Festival

4 Aug-18 Sep, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Japanese art photographer’s series Lightning Fields and Photoge nic Drawings. Complimentary exhibition: Towards the Light, colour woodcutsfrom Britain and Japan.

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Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

In the days before there were any paparazzi to catch celebrities unawares, the pictures of the stars that reached mere mortals like ourselves were carefully staged by the film studios. Establishments like MGM, Warner Bros and Paramount Pictures...

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Jake and Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton

For the past year, Jake and Dinos Chapman have worked in separ ate studios to produce a series of works in isolation from each other. The White Cube's dual exhibition at Mason's Yard and Hoxton Square explores theresult of their first non-...

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British Masters, BBC Four/ The World's Most Expensive Paintings, BBC One

James Fox: Ludicrous assertions about British Art

Does James Fox fancy himself as the Niall Ferguson of art history? I ask because clearly this latest addition to the growing pantheon of television art historians wants to do for British art what Ferguson sought to do for the British Empire. He...

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Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500, National Gallery

Andrea Mantegna’s 'Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint John the Baptist'

Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the...

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Thomas Struth: Photography 1978-2010

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