fri 12/09/2025

Visual arts

The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Artangel at Blythe House

On the roof of Blythe House: 'Armoured' shimmers in the light

Judith Clark is a fashion curator, Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and writer. In collaboration with Artangel, that font of innovative artistic commissions (including Rachel Whiteread’s House, Michael Landy’s Break Down), they have produced what is...

Read more...

Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, British Museum

This superb exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings, featuring 100 works and chosen from the outstanding graphic collections of the Uffizi and the British Museum, explores the evolution of the preparatory sketch in the 15th century. We learn how...

Read more...

Marc Quinn moves White Cube into the green

'Archaeology of Desire' by Mark Quinn

Thanks to the wonders of council applications, theartsdesk can bring you an exclusive preview of Marc Quinn's new sculptures to be placed outside the White Cube gallery on the grass of Hoxton Square.Quinn will be putting two colossal orchids (over...

Read more...

theartsdesk in Glasgow: Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art

Douglas Gordon: a faster 24 Hour Psycho than ever before

During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips

Born in 1954, Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst, literary critic and author. For 17 years he worked as a child psychotherapist in the NHS before moving into private practice to work with adults. As well as being a self-confessed "sceptical"...

Read more...

Goldsmiths: But is it Art? BBC Four

Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking...

Read more...

Anthony Caro: Upright Sculptures, Annely Juda

Anthony Caro makes works with the human figure in mind. The venerated sculptor, who, at 86, remains seemingly unstoppable, came to prominence in the early Sixties with his brightly coloured abstract steel sculptures. These, such as his seminal 1962...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon: Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe, 1996

Since winning the Turner Prize in 1996 with Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) has lived in Germany, France, New York and Germany again. But in accent and attitude, he remains a Glaswegian. Those roots are being reaffirmed...

Read more...

Angela de la Cruz/ Anna Maria Maiolino, Camden Arts Centre

Angela de la Cruz: destruction is an artform

Acts of wanton destruction appear to have taken place at Camden Arts Centre, as canvases lie crushed, ripped, crumpled and broken. Monochrome and minimalist works have had their stretchers, their very backbones, ripped and cracked in two, and their...

Read more...

The Art Nouveau Dacha, Russia's wooden weekend houses

"Russia has a remarkable and ancient tradition of wooden buildings that dates back to the tenth century, with the remains of Medieval fortresses demonstrating the sophistication of the Nordic wooden construction methods employed across Russia and...

Read more...

Design Gallery: The Art Nouveau Dacha

Vladimir Story's 1917 brochure for patterns for building Russia's traditional wooden country houses - called dachas - has been rescued from oblivion by the chance discovery of an ancient copy of it in Georgia. Now reprinted, The Art Nouveau Dacha:...

Read more...

Nightwatching

How might a portraitist, working in oils, describe Martin Freeman's face? If one were a novelist, heavy with description, perhaps the following: fleshy, boneless features; pasty Northern European pallor; flesh the texture of sweaty suet pudding. Not...

Read more...
Subscribe to Visual arts