fri 12/09/2025

Visual arts

Quilts 1700-2010, Victoria & Albert Museum

This 18th-century bedcover was probably a professional commission, yet amateur examples are just as impressive

The notion of women’s work has undergone a revolution, and yet that revolution has, in many ways, come comfortably full circle. We may now celebrate the work of generations of women who, limited to the domestic realm, were perhaps also liberated by...

Read more...

Tinie Tempah and the rise and rise of black British pop

A little revolution is taking place at the top of the pop charts. UK artist Tinie Tempah's rap track “Pass Out” has had two weeks at number one, and at the time of writing looks very much like it may successfully fight off Lady Gaga & Beyonce's...

Read more...

Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters, Serpentine Gallery

Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work...

Read more...

The Culture Show: Henry Moore, BBC Two

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1951)

What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity. Rather than a simple programme...

Read more...

From Floor to Sky: British Sculpture and the Studio Experience, Ambika P3

Foreground: Clone Installation (1980-1982) by Keith Brown. Background film: Communion (2010) by Nina Danino

From Floor to Sky looks at a relatively little known, but pivotal, moment in the development of British sculpture: the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when tutors and students at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College worked...

Read more...

Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield St

An abandoned classroom in a school in Chernobyl

A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of...

Read more...

English Journey Revisited, AV Festival, Newcastle

Alan Moore performing at the Southbank Centre, London 2007

The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the...

Read more...

theartsdesk in Newcastle: The AV Festival

At seven o'clock on a Friday night, with the first spring twilight of the year as a backdrop, Newcastle’s Civic Centre reverberated to a new composition for its Carillon bells. Mingling eerily with birdsong, it marked a rather different start to the...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Sarnath Banerjee

Sarnath Banerjee: 'Everybody has his own aesthetics; but mine are a bit… wonky.'

When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public...

Read more...

Art Gallery: Sarnath Banerjee

The subversive artist and film-maker Sarnath Banerjee, credited with introducing the graphic novel to India, features in a London show, Royale With Cheese, at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1, where his eight-scene graphic narrative Che in...

Read more...

Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain, ICA

Billy Childish: honouring the tradition of the outsider artist

Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry....

Read more...

Irving Penn: Small Trades, Hamiltons Gallery/ Portraits, NPG

Irving Penn's Le Chevrier 'holds his box as proudly as an artist with his paints'

This week I discovered Irving Penn’s little-known portraits of anonymous street traders, taken in Paris, London and New York between 1950 and 1951. Previously unseen in the UK, they are now appearing at Hamiltons’ Mayfair gallery: 33 examples from a...

Read more...
Subscribe to Visual arts