sat 13/09/2025

Visual arts

Graffiti Gallery: Crack & Shine

Graffiti is the only form of artistic self-expression that can get you both arrested and exhibited. Its most celebrated exponent, Banksy, is the subject of tabloid news speculation. The faces and names of most graffiti artists are even more of a...

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Tim Davies, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea

Cadet: Running at Preston (DVD installation): 'the artist runs in circles, filming the poppies, the grey uniforms, and gold lettering on the plinth'

Wales doesn’t figure high on the UK charts of art awareness, but one of its leading contemporary artists, 43-year-old Tim Davies, represents a generation who are producing significant, original work without approbation from the Hoxton or Shoreditch...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Anish Kapoor

The sculptor Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), RA, CBE, won the Turner Prize in 1990. His public works are characterised by their gigantic scale and ambition. In the UK he is probably best known for Marsyas (2002), the viscerally red “ear trumpet” that...

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Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, Hayward Gallery

West Coast pop art always was a poor relation to the world-beating New York original. Beside the Big Apple titans – Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg – LA painters such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin and John Altoon remained...

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Art Gallery: Ed Ruscha

Standard Station: 'The Hayward exhibition achieves the rare feat of making you actually like the artist as a human being'

Half a century of Ed Ruscha's paintings are on show at the Hayward Gallery, London. Mark Hudson reviews elsewhere in theartsdesk the display of Los Angeles's most famous painter, "an aspect of American art about which we’ve remained remarkably...

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Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009, National Portrait Gallery

Does a winning photograph jump out at you? Sure, we can talk earnestly of composition, an interesting subject, a telling juxtaposition, or the abstract interplay of colour, texture and light. But perhaps more than any other visual art form, what...

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Wunderbar Festival

With the launch of the Wunderbar Featival this week, Newcastle continues to demonstrate just what 2008’s European Capital of Culture judges missed when they anointed Liverpool. The 10-day celebration, which starts tomorrow, is international in...

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Art Gallery: The Sacred Made Real

Fernandéz' Dead Christ, 1625–30:

Mark Hudson reviews on another page the National Gallery's exhibition of 17th-century Spanish sculpture and art, The Sacred Made Real, which he describes as "in some ways the most contemporary exhibition in London". Here are some of the artworks on...

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Art Gallery: Romuald Hazoumé

An extensive selection is shown here of the work of Romuald Hazoumé, the Benin contemporary artist whose iconic masks made from petrol canisters dumped around his poverty-stricken homeland of Benin launched his international career. A major...

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A Gold Medal for the Cultural Olympiad?

Worries that London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad had fallen at the first hurdle – as it seemed when the proposed Olympic Friend-ship, carrying a cargo of British artists and philosophers around the world, was scrapped – can be assuaged. The organisers...

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theartsdesk in Paris: Surrealist Blues

Sans titre by Jacques-André Boiffard

I've been having rather a surreal autumn here in Paris. First, I was lucky enough to catch the last day of Une semaine de bonté at the Musée d'Orsay, where the original collages were on display in five colour-coded chambers. For those not in the...

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Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill, Royal Academy

By all accounts Eric Gill had a shocking private life. When it was revealed in Fiona MacCarthy’s biography, published 20 years ago, that he’d embarked on an adult incestuous relationship with not only both his of sisters but, later, with two of his...

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