Visual arts
Germany: Memories of a Nation, British MuseumThursday, 16 October 2014
There is a 1953 Volkswagen parked in the Great Court of the British Museum, and we are reminded that Hitler persuaded Frederick Porsche (who gave his name of course to a hideously expensive luxury automobile) to design a people’s car. The postwar... Read more... |
Richard Tuttle, Tate Modern / Whitechapel GalleryThursday, 16 October 2014
It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its... Read more... |
Steve McQueen: Ashes, Thomas Dane GalleryWednesday, 15 October 2014
Ashes is a two-part exhibition. The darkened gallery at 3 Duke Street, St James’s is filled with the onscreen image of a young black man sitting on the prow of a small boat with his back to us (main picture). He turns occasionally to smile to camera... Read more... |
Rembrandt: The Late Works, National GalleryTuesday, 14 October 2014
All human life, as they say, is here: we witness displays of warmth and tenderness in virtuous matrimony; reflection and contemplation in quiet solitude. We respond to the soft seductions of the flesh in its yielding ripeness, and we feel the pathos... Read more... |
Glenn Ligon: Call and Response, Camden Arts CentreTuesday, 14 October 2014
“I was a nigger for twenty-three years. I gave that shit up. No room for advancement.” This astute joke, by American comedian Richard Pryor, is stencilled in black capitals on the gold ground of a painting by Glenn Ligon.I’ve long admired the work... Read more... |
Cathedrals of CultureMonday, 13 October 2014
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the... Read more... |
Listening, BALTIC 39, Hayward TouringFriday, 10 October 2014
Traditionally, art exhibitions have been about looking, but as more and more artists cross boundaries to engage with sound, touch and movement or to use film and video, work that is static and silent is becoming the exception rather than the rule.... Read more... |
Sigmar Polke: Alibis, Tate ModernThursday, 09 October 2014
England is in the throes of an unusual Teutonic love fest, and in 2014 no doubt deliberately. Music of course has always been omnipresent: Bach to Wagner, and a passion for Beethoven and Schubert that knows no bounds. But there has been a love-hate... Read more... |
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, British LibraryWednesday, 08 October 2014
We all romanticise the olden times. Those we think of as belonging to them are no different. The Castle of Otranto – by common consent, the first Gothic novel – was published a quarter of a millennium ago. “Otranto ‘lost its maidenhead’ today... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer, Royal AcademySunday, 05 October 2014
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. In 2007, I was left breathless by the German artist’s new paintings at the White Cube gallery in... Read more... |
Constructing Worlds, Barbican Art GalleryThursday, 02 October 2014
“The minute I touched New York,” wrote Berenice Abbott, “I had a burning desire to photograph the city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same but always changing.” Backed by funding... Read more... |
Turner Prize 2014, Tate BritainTuesday, 30 September 2014
When did Big Ideas make a comeback at the Turner Prize? Did they ever go away? In its 30-year history it seems that everything that wasn’t painting has been labelled “conceptual art”. But we know that labels can be very misleading, and the “... Read more... |
