Visual Arts Features
'I photographed Nelson Mandela'Friday, 06 December 2013
In 1997 I was in South Africa working on Truth and Lies, my book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when the New York Times Magazine said that they were doing a major feature on Mandela. He’d been in office for three years. The photographs were taken in the presidential house, the former seat of the oppressors. It felt very surreal for me because even the décor was Cape Dutch furniture. It was not what you might imagine for a black president. Read more... |
Turner Prize 2013: Laure Prouvost's work is visually seductive, funny and cleverTuesday, 03 December 2013
According to one broadsheet, Laure Prouvost was a “rank outsider” and the money was on comic doodler David Shrigley and the elusive Tino Seghal, he of those ghastly, utterly patronising performances designed to jolt the guileless gallery-goer from his or her imagined complacence. Her narratives are ambiguous, layered, unreliable, fragmented Read more... |
Art and poetry: the image makersSunday, 01 December 2013
When it comes to a blank page, artists and poets lead different kinds of lives and leave different kinds of marks. One for the eye, one for the ear, but both dependant on the thrill of recognition. The word, like paint, can be worked and reworked until the delight of a new image, a fresh metaphor in its right setting rings from the twisted garbage of lines in a notebook. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Dunkirk: The spirit of FRACWednesday, 27 November 2013
Those French and their grand projects! Not the least of them is the division of the country into 23 areas who acquire their own collections of international contemporary art, supplemented by a national loan collection, all under the rubric of FRAC, Fondation Régionale d’Art Contemporain. This 30-year programme has just opened a massive six-storey gallery as a brand new public face for the regional collection of the Nord-pas-de-Calais in the slightly forlorn city of Dunkirk. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Amsterdam: Being Kazimir MalevichSaturday, 23 November 2013
All eyes were on the Rijksmuseum when it re-opened in April after a 10-year refurbishment, but across the Museumplein, Amsterdam's gallery of contemporary and modern art, the Stedelijk, was already settling into its new look, unveiled six months before. Read more... |
Listed: Who shot/staged/fictionalised JFK?Saturday, 16 November 2013
On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime defector to the USSR called Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone old enough to remember is said to know where they were when they heard. As America dealt with its trauma, the conspiracy theories started,and spawned well over 1,000 books. The assassination also became the focus for artists in all art forms - in literature, theatre, film and even music. Read more... |
Lumiere Festival 2013, DurhamSaturday, 16 November 2013
The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio. Read more... |
Analogue - Rock Portraits by Tom Sheehan, Lomography Gallery Store EastWednesday, 13 November 2013
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Read more... |
Anthony Caro, 1924-2013Thursday, 24 October 2013
Sir Anthony Caro, who died on Wednesday of a heart attack aged 89, was an artist who remained not only active but inventive to the last. Read more... |
Gallery: Derwent Art PrizeFriday, 20 September 2013
You can use a computer to draw, as Hockney does, every day on his iPad, yet, despite all the technological advances the 21st century has thrown our way, the pencil continues to be the artist’s most basic tool. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages...
...
Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, Suzuki, St-Marti...
In the Saxony of 1725 – still in the grip of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” – Bach and his musicians would seldom have had to deal with the sort of...
4.48 Psychosis, Royal Court review – powerful but déjà vu
Sarah Kane is the most celebrated new writer of the 1990s. Her work is provocative and innovative. So it seems oddly unimaginative to mark the...
The Buccaneers, Apple TV+, Season 2 review - American advent...
Edith Wharton hadn’t finished her novel, The Buccaneers, when she died in 1937, but it was completed in 1993 by Marion Mainwaring. The...
Red Path review - the dead know everything
Here’s a film you might not feel like seeing. After all, Red Path tells of a 14-year-old in Tunisia who is forced to carry home the...
Album: Loyle Carner - Hopefully!
Loyle Carner’s Hopefully! is a luminous, deeply personal exploration of fatherhood, identity, and artistic reinvention, marking the south...
The Midnight Bell, Sadler's Wells review - a first repr...
Rarely has a revival given a firmer thumbs-up for the future of dance-theatre. Yet Matthew Bourne’s latest show, first aired at the tail-end of...
Album: HAIM - I Quit
Haim’s profile just grows and grows. Since their last album, youngest sibling Alana’s starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical Seventies...
Aldeburgh Festival, Weekend 1 review - dance to the music of...
This year’s Aldeburgh Festival – the 76th – takes as its motto a line from Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. The poet speaks of despair “...
Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a char...
If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of...