Visual Arts Reviews
Alexander Calder, Tate ModernTuesday, 10 November 2015
Sculpture that moves with the gentlest current of air! Sculpture that makes you want to do a little tap dance of joy! Or maybe the Charleston – swing a leg to those sizzling Jazz Age colours and shapes and rhythms. Look, that’s the queen of the Charleston right there – the “Black Pearl” of the Revue Nègre, Josephine Baker. She’s a freestyle 3D doodle in space, fashioned out of wire: spiral cones for pert breasts, that sinuous waist described by a single serpentine line. Read more...
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Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 07 November 2015
Every object tells a story, nowhere more so than in a museum. The Victoria & Albert has been busy retelling as many stories as it can by rearranging, refurbishing, adding and subtracting from the millions of objects it has at its disposal to display, study and conserve. Read more... |
The World of Charles and Ray Eames, BarbicanFriday, 06 November 2015
Chairs, chairs, chairs, as far as the eye can see. Plywood or plastic shells, some decorated with hilarious drawings of jolly nudes by Saul Steinberg (main picture), others in all the colours you can imagine – stacks, in rows, alluring and all so familiar. As it is an exhibition, there is an air of reverence – heaven forbid that you actually have a chair to sit on! - but these chairs have been design icons for well over half a century. Read more... |
Chantal Akerman: NOW, Ambika P3Thursday, 05 November 2015
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman used her camera to record, with a sympathetic eye, the world around her – both in the immediate surroundings of her Paris flat and in the wider world. The news that she died last month, apparently by her own hand, sadly makes this retrospective of the installations she began creating in 1995 all the more timely. Read more... |
Imagine… Antony Gormley: Being Human, BBC OneWednesday, 04 November 2015
Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Mons: The turbulence of VerlaineSunday, 01 November 2015
Poetry is everywhere in Mons, with 10 kilometres of verse painted along the city streets. You’ll even find it on the walls of the city’s imposing 19th-century prison, at odds with the arrow slits, the crenellations, and the towering nets preventing family or friends throwing contraband into the exercise yards. Read more... |
Sonica 2015, GlasgowSunday, 01 November 2015
Sometimes it’s visual art with a sonic slant; sometimes it’s music with a visual slant. Glasgow’s Sonica – created by producers Cryptic, now in its third year and bigger than ever – feels like a thoroughly modern festival, defying genre boundaries and instead focusing squarely on the intersection of the sonic and the visual. That might make some of its offerings hard to categorise, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Read more... |
In Sol LeWitt's head is a machine that makes artSaturday, 31 October 2015
Any exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s work raises an interesting question. Why go and see it if it’s the idea that’s the most important aspect of the work? In his 1967 essay, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, he clearly outlined the predominance of the idea over material form, which may seem an obvious statement to make about conceptual art (the label’s on the tin) but LeWitt went further. “All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair,” he wrote. Read more... |
The Face of Britain by Simon Schama, BBC TwoThursday, 29 October 2015
This was the fifth and last in a series of hour-long programmes amounting to a vivid, varied and extraordinarily lively history of Britain. Although ostensibly a history of portraiture, the images have been hooks for Simon Schama, that most ubiquitous historian who bears a rather charming resemblance to Tigger – very bouncy, very chatty, very enthusiastic, a little self-regarding – to subtly engage us in a journey through the political and social landmarks of British history. Read more... |
Jean-Etienne Liotard, Royal AcademySunday, 25 October 2015
Unswervingly confident, relaxed and assured, the élite of the 18th century are currently arrayed on the walls of the Royal Academy, gazing down at us with the utmost assurance of their unassailable place in the world, bright eyed and dressed to match. Read more... |
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