Visual Arts Reviews
The Great MuseumTuesday, 09 December 2014
I don’t think any of us will look at a museum in quite the same way after this dazzling documentary. For several years the Austrian film-maker Johannes Holzhausen and his team followed what seems to be scores of the working staff inhabiting Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (KMH), as they physically cared for the remarkable objects in their care, worried about how best to put them on view for the public, and met continually to discuss museum matters. Read more...
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Maggi Hambling, National GalleryFriday, 05 December 2014
I must admit to feeling, briefly, just a little disappointed on first sight of Maggi Hambling’s Walls of Water, nine new paintings on show at the National Gallery. Perhaps it was the evocative title, which promises high drama and instant gratification, something obviously and extravagantly impressive. In short, I was expecting something bigger, an absurd statement because eight out of the nine canvases measure more than six by seven feet. And yet, they are small. Read more... |
Conflict, Time, Photography, Tate ModernSunday, 30 November 2014
This huge exhibition is an awesome and terrifying compilation of photographs of the sites of conflict, and the remnants of wars and conflicts of all kinds – local, civil, short, long, global, technological, industrial and hand-to-hand. Taken from the mid 19th century to the present, the images – hundreds, perhaps even well over a thousand – are oblique and often incomprehensible or unidentifiable without the expansive wall captions. Read more... |
HockneyFriday, 28 November 2014
David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. Read more... |
Olga Chernysheva, Pace GalleryThursday, 27 November 2014
Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats (main picture and pictured below). There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti. Read more... |
The Institute of Sexology, Wellcome CollectionSunday, 23 November 2014
There is nothing erotic or titillating about The Institute of Sexology, an exhibition the Wellcome Collection plans to keep open for a year. Those expecting a display of fertility symbols, fetish objects, kinky clothing or sex aids down the ages will be deeply disappointed. Read more... |
Imagine... Anselm Kiefer, BBC OneTuesday, 18 November 2014
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Read more... |
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2014, National Portrait GallerySunday, 16 November 2014
It is hard to know whether the thematic and stylistic threads running through this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize are evidence of some general shift in approach, or simply reflect the judges’ tastes. In any case, where last year’s shortlist featured stark portraits highlighting the tricky power relationships between photographer and subject, this year’s competition tends towards something gentler and more empathetic – an altogether homelier sort of photography. Read more... |
Allen Jones, Royal AcademyThursday, 13 November 2014
There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the torture meted out to prisoners of war by their Japanese guards in WWII. Read more... |
Emily Carr, Dulwich Picture GalleryWednesday, 12 November 2014
Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour. Read more... |
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