Visual Arts Reviews
Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, Nottingham ContemporaryWednesday, 24 July 2013
Undines, mermaids, selkies, nixies, kraken. You’ll encounter such imaginary creatures in Aquatopia, an exhibition which delves into the myths of the ocean deep, and thereby to the murky, fathomless depths of our subconscious. But more often than imaginary beings you’ll encounter real ones who’ve touched our imaginations by their unearthly appearance and tapped into our deepest fears and desires, which means, naturally, our sexual desires. There’s a lot of octopus love going on. Read more... |
Laura Knight: Portraits, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 15 July 2013
Laura Knight’s wartime masterpiece Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring (1943) is a subtly glamorous picture, strikingly composed. A frieze of blue-clad women at an armament factory workbench are in the background, highlighting the profiled figure of Ruby tending her elaborately complex machine, at an oblique angle to the picture plane. Read more... |
The Spirit of Utopia, Whitechapel GalleryFriday, 12 July 2013
Some artists seem to need a reality check. The Spirit of Utopia is billed as a show of artists “who speculate on alternative futures for society, the economy and the environment”; but anyone anticipating cogent analysis or visionary ideas will be disappointed. The exhibition consists of a bunch of dreamers who imagine that an art context gives social significance to weak or wacky ideas. It doesn’t. Read more... |
Collecting Gauguin, Courtauld GallerySunday, 07 July 2013
A one-room display at the Courtauld of seven paintings, a wall of woodcuts, some drawings and a sculpture by the passionate and volatile Gauguin: for all its modesty, this is a staggeringly powerful show, replete with exotic dreams and embodying the power of the artist’s lasting influence. Read more... |
Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910-1940, Royal AcademyThursday, 04 July 2013
Artists love a good revolution. The social upheaval, the bubbling up of new ideas and the breaking down of old ones, attracts them like flies to fly paper. The Mexican revolution was no exception. During the years 1910-1940, Mexico attracted large numbers of international intellectuals and artists, seduced by the political maelstrom and apparent freedoms that beckoned in this culturally diverse and varied land. Read more... |
Vermeer & Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, National GalleryWednesday, 03 July 2013
Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society at all levels than the Golden Age of Dutch culture in the 17th century. Music is emblematic of time passing and its accompaniment, mortality Read more... |
Paul Delvaux, Blain Di DonnaTuesday, 02 July 2013
Paul Delvaux, the subject of a modest exhibition at the Blain Di Donna gallery in Mayfair, was JG Ballard’s favourite painter. The writer prized him for the creation of a complete world. Ballard found that world curious and inviting. He said he could spend hours gazing at the pictures wishing he could escape into their alternate reality. Ballard was made of sterner stuff than me. The places Delvaux paints seem quiet but harsh, not much happens but they feel menacing. Read more... |
Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, Tate BritainSunday, 30 June 2013
It’s part of the Lowry myth – the myth of many famous artists, in fact, whether or not it actually happens to be true – that he’s never been taken seriously as an artist by critics or by cognoscenti. Even the co-curator of this exhibition, T.J Clark says more or less the same. Lowry isn’t taken seriously, Clark has said, because anyone dealing with working-class life in class-ridden Britain can’t be taken seriously. Read more... |
Sturtevant: Leaps, Jumps and Bumps, Serpentine GallerySaturday, 29 June 2013
Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries. Read more... |
Curiosity: Art & the Pleasures of Knowing, Turner ContemporaryTuesday, 25 June 2013
One of this summer’s seaside attractions in Margate is an overstuffed walrus, but day-trippers won’t find it in the town’s Museum of Monstrosities. The taxidermic freak, on loan from the Horniman Museum, is the star exhibit in the new show at Turner Contemporary. Against the backdrop of a North Sea painted by Turner, the adipose Arctic mammal is out of its element. Read more... |
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