Visual Arts Reviews
Fred Sandback, Whitechapel GallerySunday, 29 May 2011
Fred Sandback is one of the great overlooked of the Minimalist movement that developed in the 1960s. Both those words are important – “great” and “overlooked”: his work is genuinely great, and part of its greatness is the way it has overlooking built into it. Read more... |
Tessa Farmer, Danielle Arnaud Art Gallery/Crypt GallerySaturday, 28 May 2011
The world of artist and entomologist Tessa Farmer really is a world, wholly self-contained and free of human kind – unless you see her tiny warring fairies as symbolic of mankind’s conscience-free decimation of our planet’s environment and co-inhabitants. And it’s hard not to when you see them relentlessly picking over the corpse of a bird, mugging a mouse, or scrapping with a hornet, their tiny skeletal forms so industriously yet somehow amusingly destructive. Read more... |
George Shaw: The Sly and Unseen Day, South London GalleryFriday, 27 May 2011
By anyone’s standards this is an obscure year for the Turner Prize shortlist: you should consider yourself a contemporary art aficionado if you’ve heard of even one of the artists. And if this is indeed the case, that artist is likely to be George Shaw; in recent years his work has featured regularly in group displays at Tate Britain. Read more... |
Egon Schiele, Richard Nagy GallerySunday, 22 May 2011
Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls. But don't let that dissuade you from seeing one of the shows of the year. Read more... |
Kutlug Ataman, Brighton Festival/Thomas Dane Gallery, LondonSunday, 22 May 2011
One of the highlights of this year’s Brighton Festival, curated largely via web chats and long-distance phone conversations by Aung San Suu Kyi, is Kutlug Ataman’s silent film installation Mesopotamian Dramaturgies. The leading Turkish artist, a favourite of international biennales and arts festivals, has taken over the town’s Old... Read more... |
The Hepworth WakefieldSaturday, 21 May 2011
A town in desperate need of regeneration commissions David Chipperfield, the architect of the moment, to build an art gallery in the hope of attracting visitors with deep pockets. Read more... |
Max Bill, Annely Juda Fine ArtThursday, 19 May 2011
Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at full strength less than 20 years ago could have a past that is so strongly entwined with these legendary names – hard to imagine, that is, until one looks at the work displayed in this fine retrospective, which even so manages to encompass... Read more... |
The Mountain That Had To Be Painted, BBC FourWednesday, 18 May 2011
Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit. “Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,” recalled George Borrow, author of the prolix Victorian classic Wild Wales, “none made a greater impression upon me.” He was not alone. Arenig Fawr, a southern outcrop of Snowdonia, was also the entry point for British art into Post-Impressionism. Read more... |
Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want, Hayward GalleryTuesday, 17 May 2011
That Tracey Emin is one of the defining personalities of our time isn’t in doubt. Even if you never want to hear another second of her guileless wittering, another word about her abortions, traumatic early rape and relentless onanistic neediness, you can't deny that her self-effected transformation from chippy Margate outsider to big-league art-world player represents something extraordinary. Read more... |
Christine Borland & Kerry Tribe, Camden Arts CentreMonday, 16 May 2011
“As a student at Glasgow School of Art I used to visit the amazing anatomy, zoology and ethnographic collections at Glasgow University,” says Christine Borland. “I couldn’t understand why I was so intrigued, except for the question of how something so awful – so dead – could also be so beautiful. I was trying to unpick my responses, to understand how beauty and death could co-exist.” Read more... |
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