8 July 2017
A small confession to make here: I wrote a brief text for the catalogue of this show because Jamaica is where I originally come from. The subject of the exhibition is Jamaican art, manifested in its relationship to religion.
6 July 2017
The G F Watts Gallery, near Guilford, with one of very few art spaces in Britain that is basically dedicated to a single artist. Equivalents, perhaps, are Leighton House in Kensington, the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, and maybe – just maybe – Damien Hirst’s splendid new gallery in Newport Street, Vauxhall. There, however, the great Damien has been careful to show work by artists other than himself, though most of what is on view comes from his own collection.
5 July 2017
Everyone has a “somewhere else” in their lives Howard Hodgkin said in 1992. “My somewhere else is India”. Howard Hodgkin was 32 when he first visited that vast country. At Eton, he’d been shown a 17th-century Mughal painting by a teacher and in his 20s had become, despite modest means, something of a collector of Indian art. A meeting with Robert Skelton, […]
4 July 2017
A fascinating exhibition linking ‘Portraying a Nation’ and ‘The Evil Eye’ with works by August Sander and Otto Dix is currently showing at Tate Liverpool.
2 July 2017
What people choose to describe as ‘a masterpiece’ is usually pretty much a matter of context. On the whole, at this annual beanfeast for conspicuous consumers, you won’t find much in the way of graffiti art lurking around, though it’s just possible that you might be confronted with a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat now that he’s included in the pantheon of artists with multi-million dollar price tags.
28 June 2017
This year’s big graduation show of work by Fine Arts students from the Royal College of Art is both inspiriting and at the same time just a little bit depressing.
23 June 2017
This intimate exhibition of eighty watercolours from the Anglo-American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) has opened at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
22 June 2017
I confess I had a few reservations about the Fahrelnissa Zeid retrospective now at Tate Modern.
16 June 2017
The small exhibition of work by Richard Smith currently at the Flowers Gallery in Cork Street offers, among other things, a demonstration of just how drastically once huge reputations can fade. Smith died last year, at the age of 84.
Right now, in terms of the shows, it’s offering the public, the Royal Academy is on a roll. There’s been one great, news-making exhibition after another, under the guidance of its Director of Exhibitions, Tim Marlow, who came to them from White Cube. Those whom Munnings would have dismissed as lunatics have taken over the […]
5 June 2017
Paul Carey-Kent Offers Artlyst his choice of the best London Art Exhibitions to see in June 2017
Sgt Pepper At 50 is the 50th anniversary of the original album by The Beatles and through this festival has become a newly ‘re-imagined album’ of artworks, theater, music and dance pieces.
30 May 2017
Until the Modern epoch, and indeed right up to the present day, Hokusai was by far the most influential non-European artist to impact European art.
27 May 2017
Everyone in Britain was torn apart by World War ll. Artists were hungry, dislocated and like everyone else had lost their sense of safety and home. Rosenberg & Co.’s current exhibition ‘British Modern Masters’ presents the artistic release of the emotional build up of what British artists had seen or perhaps done during the war.
26 May 2017
The now very senior Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) has often found himself classified as a Pop artist, largely because a large part of his subject matter – still lifes of commonplace objects (in his case often items of mass-produced food) – overlaps with the kind of things that members of the American Pop movement chose to depict.
Sometimes the best art is born out of a mistake. It is this type of accidental trial and error that keeps the Turner Prize winning artist Richard Deacon on his toes, as a practitioner of fresh ideas and innovations.
22 May 2017
Hauser & Wirth have demonstrated an impeccable sense of timing by presenting their Richard Milhouse Nixon show, ‘Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975’, first seen in their New York gallery in 2016 – that is to say actually before Donald Trump won the American presidency in December of that year.
18 May 2017
Paul Carey-Kent has sifted through Photo London the UK’s leading photography fair to put together this themed pick of what caught his eye. The most impressive Photo London yet runs 18-21 May. Art Fairs are not by their general nature intimate experiences, but photography as a medium is certainly capable of intimacy. So it was interesting to hunt down the latter within the former…
18 May 2017
Photo London returns for its third edition with a swagger this year, confidently asserting its position as a premier international photo event. Like it or not, it has become the event around which all photography in London now revolves, and in this edition, it goes someway towards justifying its gravitational pull.
15 May 2017
Artist Hedley Roberts Picks Twelve of the best from the`57th Venice Biennale
11 May 2017
Tate Modern’s new Giacometti show, following hot on the heels of a recent show dedicated to the same artist at the National Portrait Gallery, is nevertheless welcome for the comprehensive view it gives of one of the major stars of the Modern Movement.
10 May 2017
I had the privilege to share this incredible Art journey with Michal Cole.
9 May 2017
Artlyst has attended Modern Art Oxford, for the opening of ‘Kazem Hakimi: Portraits from a Chip Shop’, a fascinating and very personal exploration of a local community.
8 May 2017
Desire is at the basis of most human behaviour from sex and procreation to the pursuit of beauty and death. According to Freud our psyches see-saw between the two conflicting points of Eros and Thanatos. Mat Collishaw has always been interested in origins and in what goes on behind the veil of social givens and norms.
4 May 2017
The Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors show now on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill neatly pips Tate Modern to the post. On 8th May Tate Modern unveils Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame Tragedy, its first ever solo show devoted to this most celebrated of all Modern Movement artists.
28 April 2017
Richard Long, the four-times Turner Prize nominee and one-time winner (1989), is one of the leading figures of conceptual and land art. His latest exhibition at Houghton Hall in Norfolk is an inspired pairing. The location flawlessly blends his work in terms of scale, locality and sentiment. Each piece is given space to breathe and […]
19 April 2017
Lost+ Found is David LaChapelle’s first solo show in Venice. The exhibition expanding over four floors presents a survey of LaChapelle’s work from his early career till today.
The current Michelangelo & Sebastiano show at the National Gallery here in London is very much the kind of exhibition that one feels a great institution ought to be doing: spaciously presented, tirelessly scholarly, you couldn’t wish for a better introduction to these major names in Italian Renaissance art.
12 April 2017
Henryk Hetflaisz’s latest collection of photographs elevates the viewer into the realm of mystic form and enduring light.
From Selfie to Self-Expression at the Saatchi Gallery represents a return to form, after a recent series of dead-on-arrival exhibitions held in this space. It’s good to be able to say welcome back.
5 April 2017
The hosannas are already ringing out for Tate Britain’s new show Queer British Art, 1861-1967.