New London Art
Picasso and Modern British Art
London Art Exhibition
The exhibition presents us with interlocking stories: first, that of Picasso’s career in Britain, from his first and much-pooh-poohed showing at Roger Fry’s 1910 Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition, to his major and unprecedentedly popular retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1960, attracting a record-breaking 500,000 visitors; and second, the story of his influence on British artists, with the curators drawing out those moments when Picasso’s formal experimentation and creative energy opened up the way for major artistic leaps within the careers of others.
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Lucian Freud Portraits
London Art Exhibition
Presenting a much broader picture of stylistic and creative evolution over seven decades; of an artist ever-engaged, ever-rigorous, ever-investigative, during a life-time’s encounter with human flesh.
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Yayoi Kusama
London Art Exhibition
The only thing more remarkable than Kusama’s incredible diversity, is her incredible consistency, with the artist surfing the wave of artworld trends but ever-retaining her voice. Walking through this exhibition, you get an potent sense of Kusama’s impulsiveness, of her near-fetishistic fixation with repetitious processes, of her obsessive sensuousness.
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Gavin Turk: GAVIN & TURK
London Art Exhibition
Throughout 25 years of artwork, Turk has questioned authorship, identity and the handmade. This new exhibition is no exception, but here, he chooses to pay homage to Alighiero Boetti, an Italian conceptual artist prominent in the sixties and seventies, who is the subject of a Tate Modern retrospective.
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Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings
London Art Exhibition
Like many of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Mitchell was fascinated by the French countryside and the lush landscape of Vétheuil featured prominently in her late paintings. In the diptych 'River', a painting of the River Seine as seen from her home, Mitchell filled two canvasses with vigorous brushstrokes in an array of greens, blues, purples, reds and a swath of yellow paint crossing the bottom of the canvas to represent the river. In 'Sunflowers', Mitchell again used a diptych format to depict one of her most well known subjects in the twilight of its life. In a conversation with Yves Michaud, Mitchell once said, 'Sunflowers are something I feel very intensely. They look so wonderful when young and they are so moving when they are dying...'. With 'Sunflowers', Mitchell worked quickly across her canvasses, expressing her intense feeling through the intense gestures that form the unrestrained and multi-coloured flowers' blooms. Pushing the boundaries of abstract painting, both 'River' and 'Sunflowers' illustrate Mitchell's emotional and physical recollections of the countryside she loved.
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David Shrigley: Brain Activity
London Art Exhibition
Shrigley has indeed carved out a unique niche for himself in contemporary art; describing himself as being ‘somewhere between graphic comic book art and conceptual art’, this exhibition makes a case for his swing towards the transcendent latter
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David Hockney: A Bigger Picture
London Art Exhibition
This exhibition demonstrates David Hockney’s tremendous capacity to re-invent himself and move with the times. Look, for example, to his airbrushed Ipad drawings (the tablet having replaced the artist’s sketchbook!), which appear like spoof versions of his paintings, glitchily replicated on Paint by geeky 13 year-olds: or, to his movie-montages that rework his classic photo-montage with HD monitors.
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Turner and the Elements
Margate Art Exhibition
‘We all know Turner as a painter of light’, curator Ines Richter-Russo reminds us. But somehow it does, the literal truth of this truism lost through overuse. It takes a day like this, with the cold, clear light of the Kentish Coast – of Turner’s very own world – cutting through Chipperfield’s windows, to hear these words anew
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Anselm Kiefer Il Mistero delle Cattedrali
London Art Exhibition
Almost three years after his last show at White Cube, and the legendary sculpture/painter Anselm Kiefer is back – and back with a vengeance. Sprawling across 11,000 sq ft of crisp white gallery space, ‘Il Mistero delle Cattedrali’ is the largest ever exhibition of Anselm Kiefer's work to take place in London.
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The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean
London Art Exhibition
Dean’s new work is born out of the language of analogue film, made entirely in-camera and without the aid of post-production – utilising the olde-time techniques of ‘masking’, double-exposure, glass matte painting, and hand-cut editing, so that a single negative may have gone through the camera as much as 10 times. Unlike in digital film, with the loss of ‘discipline’ and ‘vitality’ brought about by not having to ‘rely on the moment’, ‘there’s no looking, there’s no cheating’, Dean explained. Here, the sprockets are visible, the negatives hand-tinted, and the final product is as much a product of fortune as it is of the artist’s skill.
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