In the midst of the chaos in the London art world caused by the current pandemic an artist occasionally shows up who seems serenely separated from the ongoing turmoil.
18 October 2020
How to celebrate the continuing vital and sacrificial contribution of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic? Clap for Carers united the nation early on in lockdown but was thought to have become politicised and was vulnerable to the criticism that it distracted attention from a necessary focus on the low wages paid to many care workers.
11 October 2020
Once upon a time in modernism, the interlacing of art and religion was rendered invisible. Art was not just for art’s sake but was exclusively about art. For Clement Greenberg and his followers, art that was pure and autonomous was art that was self-critical and self-defining.
11 October 2020
In present circumstances, both public and private galleries have had to think hard about what is practical and within their reach to do. Sometimes they come up with curiously similar solutions. This is the case with two shows that have just opened in London – one at the National Gallery and the other at Colnaghi in St James’s.
8 October 2020
The Royal Academy Summer Show has an unbroken record. Still, this year, due to the pandemic, it’s being held in the winter rather than the summer
8 October 2020
The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition has opened at the National Gallery at long last. It is accompanied by a handsome, fully illustrated hardcover catalogue. The hassle is that you have to book your slot to see it.
1 October 2020
London Grads Now, the new show currently on view at the Saatchi Gallery, won’t be with us for long. It is due to close on 25 September.
16 September 2020
Quentin Blake and Victor Pasmore Hastings Contemporary: I’m standing for the first time inside the Hastings Contemporary
13 September 2020
Three very colourful large format art books on Philip Guston, Bridget Riley and Henri Matisse have arrived this week.
1 September 2020
Ai Weiwei IWM: History of Bombs. Little Boy, Fat Man, Daisy Cutter, Snake Eye, Grand Slam, Tomahawk, Tsar Boba, are seemingly innocuous even childlike labels for toys or games. But they are seared into the historic memory and are the actually terrifying, curious official nicknames of objects that are weapons in wars of mass destruction and attrition. The first two are those of the 1945 atomic bombs unleashed on Japan. Daisy Cutter (1970) did just that, flattening swathes through the forests of Vietnam.
30 July 2020
London was never invaded, but London has been at war. The look of London during the Blitz and after is captured in this marvel of a picture book, Wartime London in Paintings by Suzanne Bardgett, which reminds us of the superb collections of Modern British art held at the Imperial War Museum.
19 July 2020
“Anish Kapoor is a magician,” says Lord Cholmondeley in his introduction to this exhibition. His ancestral seat, Houghton Hall is presenting the largest ever exhibition of outdoor sculptures by Kapoor, including stone pieces he has been making for 25 years but never shown in the UK. Quite a coup for Cholmondeley who it seems has pulled off some magic of his own.
16 July 2020
An online show called Revisiting the Decameron, curated by Laura Gascoigne, has recently gone up on the Flowers Gallery web-site. It runs until 9th of August.
13 July 2020
Painting, sculpture, architecture: here is a triumvirate wherein painting and sculpture remain in commanding dialogue with architecture throughout the impressive output of Sean Scully, as exemplified in the exhibition titled INSIDEOUTSIDE currently on view at the Villa Waldfrieden and the Cragg Foundation Sculpture Park in Wuppertal
11 July 2020
As this exhibition demonstrates, Zoobs Ansari’s work covers a lot of contemporary themes. On the one hand, there is the experience of the outsider, living in a culture that is not his own. Secondly, there is the fascination of show-business
26 June 2020
The Masterpiece Art Fair, a regular feature of the summer season in London, is now up online and will be available there until 28 June.
25 June 2020
Two books from Thames & Hudson about Vincent Van Gogh, one of the most durable legends in art. One offers his life-story, as told in letters written by himself, most of them to his brother Theo, who became a moderately successful art dealer. The other, by Mariella Guzzoni, is entitled Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him.
17 June 2020
Andrew Lambirth’s The Life of Bryan, recently published by Unicorn, describes itself rather demurely as a celebration, rather than as a biography.
11 June 2020
As the National Portrait Gallery closes its doors, not just in response to the Coronavirus epidemic, but in preparation for a three-year rehab, the annual BP Portrait Award survives online, as a virtual show. The 2020 exhibition is now up for view on the web.
26 May 2020
The ways of the art market are pretty strange. Hamiltons, a leading gallery here in London that specialises in photography, have just put a new series of images up on the web, black and whites from various stages in his career by Sir Don McCullin
18 May 2020
Home Alone Together: We are told that home is where the heart is, but also that, while we can travel the world in search of what we need, we must return home in order to find it. Home has been described as the centre and circumference, the start and finish, of most of our lives.
17 May 2020
Spring 2020 was to have been an appropriate season for the launch of one of the Camden Arts Centre’s most ambitious exhibitions to date. The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree is a major thematic group exhibition investigating the significance of the plant kingdom to human life
11 May 2020
Ben Lewis’s book The Last Leonardo, subtitled ‘A Masterpiece, A Mystery and the Dirty World of Art’, has now appeared in paperback after its publication in hardcover last year.
6 May 2020
Here’s a handsome new volume, well-illustrated, but more social history than art book, which tells of the emergence of London as an international art scene, during the years that followed World War II.
30 April 2020
Darren Coffield’s well-presented Tales from the Colony Room, Soho’s Lost Bohemia, memorialises an epoch in the London world of the arts that now seems very far away, even though the once-famous Colony Room closed its doors as recently as December 2008.
23 April 2020
The much-anticipated Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition at the National Gallery in London has now been indefinitely postponed, to the disappointment of many.
16 April 2020
This handsome soft-cover catalogue published by Thames & Hudson for the British Museum was intended to commemorate an exhibition that hasn’t in fact taken place, due to the coronavirus.
9 April 2020
Books written in exile by the exiled. It is this phenomenon, the triumph of the human spirit in dire circumstances, that is the focus of a gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art, by Edmund de Waal which may be viewed at the British Museum when it reopens
26 March 2020
The Titian show at the National Gallery in London has arrived at a particularly inauspicious moment. Major public galleries in Europe are shutting their doors because of the coronavirus. The National Gallery has now temporarily closed.
19 March 2020
What is this ‘other world’ Alexander Hinks is drawn to and asks that we be drawn into?
His current exhibition at ‘The Cello Factory’ spans some four years of art-making. The paintings introduce themselves as unabashedly interested in transcendence, possibly unfashionable given an increasingly materialistic contemporary background.
16 March 2020
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) has, even since his death more than thirty years ago, retained a central position in the world of contemporary art.
12 March 2020
Among the Trees which just opened at the Hayward Gallery, is an ambitious exhibition that has all the best intentions, and somehow fails to make its point. Or, rather, it makes a point that is perhaps different from what the organisers intended.
9 March 2020
