4 October 2018
I’m what you could call a seasoned Frieze regular. I may have missed the first London fair but I was soon sucked into the great black hole of mega-international art fairs and beamed myself out beyond London to Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, not to mention the first Frieze in New York. Galleries […]
There can be no doubt that the Turner Prize is pretty much of a sick puppy right now.
20 August 2018
Nobody, I think, could be keener than I am to see women obtain more recognition for their creative contribution to the visual arts.
At a time when London’s big art museums are going all out to be populist, they also seem to be witnessing a fairly general fall in attendances.
24 May 2018
High value bluechip contemporary art displayed at alternative venues is usually something that excites us here at Artlyst; however,
The Royal Academy’s radical extension of its premises including some splendid new exhibition spaces and an imposing new lecture-theatre excites me, but also generates some doubts and mixed feelings.
This year’s list of finalists for the Turner Prize has just been announced. While the names on the shortlist are virtuously unfamiliar, the general artistic direction is not.
Overshadowed by iconic images from Picasso 1932 and Bacon/Freud two of the Tate’s current exhibitions feature powerfully expressive crucifixion images.
I’m just back from a visit to Prague. I went there specifically to see an exhibition of new British painting organised by an organisation called ArtLines
The latest in a long line of examples is a new statue honouring the late artist David Bowie, unveiled over the weekend in Aylesbury.
Today (8th March) is International Women’s Day, it’s also the public opening of the new Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern. For those of you familiar with Picasso and his self-mythologized monster; you may need to read that sentence again.
With Pablo Picasso 1932 – Tate Modern’s major exhibition for the first half of this year – ready to open (March 8th), the drumbeats are already beginning.
The contemporary art world seems an increasingly strange place to be.
6 January 2018
I had never experienced a Frank Gehry up-close. Never stood slack-jawed, gawping at the gymnastic splendours that the photographs in the glossies promise.
4 January 2018
One name immediately sprang to mind – that of the born Irish, once British, now American painter Sean Scully.
31 December 2017
The British contemporary art world is apparently in a healthy state at the moment.
18 December 2017
On 5th December, seven new appointments were quietly made to Arts Council England’s (ACE) National Council, its governing board. This included the controversial choice of Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
I went to see the R.A.’s new Matisse show, but not at the press view, as I was abroad. I did go very shortly after it opened. Not unexpectedly, it was jammed with visitors, and I mean jammed. You had to dodge round backs to get a proper view of some of the smaller items, notably the drawings.
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.
Last October I was in Doha the capital of Qatar which seemed like a well-oiled machine when it came to Art, Education, and Culture.
Imagine in 1988 the public furore if the Tate had hosted an exhibition of queer British art – marking the 21st anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised private homosexual acts between men over 21 in England and Wales.
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.
The next two occupants of the so-called Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square have just been announced and, true to form, the British visual arts establishment has laboured and given birth to a mouse. Or, to be fair, to two mice, one of them just slightly larger than the other. I speak not in terms of size, but in those of probable effect.
Artist George Boorujy feels particularly pumped to take on the environmental cause, especially since ‘Day One’ the Environmental Protection Agency has been quieted with regard to global warming. Boorujy, an artist devoted to highlighting and protecting our precious natural world says, “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue! Democrats, as well as Republicans, need to breathe.
The Knoedler & Co. gallery fraud case which involved selling $80m/£63m in fake Abstract Expressionist artworks to unknowing collectors seems to be edging to a lenient closure for the corrupt dealer Glafira Rosales.
When Maria Balshaw takes over from Sir Nicolas Serota at Tate (not yet officially confirmed as I write this, but a racing certainty), she takes over an empire that seems to be in excellent health.
During the last few years, the world of contemporary art has undergone a number of drastic changes, which many leading participants seem extremely reluctant to acknowledge.
We face the world in which it appears ever more likely that a Clash of Civilisations will be played out on the world stage, potentially with weapons of mass destruction, as the axis of the world appears to have shifted significantly in this year of political shocks.
In art, the firing squad is composed as much in time as it is in space; in these first words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, we encounter a plethora of narrative potential for past future heroism.
Caravaggio – “What a man! What a painter, but what a man and what a believer.” Those are the words of François Bousquet, Rector of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, the church which, in the stunning Contarelli Chapel, houses the magnificent paintings which formed Caravaggio’s first major commission and made his reputation. Bousquet makes his assertion in the introductory film […]