6 July 2022
Masterpiece is one of London’s unmissable art fairs. This is a melting pot where visitors can view and buy the finest works of art, design, furniture and jewellery
3 May 2022
Several exhibitions/installations in Venice during the 59th Biennale re-situate key works or themes from Christianity’s historic engagement with the Arts, in some cases overlaying biblical narrative onto the present.
The Government Art Collection has been going for over 120 years, through Government and private investment.
The event was a travesty of everything the Colony stood for, organised by people who thought they could recreate a special place.
21 May 2021
The Turner Prize continues to be in trouble. The competition has an aim: to single out the best new artists living and working in Britain
10 December 2020
Billy Childish has been around a long time. He is not only an artist but a poet and a composer of music.
18 November 2020
Marcus Lyon is an artist whose early work took him to the slums and ghettos of the developing world to explore issues surrounding street children and child labour.
12 November 2020
It’s been quite a year for statues. Normally no more than street furniture that no one bothers to look at – old white men standing on plinths in all weathers extolling some arcane ‘victory’ of the Empire
Just as the new lockdown was being announced, the Sunday Times (UK) was unusually full of stuff about contemporary art. The main colour supplement led with a piece about Tracey Emin
This is long overdue, but under the worrying circumstances that have dominated the news in the past week, I feel it is essential to voice an opinion representing Artlyst.
Edward Lucie-Smith has rightly wondered, as ‘the contemporary art world goes dark, and as galleries – official spaces and commercial ones – slam shut their doors,’ ‘what the art world will be like once all this is over.’ However, the immediate wondering is simply, what do we do now?
1 October 2019
On my way to Tate Modern in the rain, last night, I smiled, thinking just how much Susan Hiller would have liked that there was to be an evening there in her honour. Susan could be famously grumpy and the last time we had lunch together she spent much of it complaining that the Tate […]
8 August 2019
When someone attacked Michelangelo’s Pieta with a hammer in the 1970s, the sculpture was severely damaged. It was restored and put back on display at the Vatican. A few years later a paranoid schizophrenic slashed Rembrandt’s masterpiece ‘The Night Watch’ putting a gaping hole in the canvas with a bread knife, at the Rijksmuseum.
Dame Jillian Sackler, third wife of the late Arthur Sackler has defended her branch of the family’s philanthropic donations with a statement to the Washington Post, outlining that her side of the family has never participated in the manufacture of OxyContin or benefited from money generated by Purdue Pharma, which is wholly owned by the other side of the Sackler family.
In welcoming Bill Viola’s installations at St Paul’s Cathedral, Mark Oakley noted that: ‘Viola’s art slows down our perceptions in order to deepen them.’
I’ve been looking again at Georgina Adam’s recently published book, The Dark Side of the Boom (Lund Humphries). It ranges over a wide variety of contemporary art world topics and is quite largely concerned with recent art world misdeeds – that is, with the commercial rather than the official sector of art world activity, insofar as these can be fully separated from one another.
It has been in many ways a somewhat melancholy year for art, here in Britain – or should I say: ‘here in London’? -since pretty well all the shows I will mention here took place in a capital city that seems to be drifting steadily away from the rest of Britain.
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.