8 February 2017
It seems a long time since Tate Britain had a real blockbuster show. Even the Turner Prize, once a focus of popular attention, has received less and less publicity recently, to the point where the dissidents of the Stuckist Movement can no longer be bothered to picket it, even when the annual prize exhibition is held here in London, and not banished to some deserving gallery in the provinces.
5 February 2017
BILBAO GONGS AND BONGS Paul Carey-Kent has just spent 30 hours in Bilbao, mostly focused on the opening of Abstract Expressionism at the Guggenheim Museum on the evening of 2 Feb, but the city has plenty else of interest, some good, some not so good… Most Loved Cloaked in titanium to appropriately fish-scale effect, the […]
2 February 2017
It is rare that I feel an exhibition is important enough to review twice on Artlyst but in the case of the Abstract Expressionist exhibition that was unveiled at the Royal Academy, earlier this year.
30 January 2017
The emergence of female artist’s in 2017 gives an opportunity to find discourse and insight into our contemporary culture, integration, position and sense of experience in living and lifestyle in today’s world. Nadine Talalla’s show, ‘Haunted Beauty’ at Dissenters Gallery, Kensal Green, runs from 27 January – 5 February. The presence of her oil […]
28 January 2017
It’s been a challenging time in New York City and art has provided some relief from politics. A recent roundup of three current and very different exhibitions left me feeling quietly inspired. Portia Munson’s shamanic show offers a blessed reprieve to the cold reality of post-Trump January blues. Twenty-four gorgeous intimate paintings, photo collages, sculpture […]
27 January 2017
London is a great city for art! Paul Carey-Kent regularly produces some of the best recommendations for London Art Exhibitions on a rolling basis.
22 January 2017
Desperate Artwives Exhibition is an exhibition of many voices; it is a collection of imaginative and engaging artworks made by members of the Desperate Artwives group. The works are brought together through the artists’ shared insistence on drawing the audiences’ attention to overlooked aspects of women’s lives.
19 January 2017
The verdict: “It seemed a little more even – and so a little duller – than usual this year”: less dire stuff, less outstanding material.
10 December 2016
Painter’s Painters at the Saatchi Gallery picks up the theme of figurative painting as a still essential and central form of art making and tries to give it a new spin.
5 December 2016
Paul Carey- Kent chooses his pick for December 2016 through the new year.
5 December 2016
I’m always left in two minds about Robert Rauschenberg. On the one hand, there is his enormous influence on the course of today’s contemporary art. Everywhere you look, you see things that came from him. He is a prophetic artist in all sorts of different ways: installation, junk sculpture, fascination with new technologies, performance art, collaborations
5 December 2016
A shipping container covered in graffiti sits among the dreaming spires of Oxford, and my partner hears a rather haughty voice remark ‘…Well I don’t think it’s appropriate for the setting of the university, …and not very Christmassy!’,
5 December 2016
JANE ENGLAND: TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE a new book reviewed by Paul Carey -Kent
5 December 2016
Just occasionally, however, there’s a show in a commercial gallery that’s so resoundingly ambitious and so self-evidently important that it’s bound to cause a stir. Shows of this type offer an additional, though usually little mentioned, benefit: you get in for free, which is not true of blockbusters at the two Tates, the R.A. or the N.G. Impecunious art-lovers ought to scurry along to the huge Anselm Kiefer show that has just opened at White Cube in Bermondsey. Kiefer is, after all, on of the very biggest names in contemporary art.
22 November 2016
The Art of Rivalry is a relief in art critical terms. It is well and clearly written, with no pretentions. Sebastian Smee is currently the art critic for the Boston Globe, where he has been since 2008.
22 November 2016
Damien Hirst has become a major patron, in addition to being a celebrated artist. When he stages a show at his Great Newport Street Gallery, which is one of the most handsome art spaces in London, though not alas one blessed with good links to public transport, pretty well everything you see will be items that belong to him. This is the case with the aptly entitled Who What When How & Why, a solo show for his fellow YBA Gavin Turk. It’s a significant alliance in more ways than one.
17 November 2016
Modern Art Oxford presents its final exhibition in a series of shows celebrating the Gallery’s 50th anniversary; concluding its KALEIDOSCOPE series with ‘The Vanished Reality’. This multi-generational exhibition presents work by Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Iman Issa, Darcy Lange, Louise Lawler, Maria Loboda, Kerry James Marshall, Katja Novitskova, and Hardeep Pandhal.
15 November 2016
I’ve just made a visit – a first but not the last, I hope – to the much talked about Hauser & Wirth set up near Bruton in Somerset. I already knew their rather grand gallery situated on Savile Row in London, where it jostles elbows, so to speak, with our city’s grandest purveyors of […]
14 November 2016
Walking the steps into the The Salon Art and Design show I really did not know what to expect. We are 2 days past the presidential election and Manhattan has felt uneasy, like a city in mourning even though the country had selected one of our own as president-elect. But once we passed thru the magnificent doors of the Park Avenue Armory, seeing the large crowds that greeted us, walking thru a Viennese turn of the century suite by Josef Hoffmann at Yves Macaux or the feeling of Paris 1930 with pieces from Jean-Michel Frank and Paul Dupre’-Lafon at L’Arc En Seine any uneasiness went away. It was replaced by the excitement of walking thru the best of art and design to be seen in New York.
14 November 2016
When I visited the Royal Academy’s in many ways excellent new show devoted to the Belgian Symbolist/Expressionist painter James Ensor, I was, much as I enjoyed it, haunted by an uneasy feeling. Not only that I was missing something, but that the curator, the distinguished Belgian contemporary artist Luc Tuymans, had somehow missed something too. Missed it, or averted his […]
4 November 2016
Sean Scully now increasingly seems like the most remarkable abstract painter of his generation – this, at a time when abstract art, abstract painting, in particular, is increasingly under attack.
30 October 2016
I love Paris … and even more during FIAC. This year, in particular, the city of lights became the vibrant hub of the Art World with its incredible Museums and Galleries, its exhibitions and top-notch Art Fairs.
28 October 2016
The elegant new Paul Nash retrospective just opened at Tate Britain offers a welcome contrast to some of the dismal offerings that have been unveiled there in the recent past. It celebrates an important British artist and does so in a thoroughgoing way.
26 October 2016
Paul Carey-Kent travels to Amsterdam to report ‘DAUBIGNY, MONET, VAN GOGH AND MORE: 30 HOURS IN AMSTERDAM’
25 October 2016
The Picasso portrait show now at the National Portrait Gallery and the big Abstract Expressionist exhibition on offer at the Royal Academy are both worth a visit.
24 October 2016
Dia Al Azzawi is in every way shape or form a painter’s painter. His application and layering of colour can be rich and sublime like Matisse or Leger but also his use of monochromatic elements resembling newspaper clippings are a most powerful vehicle for getting his imagery to act as a mouthpiece for his politically charged subject matter.
22 October 2016
The Courtauld Gallery’s small, intimate, two room exhibition is devoted to a little-known body of work made by Rodin in the last two decades of his life. Rodin & Dance: The Essence of Movement 20 October 2016 – 22 January 2017 / The Courtauld Gallery
18 October 2016
Review of Mana Contemporary NY presents: Marilyn: Character Not Image September 25, 2016 – October 22, 2016 Curated by Whoopi Goldberg
16 October 2016
Never previously have the Frieze Art Fairs here in London seemed larger, grander, or surer of their place in the universe of contemporary culture.
15 October 2016
London is unusually rich in important exhibitions at the moment, and sometimes these events seem to enter into a dialogue with each other. This is especially the case with the Picasso portrait show now at the National Portrait Gallery and the big Abstract Expressionist exhibition on offer at the Royal Academy. Abstract Expressionism was, among […]
13 October 2016
The new Beyond Caravaggio show in the sepulchral depths of the new wing of the National Gallery deserves to draw a large and enthusiastic public and will in all probability do so.