Reviews Archives - Page 3 of 30

Pierre Bonnard: A French Painter Carrying Forward A Great Inheritance – Edward Lucie-Smith

Bonnard was one of those betwixt and between artists, part of the Modern Movement

Rebecca Scott Beneath The Silk and Gloss – Jude Cowan Montague

Rebecca Scott’s huge oil paintings of defaced magazine pages: it’s a visceral exhibition by a confident painter, secure in her style, able to wow us with colour.

London Art Fair 2019 Returns With Solid Foundations – Sue Hubbard

The New Year revels are over. It’s January, and the art world is back to work. The first sign of this stirring is the London Art Fair 2019 that returns to the capital from 16-20 January.

Lynette Yiadom Boakye In Lieu Of A Louder Love – Ilka Scobie

A couple of years after Lynette Yiadom Boakye dazzled New York with her solo show at the New Museum, she returns to the city with 35 new paintings.

Mayfair’s Golden Oldies: Bernard Jacobson At 50 and Stephen Buckley @ Mayor Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith

The Bernard Jacobson Gallery in the heart of London has had a long connection with artists’ prints and printmaking since it first opened its doors, on a different site to the current one, in 1969.

Pailthorpe And Mednikoff The Birth of Psychorealism – Edward Lucie-Smith

This Christmas and New Year it was an exhibition at the sternly Modernist – yes, with a big M – De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. The artists on view were not precisely contemporary: a strange half-forgotten pair called Grace Pailthorpe and Rueben Mednikoff.

How Egon Schiele Became Egon Schiele – Fondation Louis Vuitton – Jude Cowan Montague

When I visited art college studios as a jealous English student in the 1980s, the cool, edgy artists had pictures of skinny, edgy women in tea shirts, naked.

Irving Penn Paintings: A Kind Of Photographic Sub-Stratum – Edward Lucie-Smith

Irving Penn (1917-2009) was one of the great stars of 20th century American photography, at a time when the United States was becoming the world’s leader in this art form.

Philip Colbert / Marshmallow Laser Feast – Saatchi Gallery- Review Edward Lucie-Smith

In the current context of London exhibitions, the unabashed rock-‘n’roll energy of the Philip Colbert Hunt Paintings’ show, recently opened upstairs at the Saatchi Gallery

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Fondation Louis Vuitton – Review Jude Cowan Montague

Where are the black artists in the galleries? We think it’s bad now, what about during the 1980s? The early 1980s before Basquiat?

Thomas Gainsborough: A Thirst For Visible Originality – Edward Lucie-Smith

After various adventures away from its traditional subject-matter – the recent Michael Jackson show being a case in point, the National Portrait Gallery returns to familiar territory with a show devoted to Thomas Gainsborough, by general consensus one of the most brilliant portrait painters to have worked in Britain. Native-born into the bargain, unlike his predecessors Holbein and Van Dyck.

London Art Exhibitions January 2019 – Paul Carey- Kent

The noted writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives us his rolling ten recommended contemporary art shows in London now.

Breeeeze: Four Artists Consider The Ambivalence Of Domestic Space – Elizabeth Fullerton

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her famous essay on the subject, which discusses the subjugation of women in the home.

Edwin Landseer The Return Of A Moralistically Empathetic Artist – Edward Lucie-Smith

How times have changed! And how much they haven’t! A small but telling display of work by the celebrated Victorian artist Sir Edwin Landseer, now on view at the National Gallery, invites both comparison and cogitation.

Plaster Casters: Victoria & Albert Museum Cast Courts Reopen – Edward Lucie-Smith

The full re-opening of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Cast Courts occurs at an apposite moment.

Richard Long: The Tide is High – Edward Lucie-Smith

There can be no doubt that Richard Long is one of the giants of British art. Or so a very impressive curriculum vitae would lead one to suppose. He is now in his early 70s. He made his reputation almost half-a-century ago, as what was then called a Land Artist

Tomas Saraceno: On Air – Palais de Tokyo Paris – Virginie Puertolas-Syn

Tomas Saraceno “On Air” an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is definitely one of the most extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen. A once in a lifetime experience not to be missed if you are in Paris.

Chiharu Shiota: Immersive Elegant Scarlet Threads – Blain|Southern – Edward Lucie-Smith

Today London’s official art world is full of enthusiasm for so-called ‘minority art’, made by artists of guaranteed ‘minority origin’. On the whole, however, the artists so defined and officially promoted don’t come from Asia.

Iain Baxter& &Information – Hales Gallery – Jude Cowan Montague

That famous aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ was spouted by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian professor, philosopher and public intellectual back 1964, when his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, set the stage for my current train journey where I overhear the students discussing their A levels.

Five Academicians: Glasgow Print Studio – Clare Henry

You have to be reasonably senior to be an Academician of any sort. Put five together? The result is an exciting and extremely varied show.

Fernand Léger A Mechanical Visual Language – Tate Liverpool – Alice Lenkiewicz

It was captivating to see the Fernand Léger exhibition (until 17 March 2019) at Tate Liverpool.

Robert Rauschenberg Light-Hearted Works With Serious Meaning – Edward Lucie-Smith

The Robert Rauschenberg show Spreads: 1975-83 just opened at Thaddaeus Ropac here in London comes complete with a museum-worthy hardcover catalogue, and is indeed, though this is a commercial space, the kind of exhibition that any museum specialising in contemporary art might be proud to put on.

Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2018 Round-Up – Jude Cowan Montague

It was a personal pleasure to visit this fair, now in its third year. The ambitious project has taken over the huge warehouse scale structure at Woolwich.

Gordon Matta Clark: The Chaos Of The 1970s – Edward Lucie-Smith

Gordon Matta Clark died quite some time ago now – in August 1978. And he died quite young, aged only 35. However, like a number of artists from about the same epoch

Paris Photo 2018 Round-Up – Zoltan Alexander

ParisPhoto, the biggest photo fair in Europe held each November at the Grand Palais, returned with its 22nd edition, attracting nearly 70.000 visitors in four days and gathering more than 200 exhibitors from all around the world, offering an unparalleled presentation of contemporary and vintage photography from grandmasters to emerging young talents.

Paul Lock: You Simply Are – Review Noho Showrooms – Simon Tarrant

Gauguin once reportedly exclaimed of self-taught artist Henri Rousseau’s self-portrait, “There is the truth and future! There is painting!”

Hilma af Klint: Paintings For The Future – Guggenheim Museum NY – Ilka Scobie

Hilma af Klint’s abstract paintings first dazzled me when I encountered her work in the 2013 Venice Bienalle.

Perdita Sinclair An Impressive Visual Interpretation Of Micro-science – Jude Cowan Montague

Angiosperms (roughly flowering plants) produce an incredible variety of seeds that are dispersed in creative, innovative ways, sometimes involving tricksy relationships with particular animals.

Alex Katz And Richard Smith Two Current London Exhibitions – Edward Lucie-Smith

Despite its title, Coca-Cola Girls, Alex Katz’s new show at Timothy Taylor doesn’t really belong in the realm of Pop Art. It does, however, have something in common with the concurrent Richard Smith show at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert.

Ashurbanipal – Assyrian King of the World – British Museum – Edward Lucie-Smith

Ashurbanipal

Mantegna and Bellini In Presence of the Triumphs – National Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith

This exhibition at the National Gallery is a landmark event. It brings together a rich selection of paintings, and some drawings, by two of the greatest masters of the Italian Renaissance.

Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery – Revd Jonathan Evens

‘Life-destroyer’, ‘get lost’, ‘monkeys’, ‘in bad faith’, ‘malediction’, ‘concealed dungeon’, ‘poison head’, ‘parasite’, ‘disenchantment’, ‘lechery’. The titles of Peter Howson’s latest work, in translation from often Latin or Anglo-Saxon words or phrases, give a graphic sense of the content.