9 September 2019
Two exhibitions just opened at a pair of well-respected West End commercial galleries here in London, seem to illustrate the complexity of the contemporary art situation as it is now.
William Hood, when writing of Fra Angelico at San Marco, noted that the ‘translucent surfaces’ of the architecture ‘shimmer in the soft currents of light gliding over from just outside’.
5 August 2019
Urban Impulses, the new exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery here in London, exemplifies the reasons why contemporary photography now so often seems to take the lead over contemporary painting. It is more directly relevant to the world that we, the viewers, inhabit. Photographers have been witnesses to it all – ELS The show is about […]
The noted writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives us his rolling ten recommended Contemporary and Modern art exhibitions for August 2019 in London now. Paul currently freelances for Art Monthly, Frieze, Elephant, STATE, Photomonitor, Border Crossings and World of Interiors, and has a weekly online column at FAD Art News.
1 August 2019
Billed as the first-ever COLLAGE survey exhibition in the world, this Edinburgh Festival fun extravaganza of 400 years of cut and paste art encompasses Picasso to Monty Python, Victorian valentines to Andy Warhol, Max Ernst to Peter Blake, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg – and of course today’s Photoshop.
31 July 2019
I have personal reasons to be interested in this book – Company Curiosities, by Arthur Macgregor. A direct ancestor of mine, not however mentioned in the text, was Chairman of the British East India Company in some of its glory days at the end of the 18th century.
25 July 2019
Is the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) the most fascinating artist the anglophone world has never heard of? The fashionable preoccupation with women artists of past and present is throwing up and out some real discoveries and rediscoveries.
25 July 2019
The current Ed Moses paintings on display at Blain/Southern represent only a snippet of a very varied career.
23 July 2019
Brave New Visions, this special exhibition at Sotheby’s George Street galleries, is a tell and show of the ways in which Britain’s insular art world was expanded and transformed by newcomers,
18 July 2019
There can be no doubt that Art-Exit: 1939, at the 12 Star Gallery in Europe House, Smith Square, is a highly political exhibition.
14 July 2019
The new show at Charlie Smith London celebrates, as the handout tells you, “a full decade’s operations in Shoreditch”. Within that period, the gallery has presented 88 exhibitions and has participated in more than 30 art fairs in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA and here in the UK.
14 July 2019
Liz Magic Laser has created an exhibition on the ground floor of Fact Liverpool as part of Real Work. This is an absorbing show about people working in unrecognised freelance jobs and how their quality of life and business can be improved through certain goals and techniques through advice from a life coach and a […]
10 July 2019
Olafur Eliasson is now a very big deal in the world of contemporary art
9 July 2019
Artlyst has attended Talking Maps, a new exhibition at the famous Bodleian Libraries, Oxford – a celebration of maps throughout history
7 July 2019
The Greek artist Panayiotis Vassillakis, known simply as Takis, born in Athens in 1925, is a very senior member of today’s international avant-garde. His new show at Tate Modern – what? Not a woman, not a person of colour? – therefore qualifies as an event of some interest.
6 July 2019
It’s time for the annual show of sculpture in Regent’s Park, organised by the Frieze Art Fair, but opening far in advance of the fair itself, and lasting for much longer. Also, it’s free. What’s on view, you see for nothing. Which makes me wish, quite fervently, that it was a more convincing show.
4 July 2019
Felix Vallotton, the subject of a new exhibition on view now, at the Royal Academy, was a betwixt and between sort of artist. Swiss by birth, he became French.
30 June 2019
Contemplating the Spiritual in Contemporary Art a new exhibition at Rosenfeld Porcini is proof, if proof is needed, that there is no shortage of artists exploring, as Erika Doss described them, ‘the intersections of iconography, religious orthodoxy
29 June 2019
A new contemporary and modern art fair at the Saatchi Gallery has just opened as a “pop-up” during the London Summer fair season. Organised in just six frantic weeks FairForSaatchi hopes to become an annual fixture.
27 June 2019
The Cindy Sherman retrospective just opened at the National Portrait Gallery is a major blockbuster, illustrating all aspects of a very prolific career.
25 June 2019
A rather too brief exhibition, well hidden away in the bowels of Somerset House and not mentioned in the official handout listing what is currently on view in the main gallery spaces there, raises many questions that aren’t being asked in our rather smug London contemporary art world. Entitled The Artist + AI, it is a compact solo show for an American artist called Scott Eaton.
25 June 2019
This is the time of year when London’s grandee galleries – official and commercial – are so busy presenting us with blockbuster shows that lesser lights tend to get squeezed out, at least where publicity is concerned. Here are a couple of exhibitions on a somewhat lesser scale that it would be a pity to miss. One, at Huxley-Parlour in Swallow Street, offers the work of the American artist Donald Sultan, one of the stars of the return to painting (as opposed to other forms of artistic expression) that took place in American art in the 1980s.
18 June 2019
All art is perforce autobiography, and every picture tells a story. How could it be otherwise? No outstanding artist almost literally makes visual these underlying possibilities more than Paula Rego.
17 June 2019
Kiss My Genders at the Hayward Gallery curated by Vincent Honore is a dynamic voyage and vivacious celebration of infinite representations of gender-diversity, gender non-conformity, androgyny and gender-subversion over the course of 50 years, featuring a mélange of 100 artworks by 35 international artists.
16 June 2019
The highly anticipated first UK exhibition of Keith Haring’s work has opened at Tate Liverpool. It is vast, covering most aspects of his work and career. This was my first experience seeing so many pieces by this seminal figure from the 1980s,’ in the flesh, so I was curious to learn more about the man.
15 June 2019
In his book, God in the Gallery: A Christian Approach to Modern Art Daniel Siedell suggests that many works of modern and contemporary art are ‘poignant altars to the unknown god in aesthetic form.’
11 June 2019
I’ve just read a piece on the web complaining that the one area of the contemporary art world where gender equality is making no progress is in the exhibition programmes of big commercial galleries.
10 June 2019
The new Francis Bacon show at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill is something of a landmark event. It contains a sumptuous array of top-quality works. Only a very few of these come from museum collections, so see them while you can. The show is brutally frank about Bacon’s homosexuality, and about the role that his sexual orientation […]
9 June 2019
If you want to take the temperature of the London art world, here are two places to do so. One is the show for Keith Tyson, at Hauser & Wirth. The other is an exhibition for Enrique Martinez Celaya at Blain/Southern. These two dealers rank very high amongst the international commercial spaces in London.