Reviews Archives - Page 3 of 29

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.

Bradley, Burden, Fischer and Pascali Four London Shows – Edward Lucie-Smith

Here, lumped together for the sake of convenience in an overcrowded Autumn season, are four London galleries.

Lorenzo Lotto Metaphors Through Gestures And Symbols – Edward Lucie-Smith

Tucked away in a group of spaces on the gloomy ground floor of the National Gallery is a superb exhibition that seems likely to attract less attention than it should in fact get.

Modern Couples Shaped By The Society Of Their Time – Barbican – Edward Lucie-Smith

The Modern Couples show currently at the Barbican has eyes slightly too big for its own – or at any rate for my stomach. Nevertheless, it is, in the present climate for the visual arts, an event that is both timely and important.

EMPIRE 2 Project Moves To Paris – Jude Cowan Montague

As one of the participants in the globe-trotting EMPIRE 2 project, exhibiting the moving image on a world tour, I came to Paris for the project’s opening at Le100Ecs, an artist centre at 100 Rue de Charenton.

Camille Henrot: Scientific History And Creation Story Mash Up – Revd Jonathan Evens

Twenty-one video and film installations, 11 hours plus of imagery created by today’s most radical image makers and at the beginning is an installation that takes us back to the beginning by mixing scientific history with Creation stories belonging to religious (Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, etc.), hermetic (Kabbalah, Freemasonry, etc.), and oral (Dogon, Inuit, Navajo, etc.) traditions.

Ann Grim: Carving Positive Messages Into The Dark – Jude Cowan Montague

Arriving at Montparnasse, I don’t at first see any sign of the Gallery Granville. With its modest frontage, it’s located just off-road in a modern shopping centre.

Klimt And Schiele: Naked Social Disruption – Royal Academy – Edward Lucie-Smith

The R.A.’s show of drawings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, almost all of them loaned by the Albertina Museum in Vienna, arrives at a crucial moment in the long history of visual art.

African American Art vs Art From Africa In London – Edward Lucie-Smith

As is becoming more and more apparent, contemporary art in the United States is becoming increasingly regionalised. Which is to say, identified with one geographical location: California North or South, Louisiana, New Mexico, Seattle – rather than being an expression of American culture as a whole.

Taylor Wessing Photo Prize 2018 Identity Politics And Culture War – Edward Lucie-Smith

Looking around the NPG’s new Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition, I was immediately reminded of the fact that we are right in the middle of a culture war.

Raqs Media Collective – Caio Locke And Rammellzee Three Reviews – Edward Lucie-Smith

Just as I had begun to despair of the future of video, or of video + installation, as mediums for genuinely convincing contemporary art, two major examples arrived to change my mind. One was the video by the Maori artist Lisa Reihana that forms part of the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy.

William Hunter: Anatomy of the Modern Museum – Clare Henry

Celebrating the tercentenary of Glasgow University Hunterian founder, Dr. William Hunter obviously calls for a significant exhibition. This impressive memorable display, immaculately presented, is organised by the Hunterian Art Gallery in collaboration with Yale’s Centre for British Art where it travels next Spring.

Alternative Miss World: Logan’s Long Running Peace & Love Happening

The Alternative Miss World Pageant which took place at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Saturday night was a triumph of artistic anarchy.

Bruegel The Painter Who Painted Things That Couldn’t Be Painted

Few painters have fascinated and enthralled over the centuries as much as Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30‒1569) Now, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has unveiled the most comprehensive exhibition of this 16th-century Netherlandish painter ever compiled.

Gauguin And Laval In Martinique: Building Paradise With Savagery – Paul Black

Artlyst recently visited the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, which is currently presenting Gauguin and Laval in Martinique

Sean Scully: Architecture Of The Sublime – Edward Lucie-Smith

Sean Scully is extremely widely known as a painter. Indeed, I might go so far as to say that he is as widely known as any contemporary painter now living.

Defining Structure The Cello Factory – A Challenging And Enriching World

Structure tends to call to mind notions of order, stability and efficiency. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the artists featured in this exhibition most often pit structure against chaos and the ephemeral. One has the feeling that rather than having arrived at a definition, one leaves with more questions crowding around the […]

Oceania Royal Academy A Lasting Air Of Strangeness – Edward Lucie-Smith

Oceania, Royal Academy: To some extent, our ideas about what we call ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ art are still formed by what we have learned, during the last century or so, about the art of tribal Africa. African art had a major impact on the attitudes of the Cubists, and later on those of the Surrealists, […]

Space Shifters Hayward Gallery An Object Lesson In Contemporary Disorientation – Edward Lucie-Smith

The Space Shifters show at the Hayward lives up to its title, often in ways you don’t quite expect. This, in spite of the fact that it isn’t absolutely bang up to the minute. Many of the works on view aren’t all that new. There’s stuff here that does back to the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s […]