Is This Art Today? 4 London Shows – Edward Lucie-Smith
A group of recently opened shows, very different from one another, raise questions about the direction the visual arts are now taking.
20 February 2019
A group of recently opened shows, very different from one another, raise questions about the direction the visual arts are now taking.
20 February 2019
Exhibitions at the Zabludowicz and New Art Projects reviewed by upcoming curators who are students of the How to be an Independent Curator course at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.
17 February 2019
With his Bob Dylan mop of curls and pug nose, he looks every inch the rebellious teenager that he was.
16 February 2019
It can be touch and go whether it’s on or not each year. The logistics are huge. The goodwill required for this annual impromptu show is necessary and substantial.
12 February 2019
I visited the white, white cube for the Emin show a day after the people-jammed preview opening. I’m a little allergic to crowds so rely on the Facebook grapevine for a feel of how sardine-packed the gallery felt. With queues stretching around the block.
7 February 2019
There’s a conflict of impulses in the art world just now. On the one hand, there is a desire to reflect what’s going on in society.
6 February 2019
GLASGOW’s reputation has risen & fallen over the years. 1990 saw a peak. The city is now in a trough.
6 February 2019
The catalogue for the new Bill Viola show at the Royal Academy – also featuring a group of Michelangelo’s best, most finished drawings – is careful to point out that it is not really proposing a rivalry, or even a close kinship, between the two artists.
31 January 2019
Molly Brocklehurst curated this small group show to a grand idea that stems from her own work as a painter; to use art to examine the philosophical and existential reality of looking back at memory itself.
28 January 2019
Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) is now one of the less-clearly remembered of the New York Abstract Expressionists, especially here in the UK. He was however amply exhibited in America during his lifetime
24 January 2019
Bonnard was one of those betwixt and between artists, part of the Modern Movement
21 January 2019
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.
18 January 2019
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.
16 January 2019
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.
15 January 2019
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.
13 January 2019
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.
9 January 2019
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.
7 January 2019
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
28 December 2018
Where are the black artists in the galleries? We think it’s bad now, what about during the 1980s? The early 1980s before Basquiat?
28 December 2018
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.
27 December 2018
“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.
19 December 2018
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.
17 December 2018
I confess straight away that I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to spend on this exhibition. It has a split location, the new building of the South London gallery being located across the main road.
15 December 2018
The full re-opening of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Cast Courts occurs at an apposite moment.
12 December 2018
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
10 December 2018
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.
6 December 2018
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.
4 December 2018
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.
2 December 2018
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.
2 December 2018
It was captivating to see the Fernand Léger exhibition (until 17 March 2019) at Tate Liverpool.
29 November 2018
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.
28 November 2018
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.
26 November 2018