Visual Arts Reviews
Botticelli Reimagined, Victoria & Albert MuseumSunday, 06 March 2016
A gallery chock-full of Botticellian lips and tits is no place to start disputing the central premise of this show, that the Florentine artist’s paintings are woven into the fabric of our collective visual consciousness. From tuppenny ha’penny statuettes to a Dolce & Gabbana trouser suit printed with fragments of the Birth of Venus, Botticelli’s most famous paintings, whether in spirit, pastiche or frank reproduction, are everywhere. Read more... |
Hilma Af Klint, Serpentine GallerySaturday, 05 March 2016
Celebrating the four ages of man, eight huge, semi-abstract paintings create a carnival atmosphere in the Serpentine’s central gallery. The freshness of Childhood is characterised by flowers, petals and stamens floating on a blue ground. The passions of Youth warrant a ground of hot orange crammed with circles and spirals jostling for space like amoeba in a petrie dish. Read more... |
Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Genius, Science MuseumTuesday, 01 March 2016
Was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who straddled the arts and science in such a unique way, several hundred years before his time? Did the painter-inventor-engineer really draw the prototypes for, inter alia, the aeroplane, the motor car, the helicopter and the submarine, or were they doodles to which history has ascribed more genius than they are due? Read more... |
Avedon Warhol, Gagosian GalleryThursday, 25 February 2016
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John. Read more... |
Botticelli and Treasures from the Hamilton Collection, Courtauld GalleryTuesday, 23 February 2016
In Hell, the souls of the damned endure cruelly imaginative punishments for all eternity. Corrupt churchmen are buried headfirst in the ground with their feet set on fire, and soothsayers, who in life presumed to be able to see into the future, have their heads turned 180 degrees and are forced to walk around looking backwards. Drawn in metalpoint strengthened here and there with ink, Botticelli’s lines are as fine as spider’s silk. Read more... |
Performing for the Camera, Tate ModernSaturday, 20 February 2016
The earliest known selfie is as old as the medium itself – literally. Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography, pictured himself as a drowned man. His technique of photographic printing on paper had been upstaged by the daguerrotype, a metal plate alternative developed at the same time (1839) by Louis Daguerre. Read more... |
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National GalleryWednesday, 17 February 2016
Art exhibitions hardly seem comparable with battery farming, and yet just as our insatiable appetite for cheap meat gives rise to some troubling consequences, so too does the demand for definitive exhibitions that require vulnerable works of art to be shipped around the world. Read more... |
The Renaissance Unchained, BBC FourTuesday, 16 February 2016
Waldemar Januszczak always has a provoking agenda to shape his now nearly countless forays into television art history. In this four-part series he's out to challenge what he sees as the unthinking acceptance of the one-dimensional traditional and monopolistic version of the Renaissance. Read more... |
Vogue 100, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 15 February 2016
When it got too hard to ship the original American edition across the Atlantic during the Great War, British Vogue appeared as a sister publication in the Condé Nast empire. Read more... |
Nikolai Astrup: Painting Norway, Dulwich Picture GallerySunday, 14 February 2016
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest public painting gallery anywhere with one of the world’s finest collections of Old Masters, has in recent years built up a deserved reputation for bringing to the British audience unfamiliar aspects of well known painters, along with reappraisals and new discoveries. Their latest show is the first-ever exhibition outside of Norway for that country's landscape painter Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928). Read more... |
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