Visual Arts Reviews
Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, Wellcome CollectionWednesday, 23 March 2011
Weeds, memorably, have been described as merely being plants that grow where we don’t want them. Walking through the Wellcome’s fine new exhibition, we can conclude that the “dirt”, too, is merely material appearing out of its appropriate location. One man’s waste is another man’s fertiliser; one civilisation’s dust-heap another’s city foundations. Children first planting a window box learn that “dirt” is alchemy: stick in a seed, out of the dirt comes dinner. Read more... |
Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbican Art GalleryMonday, 21 March 2011
I can still remember the excitement of pounding the pavements of SoHo in the early 1970s. Nowadays, this part of downtown Manhattan is awash with expensive restaurants, boutiques and smart galleries, but then it was a scruffy industrial area of warehouses and sweatshops. The factories were closing and the container trucks leaving, though, and artists were gradually infiltrating and turning the huge empty spaces into studios where they often lived illicitly. Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer, White Cube HoxtonMonday, 21 March 2011
The sea: the depths from which all life emerged, and a force of destruction. Anselm Kiefer contemplates its sublime beauty and terror in a new exhibition of 24 panoramic photographs, ranged three-deep on two facing walls. Each grey and grainy seascape has been smeared and splattered with white paint and transformed by “electrolysis”, a process which isn’t further explained in the press release but which sounds suitably and impressively dramatic. Read more... |
Nathaniel Mellors, ICATuesday, 15 March 2011
I will confess, the emotion which engulfed me when watching three films from Nathaniel Mellors’s Ourhouse series was not (initially) admiration but aggravation. The temporary plyboard cinemas of the ICA show episodes one, two and four of this pseudo-drama about the bohemian Maddox-Wilson family in their country house, whose communications... Read more... |
Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 14 March 2011
What ever happened to Ida Kar? If the question is not quite on the level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, perhaps the answer is more interesting, if less melodramatic. Ida Kar - born Ida Karamian in Russia of Armenian parents, resident of Cairo, Alexandria, Paris and Soho, the first photographer to be given a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in its heyday under that curator of genius Bryan Robertson – is now, all too often, known as “Ida Who?” even by those who should... Read more... |
Nancy Spero & Marcus Coates, Serpentine GallerySunday, 13 March 2011
A maypole greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; don’t expect a cheery celebration of spring, though. Nancy Spero’s installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008) is a scream of rage against violence and its hapless victims. Dangling from coloured ribbons, dozens of decapitated heads hang in the air like an explosion of shrapnel. Mouths gape open in pain and terror - or is it hatred? One can’t be sure, since some seem to be spitting venom from bloody tongues as though,... Read more... |
Antoine Watteau, Royal Academy and Wallace CollectionFriday, 11 March 2011
As a young man searching for a way to make a living in Paris, Antoine Watteau briefly tried his hand at engraving fashion plates. He seems to have had a natural affinity for cloth and drew its folds and creases with such apparent ease that you can almost feel the slipperiness of satin and hear the rustle of taffeta as it moves with the body. This was just as well, since he didn’t attend the Academy where students did life drawing and learned anatomy. Read more... |
Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, British MuseumThursday, 10 March 2011
I’m in an exhibition of ancient artefacts from Afghanistan, all from the National Museum at Kabul, but I may well have stumbled into the wrong room at the British Museum. I could be in the BM’s Hellenic section of Greek art, or, taking a few steps to my left, the Egyptian rooms. Read more... |
Picasso in Paris 1900-1907, Van Gogh Museum, AmsterdamThursday, 10 March 2011
An artist as inventive and as protean as Picasso, and one who ceaselessly absorbed influences throughout his life, will inevitably present an ever-changing face to the world. Hence, we have an apparently inexhaustible supply of exhibitions devoted to him. Read more... |
Mona Hatoum: Bunker, White Cube Mason's YardWednesday, 02 March 2011
The latest exhibition from Beirut-born, sometime Turner Prize-nominee Mona Hatoum – best known for sending a camera through her inner tubes and projecting the results – explores themes of displacement and geographical and political tension. I know this because since I signed up to review it a fortnight ago, invites and reminders concerning this exhibition "exploring themes of displacement and geographical and political tension" have been hitting my mailbox with hectoring insistence. Read more... |
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