Tag / art

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Silk Hats

Turner Prize 2025 (Cartwight Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, 27 September 2025-22 February 2026)

I’ve got to the Turner Prize exhibition, in London every year for a decade and to the off-metropolitan ones sometimes — Gateshead, Coventry, Margate, Liverpool, Eastbourne, although not Hull as it had closed for the ceremony to be set up. Bradford looked doable and could be combined with sidetrips to Wakesfield and Leeds, indeed Leeds was the place to stay.

(Vague memories of a trip to the Science and Media Museum, Bradford, as a child and another trip in the 1990s, and one of those involved Muppets, and I’d done three hours in February to see some Hockney. This was an hour too much for a grey and beige city marshalled by roadworks.)

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Stuff Happened

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened (Whitechapel Gallery, 11 October 2023–14 January 2024)

Born in Verdun, France, in the 1960s, Eisenman practices in Brooklyn and I’m very glad I caught this just before it closed – although a more awake me would have spent longer and a more alert me would have made the link to Ridykeulous at Nottingham Contemporary. (I seem to keep missing stuff here – maybe it’s just the wrong part of not central London. But engineering works led me, via the Dulwich Picture Gallery and Rubens to Blackfriars and the District Line…) It formed quite a contrast from the relative elegance of the Rubens oil on panels – especially as the theme of that exhibition was to evade the Rubenesque – and I felt much more in a R. Crumb/George Condo/Philip Guston tradition of the grotesque.

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Best Art Expotitions of 2023

Because “best” is such a subjective term, I’ve tried to spread my picks of gallery going across the calendar year. I’ve left out returns to museums in Amsterdam and Oslo (the Munchmuseet’s postwar American exhibition was great), and the long walks through MoMA, the Met, the Frink and the Whitney (although curiously one of two bijoux exhibitions at the Morgan Library was unexpectedly useful). A few themed shows – the surrealism at the Design Museum, the RAA’s southern America – might have made it in, but didn’t.

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The Write Off Spring

David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 (Royal Academy of Arts, 23 May–26 September 2021) 

You have to admire Hockney for his prolificness and his ability to reinvent himself in a sixty-odd year career. The Tate retrospective was great but, the 1960s rooms aside, you could imagine at least two surveys of his work that didn’t overlap with that one. Having made art with paint, pencil, charcoal, various kinds of prints and Polaroids, it was hardly surprising that he’d embrace iPads and for some years he has been using them to make landscape images. 

Here we have 116 works drawn on iPads around his newish home in Normandy during the early Covid weeks of 2020, printed above their created size on paper and on the walls of three of the rooms in the Main Galleries (and they will move in August to the slightly smaller Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries). But are they any good? 

Well, they’d look good on a fridge.  

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Skrive

Some point last year, high on the giddy delights of being in another postcode and in a secondhand bookshop, I bought a catalogue for the 1992-93 Edvard Munch exhibition at the London National Gallery. I had no idea that there had been one — and you simply can’t have enough catalogues about him, even if sometimes they come with bonus Tracey Emin. This one had a clipping from the Daily Torygraph review by Richard Dorment tucked inside (spoiler: he “loathed it”):

“[W]e long for some explanation as to the simply appalling physical condition of many of the pictures on view. A larger number look as though they have spent several winters exposed to the elements on some Norwegian fjord.”

There’s reason for this. Munch used to leave his pictures outside. In the elements.

This might explain the birdshit or white paint splashed on one of the versions of The Scream.

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The Art of the State: 2020 Exhibitions Part Two

I got my money’s worth out of my Art Fund card, just about, and Tate membership and the RAA card make life a little easier, but you need to be fast to catch the members’ previews. I have a suspicion that my listing below is a little inaccurate for February — for example, and I think a saw a couple more things in St James/Mayfair.

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The Young One

Young Rembrandt (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn has all the makings of a tragic hero — with perhaps his fatal flaw of pride. He seems to have a meteoric rise — but as with the tulip bulb market, the bottom fell out and he, overstretched, crashed. He gets up to a couple of nasties — but that is a tale for another day.

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Watching Paint Dry

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma, 2019)

Some point after 1725, the artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned by a Milan-born countess (Valeria Golino) to paint the portrait of her daughter Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), whom she intends to marry off to a Milanese nobleman after the death of her elder daughter. Héloïse, formerly a novice at a nunnery, has other ideas and has already worn out a (male) painter. Marianne must pretend to be a companion, and paint in secret. Continue reading →

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Barbikane

Tangerine Dream: Zeitraffer (Barbican Music Library, 16 January-2 May 2020)
Trevor Paglen: From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (The Curve, Barbican, 26 Sep 2019—Sun 16 Feb 2020)

BoardSo, the Barbican – aka the alcohol-free concert hall – was heaving and so the slightly complicated but with good sight lines for a rendezvous foyer turned out not to be a smart move. Especially when Dennis was playing havoc with the trains. But that didn’t dissuade the thousands of people who had descended for a wellness fête (and who were queueing in their hundreds for the ladies loos hidden in the bowels of the building).
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Art: Closing in February

I’ve gotten behind in updating my database (and still need to work out how to upload a legible file such as a PDF).

These are closing in February — those in red come highly recommended (and you may wish to prebook Blake or Rembrandt; the latter’s catalogue is now reduced).