Wednesday, 1st September 2010
6:43pm
Up until 5 September, the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne is hosting an exhibition called ‘Familiar Visions – Eric and James Ravilious: Father and Son’. ‘Familiar Visions’ presents Eric Ravilious’s instantly recognisable paintings of the Sussex landscape alongside James Ravilious’s less well known black-and-white photographs of rustic Devon; much of the work in the show confirms that both artists harboured an authentic love of the English countryside.
I have always admired Eric Ravilious’s depictions of planes and submarines, and his Betjemanesque scenes of monumental chalk figures on rolling downland, like the Uffington White Horse...
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10:25pm
‘Down Over Up’ is Martin Creed’s latest exhibition, held at The Fruitmarket Gallery (until 31 October) as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Exploring notions of increment, scale, variables and order, Creed sets up an exhibition of new works that focus on the movement of going up and down through the stacking and layering of various objects in order of size, from Lego to chairs: ‘Everything is like a kind of little experiment in trying to make enough decisions to be able to come up with something I am happy with,’ he says.
Unfortunately for Creed, ‘Down Over Up’...
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Tuesday, 17th August 2010
7:31pm
Let us congratulate Joana Vasconcelos and Haunch of Venison for breaking with the traditional ‘ever-so-comprehensive’ survey exhibition. Although this display of ambitious work struggles for collective cohesiveness (I was perturbed by being unable to crudely generalise the work), the individual pieces are thoughtful and provocative and it seems unfair to hold an artist to account for making too many and too varied works.
Passerelle (Catwalk) is a disturbing work made up of large ceramic dogs hung by their necks as if in an abattoir (see above). The viewer is invited to push a pedal that rotates the dogs along the...
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1:38pm
Haunting portraits of twins, emasculated mothers, patients and the famous make for an eerie yet emotional experience at the Whitechapel Gallery’s current exhibition, ‘Alice Neel: Painted Truths’.
This is Alice Neel’s (1900–84) first major retrospective, which brings together more than 60 works spanning the nearly seven decades of the American artist’s career, divided into thematic sections. Though the works reveal a variety of evolving styles and subjects, ‘Painted Truths’ does what it says on the tin. Neel’s portraits, almost always set in the interior, are unforgiving and brutally honest – the sick and elderly are deathly pale; children are...
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1:23pm
The run of ‘Andrea Zittel: Clasp’ at London’s Sadie Coles HQ has been extended until 14 August. Visually and physically engaging, with just enough hints of the real word, ‘Clasp’ is a series of multi-media works exploring the notion of experience, which the artist believes can be broken down into four separate modes: the pure, the representational, the ideal and the physical. In layman’s terms, this includes large paintings depicting geometric shapes and diagrams, indicating some kind of coded system of belief, superimposed on the Californian desert landscape where Zittel lives and works. Described as ‘new age iconography’, they bring...
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A recent exhibition in Nottingham showcases contemporary artists' exploration of the Communist-era space race.
As part of a metal salvage drive for munitions in World War II, many of the UK’s parks and squares lost their iron railings. With the National Gallery now victim to a constant stream of commercial events in its environs, isn’t it time we got them back?
