This is the first exhibition at Buckingham Palace that I’ve been to in five years in London. I think part of that reason may be that they don’t tend to get as much press as other exhibition spaces. This in turn is linked to the fact that the nature of the gallery lends itself to […]
For a start, the space is superb. Not just the building itself, where the exhibitions are in the Roman baths above which is a medieval hôtel for the abbots of Cluny (not a bad town house). The way that the space is used is key to what I felt was the success of this exhibition: […]
Mid-century German artists. Do they get more exhibitions in London than you can shake a stick at, or is that just me? Between Richter, Kiefer, Polke, Baselitz and another couple of heavyweights, they could certainly keep the turnstiles of a willing museum pretty busy. Having said that, this was the first major Polke retrospective I’ve […]
The central relationship explored in this exhibition is that between architecture and photography: how photographers have responded to the built environment around them, its static yet ever-changing nature, its central place in our lives; and how architecture, often through architects, has made use of photography. In order to shed light on this symbiotic give and […]
If you were in charge of exhibition programming, and you had a passion for a subject which perhaps wasn’t quite right for your museum, what would you do? It’s an interesting question, which could be argued a couple of ways. Is it better to stick to your institution’s core values and strengths, or to push […]
Horst P. Horst. What a name. What a photographer. And according to most accounts in the exhibition, what a guy. The V&A’s retrospective of his work is well-crafted, diverse and interesting, and if it doesn’t shed much light on Horst as a person rather than as a photographer, it seems that this may have been […]
What to say about Allen Jones? Well, if you’re pretty much any critic who reviewed this exhibition, most of the discussion should be about his representation of women. You’ve likely all seen his sculptures of women as furniture, produced in the 1960s for the most part. Most famously there is ‘Chair’, in which a woman […]
Late works seem to be quite fashionable at the moment: late Turner, late Rembrandt, late Matisse, probably late other people as well. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it is interesting to explore whether an artist’s output changes towards the end of their life and what the contributing factors are, but in the case […]
It would seem that Moroni has spent more time in fashion in the UK than elsewhere, making London perhaps the perfect setting for a small and well-curated exhibition that aims to increase the public’s regard for his work once more. Some early acquisitions by the National Gallery mean that perhaps his most famous work, known […]
There were a couple of things I found very interesting about this exhibition. The first was the idea of revisiting a seminal work in modern art a century after its creation: trying to look at it with the mindset of someone seeing it for the first time, and then considering it with the weight of […]
