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 […]
Forgive my relative ignorance, but I knew very little about the work of Anselm Kiefer before coming along to this exhibition at the Royal Academy. I had seen a few of his mixed media works in various settings, but did not come in with pre-conceived notions of the weight of history or bombastic symbolism in […]
Egon Schiele had something of a moment in late 2014, which is perhaps somewhat earlier than expected given that the centenary of his early death will be in 2018. Nonetheless, it was my privilege to be able to see not one but two top class exhibitions on either side of the Atlantic, the first, Egon […]
Does anyone remember how I was having a small rant in my review of Ballyturk about how I don’t like things that make no sense on purpose, such as David Lynch films? Well, it turns out I am a lot more tolerant of it when it’s an art show, probably because it’s easier to make […]
