I intend to go back to this exhibition again before it closes. Not because I loved it so much I just have to (this remains to be seen) but because the main drawbacks I found with this exhibition were organisational and design constraints: too many people, wall texts too hard to read and not enough […]
This is an exhibition with a very good starting point: a successful and creative businessman, buffeted by the vagaries of 20th Century history, whose story illustrates a much wider narrative. Plus that of a granddaughter (Anne Sinclair), public figure, painted by major artists as a child, and now author of a successful history of her […]
Artists whose creativity spills out of them – onto canvases, onto objects around them – fascinate me, it’s a reason I have such a soft spot for Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is also a principle behind Robert Rauschenberg’s artistic output, made all the more interesting by the fact that he did not set out on an […]
This is an interesting exhibition, which reflects on how we, as humans, see our fellow animals, and what effect our interactions with and understandings of animals have on them. It opens by looking Linnean classification of species (ie. the Enlightenment era division of living things into kingdoms, species, etc) including a fascinating and fragile dried […]
I rather enjoyed this historic and thematic overview of the place of electricity in our lives. The broad structure of the exhibition takes us from Generation (early encounters with electrical forces, experimentation and understanding of the processes involved in creating electricity) to Supply (how electricity was stored, harnessed and transported) and Consumption (the effect it […]
Exploring the changes in geopolitics, technology and society through the use and evolution of maps is an interesting idea, and the British Library’s exhibition does its best to add enough variety to keep the subject matter engaging. The exhibition is logically structured, with an early section on the opening of the 20th Century and a […]
This exhibition, like many of the artworks in it, bears up well under the weight of history. For Revolution is firmly rooted in the historic context of the period 1917-1932 in Russia – a time of upheavals, civil war, dictators and hopes born and cruelly dashed. Despite this, it manages to educate, illuminate and engage, […]
While visiting this overall excellent and interesting exhibition at Tate Modern, I was thinking a lot about conservation versus comprehension. Warnings abound before and throughout the galleries not to move or blow on the works as they are now too fragile, but is a static mobile still a mobile? If an installation which relies on […]
We are familiar with Greek art. In fact, as a rule, the audience will also be familiar with a number of the sculptures on display in this exhibition at the British Museum. Even the fact that Greek sculptures were originally decorated in what could be described as garish colours will not be new to many. […]
Having incorporated it into my Masters thesis, the topic of war-looted art and its subsequent treatment and consideration for restitution is one of perennial interest to me. I was very interested, therefore, to learn more about a large-scale piece of collection research which has been going on in the Netherlands since my time there, and […]
