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 […]
I think I was a little dazzled while seeing this play, not by the big name draws in their Broadway debuts, or by the direction, but, not having seen any of Tom Stoppard’s plays previously, by his way with words. While I still have nothing to compare it to, this revival of The Real Thing […]
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 […]
“I can see they’re acting, but I’m not sure why.” This was the initial reaction to Ballyturk of one of my theatregoing companions, but it essentially sums up most of the reviews I’ve read of Enda Walsh’s play recently staged at the National, having debuted at the Galway International Arts Festival earlier this year. I […]
Ok, I almost need to draw you a diagram for this one. You know Shakespeare, right? Macbeth, with the witches etc? Well Verdi wrote an opera of it in 1847. And then it was staged by a South African company at the Barbican. But they staged it as if they were a group of Congolese […]
At what point is it ok to call an exhibition out on being mainly an advertisement? This is how I felt about this one room exhibition on the John Lewis brand of department stores, which I briefly visited while at the Design Museum recently. The stated aims of the exhibitions are to mark 150 years […]
