- 16 June: A Vinted buy, a kilt and a suit to match my eyes: street style at the Royal Academy summer party – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Stylish attenders of the RA’s summer soiree talk us through their outfits and what they are hoping to get out of the exhibition
Continue reading... - 16 June: ‘Queer as a $3 bill’: celebrating 100 years of LGBTQ+ art for Pride month - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A new exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles looks back at a variety of queer art from 1900 to the present
As curator Pietro Rigolo was combing through the Getty’s archives in search of material for his new show, he came upon a strange sight – a $3 bill.
“I was in this section of the archive dealing with the Black Panther movement, the WPA, the gay rights movement and protest material related to HIV/Aids,” Rigolo told me during a video interview. “In there, I found this little piece of ephemera that was this fictive $3 bill. This specific banknote bears the portraits of Harvey Milk and Bessie Smith.”
Continue reading... - 16 June: Stop rushing through art galleries. Spend 10 minutes with just one masterpiece instead | Jane Howard - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Science tells us art can expand our minds and bring us happiness. Australians are so lucky our public collections are free – and here’s one way to make the most of them
On a recent Sunday afternoon, with a few hours up my sleeve, I decided: I want to see a Rothko. I wasn’t in the mood to wander around the gallery, spending a couple of minutes with hundreds of pieces of art. I just wanted to find the Rothko at the National Gallery of Victoria, stand in front of it for 10 minutes and then go outside again to enjoy the sunshine.
We’re extraordinarily lucky in Australia that the permanent collections at our state galleries are free to attend. Our public collections are just that: owned by the public, belonging to us, there for us to enjoy.
Continue reading... - 13 June: Summer arrives with monsters, minimalism and a memorial quilt – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Big names liven up the Royal Academy’s annual extravaganza, Durham digs into its past and Tate welcomes the Aids memorial quilt – all in your weekly dispatch
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Continue reading...
Tracey Emin unveils a stunning Crucifixion, while Cornelia Parker, Frank Bowling and George Shaw are also among the stars of this huge, often rewarding show.
• Royal Academy, London, 17 June to 17 August - 11 June: Jim Royle’s take on Tracey Emin ‘masterpiece’ | Brief letters - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Art review | ‘Worser’ in Shakespeare | Youth hostelling | Driverless taxis | Egregious Americanism | Outage outrage
Jonathan Jones, in his review of the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition (Letters, 10 June), describes Tracey Emin’s The Crucifixion as a “masterpiece … the greatest new painting that’s been seen since Lucian Freud died”. Spare us this spurious hyperbole! The art critic Robert Hughes will be turning in his grave. Or as Jim, the grumpy philosopher in The Royle Family, would say: “Masterpiece my arse!’
John Rattigan
Doveridge, Derbyshire• Re Iain Fenton’s racked brain (Letters, 9 June), yes, Shakespeare did use “worser”, multiple times in a dozen different plays. Cleopatra: “I cannot hate thee worser than I do.” Juliet: “Some word worser than Tybalt’s death.” Gloucester to King Lear: “Let not my worser spirit tempt me again.”
Continue reading...
Sally Smith
Redruth, Cornwall - 11 June: Edward Burra / Ithell Colquhoun review – sex, jazz, war and the occult, all confusingly jumbled - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Tate Britain, London
Colquhoun’s surrealism and Burra’s pro-fascist war paintings and Hogarthian scenes of Harlem nightlife are all brilliant. But they have nothing in common – so why handcuff them together?They make a truly odd couple. She’s an occultist who once appeared on BBC television explaining to the nation how to make surrealist art at home. He’s a jazz enthusiast whose slices of modern – and often queer - life are full of roly-poly grotesques. What on earth have Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra got in common, and why has Tate Britain handcuffed them together for an uncalled for, unneeded and ultimately baffling double header?
I loved Colquhoun’s exhibition at Tate St Ives when I reviewed it earlier this year, but this version of it is much more flatly laid out and her experiments in releasing the unconscious are shouted down by all the drunken, drugged, omnivorously shagging people in Burra’s 1920s and 30s clubs and bars. Yet he also gets edited and reinvented in a way that left me largely cold.
Continue reading... - 10 June: I have seen the light and it’s Tracey Emin’s Jesus – RA Summer Exhibition review - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Royal Academy of Art, London
With an extraordinary painting by Emin, great works by Cindy Sherman, Cornelia Parker and Sean Scully, assisted by some perving from Allen Jones, this annual jamboree has returned to relevanceHalfway through the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, I was woken up by Jesus (but more on this shortly). Suddenly, as I came to, the whole place appeared alive and more and more good stuff leapt out from the 1,600 works on view. What’s that upsidedown stag? It’s by the 87-year-old German master Georg Baselitz. As for those convex mirrors above your head, reflecting you and the floor in radical foreshortening, that’s an installation by Cornelia Parker. In the same room hang eviscerated animal carcasses hooked up on chains, made of textiles by Tamara Kostianovsky.
But it’s Jesus who lifts this exhibition out of the ordinary. He moves towards you like a shark in the illusion created by Tracey Emin’s painting The Crucifixion. And like a shark, he is frightening. I thought art had lost its capacity to shock. But what can be more shocking than a celebrated 21st-century artist sincerely painting the passion? Emin shows another work before this startling, upsetting show-stopper – an outsized, melancholy portrait print. It makes you wonder and worry: is the artist OK? And even, is the artist any good? This female face is so broadly sketched it’s a bit clumsy, and yet you can’t forget it.
Continue reading... - 9 June: ‘Painting’s dangerous work!’ The artist whose tools are brushes and power sanders - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Megan Rooney painstakingly creates works with layer upon layer of paint – and attacks them with a grinder in between. Ahead of a beguiling new show, our writer braves a studio tour
‘I’m just trying to get one step ahead of my paintings,” says Megan Rooney, who is surrounded by the vibrant, gestural abstract works in her studio. She moves through the space restlessly as we chat, rocking on to her tiptoes and arching her arms through the air in an echo of the curving strokes in the paintings. She calls it “dangerous work”, her slow, fraught process of creation. “After a decade of serious painting,” she says, “I still feel bewildered and beguiled.”
Rooney, 40, grew up in Canada and now lives in London, where she is preparing for her forthcoming show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. She has a unique approach of adding and subtracting. She begins by adding paint to a blank canvas, then removes it with power sanders, then adds more on top, then removes it again, in a painstaking, almost bloody battle to find her way to the finished work. Each painting ends up with 10 or 15 other works beneath it.
Continue reading... - 8 June: Fancy some iconic celeriac? New Nordic cuisine, now a blockbuster exhibition - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Twenty years ago, a group of Scandinavian chefs announced a culinary revolution. But as Norway’s National museum celebrates the New Nordic manifesto’s impact on dining and the arts, has the movement betrayed its own ambitious ideals?
When is gastronomy about more than just recipes? When it is New Nordic cuisine: to its advocates, the most influential culinary movement of the 21st century; to its detractors, a school of foodie puritans who have spent the last two decades sucking the joy out of dining and injecting it with po-faced declarations.
If a decade of breathy Netflix food programming is to be believed, you could delicately tweezer some edible petals and micro-herbs on to locally foraged mushrooms and a bed of ancient grains, serve it with a naturally fermented lemonade, and you’ve got yourself a cracking (if not hugely substantive) New Nordic meal.
Continue reading... - 6 June: A magical mystery tour of Liverpool, bug-eyed cuteness and the world of vineyards – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Roll up to the latest Biennial in the city of the Liver birds, trip the light fantastic with Liliane Lijn and wonder at a massive ox – all in your weekly dispatch
Liverpool Biennial
Continue reading...
Turner winner Elizabeth Price and Turkey’s Cevdet Erek are the stars of this mystery tour of Liverpool that’s occasionally magical.
• Various venues, Liverpool, until 14 September - 5 June: Brooding, fearsome views of a blackened earth: Jungjin Lee’s epic Iceland photographs – review - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London
The South Korean, who once followed an old man’s decade-long search for wild ginseng, has found the perfect subject – full of frothy seas, imposing rocks and smoky cloudsThere’s a visual quiz circulating on social media at the moment that promises to reveal your unresolved childhood trauma. Do you see an elephant first or a forest? A butterfly or an apple? Jungjin Lee’s exhibition, called Unseen, is in some ways an elevated version of that. The series of large, black-and-white landscape photographs – all made last year in Iceland – do not tell you anything about the times, or the place. Instead what you see depends on what is buried in you – threatening to open up that scary, unbidden “unseen”.
Lee, who lives in New York, is little known in the UK beyond her photobooks. This small show of 10 works is her first solo show in the UK in a 30-year career. Her background is important in deciphering these images. Her first artistic training was in the traditional calligraphic arts, as a child growing up in South Korea. Later she studied ceramics at Hongik University in Seoul, where artists such as Lee Bul were among her peers.
Continue reading... - 4 June: Hamad Butt: Apprehensions review – beauty and violence from a lost and dangerous YBA - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Whitechapel Gallery, London
He died before his time but Hamad Butt’s sublimely hazardous retrospective of mustard gas baubles and blinding lights is a thrilling mix of the nostalgic and newFlies crawl about in a triptych of glass-fronted cabinets, while in another installation you gradually realise the fragile bottles you’re looking at are full of poisonous gas, lethal to humans. Does this remind you of anyone?
Hamad Butt is the Damien Hirst who got away, the Young British Artist of the 1990s who didn’t win the Turner prize, make millions or lose his youthful talent and turn into a bloated mediocrity. Now he is a cult figure precisely because he is none of those things and can instead be presented as if he was a complete unknown, whose art expresses his queer Pakistani identity rather than being part of a fin-de-siecle art movement of sensation and creepy science. I couldn’t find any reference, even in the moving array of Butt’s working documents on show, to the fact he studied at Goldsmiths alongside Hirst, Collishaw, Wearing and more.
Continue reading... - 3 June: ‘A reflection of who she was’: major Diane Arbus exhibition hits New York - Exhibitions | The Guardian
An expansive survey of the photographer’s work lands at the Park Avenue Armory, offering an unusually assembled look at her defining images
Constellation, the enormous new show of photographer Diane Arbus’s life work, aims to present the artist as no one has seen her before. Embracing randomness, this exhibition of a full set of 454 master prints from Arbus’s only authorized printmaker, Neil Selkirk, tries its best to give audiences a completely unstructured presentation of the photos.
“I wanted to make sure that it was as mixed up as possible,” the show’s curator, Matthieu Humery, told me. “I didn’t want to make any specific connections between images. I tried to keep out any kind of narratives so that visitors create their own narratives. There is this magic madness.”
Continue reading... - 3 June: 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art – a grand, disturbing and provocative exhibition - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Melbourne’s Potter Museum has reopened with a bold celebration of thousands of years of Indigenous art that forcefully declares ‘this is not an ethnographic collection – it’s art’
The opening exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s newly refurbished Potter Museum of Art has been given a darkly ironic and deliberately provocative title: 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art. While there is a vast and storied tradition of Aboriginal art, its power and dignity have been criminally under-appreciated and devalued until only recently.
For most of the 20th century “this work was considered primitive”, says the renowned academic and co-curator of the exhibition, Marcia Langton. The central point of 65,000 Years is declamatory, a forceful demonstration that “this is not an ethnographic collection”, she says. “It’s art.”
Continue reading... - 31 May: The Jewish dealer who bought art hated by the Nazis – and created one of the greatest collections ever seen - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A new National Gallery of Australia show draws on Heinz Berggruen’s collection to celebrate the spread of modernism around the world, despite the Nazis’ best efforts
When Heinz Berggruen left Germany for America in 1936, he was not allowed more than 10 marks in his pocket. As a young journalist in Berlin, Berggruen had been forced to publish under the pseudonym “h.b.” in order to hide his Jewish heritage and evade the Nazi party’s antisemitism.
In the decades that would follow, he became an art dealer, regularly rubbing shoulders with the most important artists of the 20th century, and amassing one of the most impressive private collections of modern art ever to exist. On the day he left Berlin for Berkeley, however, such a future would have seemed impossible.
Continue reading... - 30 May: Jazz and blues through the camera lens – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A new joint exhibition showcases the work of photographer Frank Stewart and his mentee Petra Richterová, capturing the essence of jazz and blues within the African diaspora. Over his career, Stewart photographed figures such as Miles Davis, while Richterová has worked for Jazz at Lincoln Center
The Blues and Mean Reds and Sound of Light are showing at the Wilmer Jennings Gallery in New York until 28 June
- 30 May: The Guardian view on a new era for museums: letting the public take control | Editorial - Exhibitions | The Guardian
The V&A East Storehouse and the award-winning Manchester Museum show radical ways forward
The museum of the future has arrived and it looks like an Amazon warehouse. But art critics have unanimously awarded it five stars. From Saturday, visitors to the V&A East Storehouse in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will be able to wander among the 250,000 objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection that are not on display in its west London home. The headline-grabbing order-an-object initiative means you can book online to get your hands (gloves are provided) on a priceless artefact any day you like. And all for free.
It is a triumph born out of necessity. After the V&A’s eviction from their Kensington storage home a decade ago, they decided that instead of hiding one of the world’s largest design collections in an expensive warehouse, they would turn it into an attraction in its own right. Storage is a big issue for institutions: only 1% of the British Museum’s more than 8m artefacts are on public display. Showing off your overflowing attic makes the most of what you’ve already got, repurposing a closet that, for the V&A, includes a Balenciaga gown (the most requested item so far) and PJ Harvey’s hotpants.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading... - 30 May: Rachel Whiteread hits the countryside, Derby’s great hero and museums reinvented – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A brand new outdoor/indoor art foundation opens with a spectacular show by the British sculptor, and the V&A unveils its extraordinary public Storehouse – all in your weekly dispatch
Rachel Whiteread
Continue reading...
The Sussex countryside is haunted by grey concrete ghosts and white mortuary slabs as Whiteread proves her vision is as melancholically powerful as ever.
• Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex, 31 May to 2 November - 29 May: The best US exhibitions and art events for Pride month 2025 - Exhibitions | The Guardian
LGBTQ+ communities face more discrimination under Trump 2.0 but cultural institutions continue to support
While many sectors of society are pulling back on LGBTQ+ celebration, support and representation – including retailers like Target, tech giants like Meta and Google, and non-profits such as the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (Rainn) – art venues large and small are showing up for Pride month this June. Here’s a roundup of many of the things happening all over the country to celebrate and encourage the LGBTQ+ community this year.
Continue reading... - 28 May: Fancy a masterpiece? Just pop one in your basket! V&A’s new open-access outpost will thrill art-lovers - Exhibitions | The Guardian
V&A East Storehouse, London
The Victoria & Albert’s new warehouse boasts a mind-boggling 250,000 artefacts. Our art critic tries its ‘order an object’ service and gets intimate with some national treasures – including ‘the biggest Picasso in the world’• ‘The national museum of absolutely everything’: our architecture critic visits the Storehouse
On a table in a study room at the new V&A East Storehouse, a silk-embroidered Alexander McQueen dress decorated with Hieronymus Bosch paintings has been laid out for me to see intimately. Creatures from The Garden of Earthly Delights cavort and gurn in my face, including a bird monster perched on a high stool that defecates out sinners. Ah, the privileges of a critic – except it isn’t my special experience at all. This opportunity for a personal encounter with an exquisite object is available to everyone and anyone, free of charge, as part of this unprecedented reinvention of the Victoria & Albert Museum that is V&A East Storehouse. It isn’t even difficult to arrange. All you do is look up the collection online and, if an object is in the Storehouse, you add it to your cart of up to five treasures, place an order, and in a fortnight they will be available for your private delight.
You can choose anything from theatre posters to Renaissance paintings to shoes. If they’re movable they will be brought to the study room, if not you go to them. I recommend the Ajanta paintings in the ground floor storage facility where I found one towering over me, its damaged parts covered with what looked like sticking plasters, adding to the mystery of this great mass of red and green out of which emerge sharply portrayed people. It’s a full-size copy of one of the Ajanta cave paintings in India – one of 300 made for the V&A in the late 19th century by a team from Bombay School of Art.
Continue reading...
Originally posted 2011-02-25 17:28:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
