Sapling Gallery, Mayfair, installation shot Nestled among the red bricks of Mount Street Mews - not far from the splendour of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where Evelyn Waugh sought solace - there’s a new light filled gallery in London’s Mayfair, called Sapling. With potted plants outside, its sizeable glass façade provides a first glimpse of … Continue reading California’s Dreams of Coolness: the art of Eddie Ruscha
Category: Reviews
Grasping after Perfection: the making of Rodin
Auguste Rodin The Three Shadows, before 1886, S.03970 If you were expecting to see Rodin as the maker of finished sculptural objects, a fabricator of masterpieces in bronze or marble, a maker whose works could easily be defined and wholly encompassed by the word MONUMENTALITY, this is the wrong exhibition for you. Auguste Rodin, Hanaka … Continue reading Grasping after Perfection: the making of Rodin
Deep Down Blueness
The Heart is Not a Home Could it be something to do with the fact that the eye is moving through ever finer, and often ever more finely layered, gradations of a single colour? And that the particular colour in question is of course blue, which drags along in its slow wake a long history … Continue reading Deep Down Blueness
Georg Baselitz and the Graspability of Hands
Georg Baselitz has been much preoccupied by the subject of hands, old hands, recently. His own hands? The hands of others? The hands drawn and painted by artists of the past? An amalgam of all three perhaps. Hands show off and encapsulate extremities of emotion – think of the reaching index finger of God's hand … Continue reading Georg Baselitz and the Graspability of Hands
The Molten Force of the Sunflower****
‘I, indeed, before, others, have taken the sunflower,’ wrote Vincent Van Gogh to Paul Gauguin on 21 January 1889 with remarkable assurance for a man of such febrile temperament. Ever since, the whole world has inclined to agree with him. The name Van Gogh has become identified with his various painted representations of it. Without … Continue reading The Molten Force of the Sunflower****
The Challenge of Latex: the danger of gender-fluidity spillage **
Can you imagine a hotter topic for an inflated gallery show than gender fluidity? Apparently human beings are are at it everywhere these days, in the bedroom and the schoolroom, wondering who they are, and who they might yet become once they have shucked off the daily, flat-footed plod of their customary identities... Could there … Continue reading The Challenge of Latex: the danger of gender-fluidity spillage **
Dancing with Saint Peter ***
Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) was born the daughter of an aristocrat into a rural Russia profonde two hundred miles from Moscow, amongst piety, peasantry and the older ways of doing things. Her family had been manufacturers of textiles, and from the start this huge retrospective of her work at Tate Modern embeds her deep in tradition … Continue reading Dancing with Saint Peter ***
Wildness is all: yet another under-sung heroine… ***
Do you know the work of the painter Lee Krasner? Why not? Born in 1908 into a family of Russian Jewish émigrés in New York, she was an Abstract Expressionist. Remember them? In the 1950s, they snatched the crown of Art Capital of the World from Paris single-handed. Paris has never recovered. Who were the … Continue reading Wildness is all: yet another under-sung heroine… ***
Those Long Afternoons in Paris: the voyeur’s view of Edouard Vuillard ****
The sheer oddness of the angle of view is what appeals above all things else. Too pent? Too wonky? Too side-on? The painter Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) lived for much of his life in a variety of rather small apartments in Paris, hugger mugger with his mother and his sister... The Family After the Meal (1891), … Continue reading Those Long Afternoons in Paris: the voyeur’s view of Edouard Vuillard ****
Sean Scully: the Bruiser’s Back!***
Scully (b.1945) the Irish bruiser's back in town. He's not been long away. His most recent show of new paintings, on display at Blain Southern in Hanover Square, closed just a few months ago. He's a man who regards himself - you can hear it in the rough-edged way he talks; observe it in how … Continue reading Sean Scully: the Bruiser’s Back!***
The ARTlicker 