Above: Tostoy by Ilya Repin. More here.Monday, 23 November 2009
Monday, 16 November 2009
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Sunday, 1 November 2009
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
New! Pop Life at Tate Modern
It’s not cool to be depressed by the brazen commercialism of certain facets of the art world, yet you’d have to have a heart of stone not to leave Pop Life, the new exhibition of post-Warhol contemporary art at Tate Modern, without feeling that at least a little part of you had died. Not that it’s all bad, by any means, but the sheer glitzy glibness of it all did make the gurgling Thames, far below outside the café windows, seem more inviting than ever.Monday, 12 October 2009
New! Robert Lang on Saatchi Online
In Fumble (2008, above), a figure bends inside a kite-shaped hole. Paint, applied in cautious little stabs, prescribes its own descriptive limits. It does what it can. In places it has the urgency and awkwardness of finger-painting. Something wants to be said, but can't. Lang's paintings deny themselves complete descriptive facility: they can't find the right words.
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
New! Kapoortalism
There’s a big lump of birdshit in the eye of Joshua Reynolds. The painter and founder of theRoyal Academy, who once literally took a Titian painting to bits to better understand how he did what he did, stands immortalized in bronze in the Academy’s courtyard, waggling his metal brush reprehensively at a wall of giant stainless steel bubbles by Anish Kapoor, a more recent member of the Academy whose mid-career retrospective dominates the galleries of the building behind. The birdshit has landed capriciously, streaked in the sculpture’s eye, but it’s tempting to read it as clunky metaphor for Kapoor’s all-out assault on the neo-Palladian austerity of the Academy and the art-historical “standards” it represents. One in the eye for the stuffed shirts!
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