Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 131
May 5, 2017
Giacometti, Syria and Richard Long: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Track the evolution of the Swiss visionary’s art, explore the worst humanitarian crisis of our time and take in the pioneering ecologist’s landscapes
There are two Alberto Giacomettis. One is the revered, perhaps even over-revered, visionary whose tall, thin figures and heavily expressive portraits helped to define the anguished culture of postwar Europe. Yet before he became an existentialist, Giacometti was a surrealist. His sculptures from the 1930s are sensual, violent and often shocking. How did Giacometti evolve from a young sensationalist into a mature artist of the human condition? And does he still have lessons to teach the art of our century?
Tate Modern, SE1, 10 May to 10 September
May 1, 2017
Cornelia Parker is the first conceptual election artist – what will she do?
The Turner-nominated sculptor and installation artist will provide a visual record of this spring’s snap election. Here’s who took on the quirky role before her and what they created
The first artist to cover a British election was probably William Hogarth, whose series of paintings of the 1754 general election show voters being bribed with money, oysters and booze in a spectacular carnival of corruption. Hogarth, however, was a maverick satirist, not an official, accredited election artist like Turner-nominated Cornelia Parker, who has been announced as the visual recorder of this spring’s snap election.
Related: Cornelia Parker named as official artist of 2017 general election
Continue reading...April 28, 2017
Syria, sculptural surrealism and Lenin's library pass – the week in art
Ed Ruscha’s urban surrealism heads to Edinburgh, while Norfolk welcomes Richard Long’s contemplative landscape art – all in your weekly dispatch
Ed Ruscha
The master of cool irony and urban surrealism gets a mini-retrospective courtesy of the Artist Rooms collection.
• Modern One, Edinburgh, from 29 April
David Hockney, Ed Ruscha and Chris Ofili: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Take in etchings inspired by Greek poet CP Cavafy, eerie paintings of Los Angeles, and work by a landscape artist turned tapestry designer
There is an eerie, apocalyptic undertone to Ed Ruscha’s apparently bland vision of Los Angeles. The gas stations and strip malls he paints or photographs may burst into flames any second. Morbid, poisoned skies glow above their neatly painted signs; flat yet bizarre messages are written in the ether. Ruscha is a pop artist, a conceptual artist and a surrealist whose images portray the same sinister Hollywood you see in David Lynch films. In other words, a contemporary great.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, to 29 April 2018
April 27, 2017
Cornelia Parker review – a current affairs lesson devoid of empathy
Frith Street Gallery, London
The British conceptualist is clearly enraged by the chaos in the world today – but her new work can only muster sneering contempt
How can art adequately face up to an age in which Donald Trump is president of the United States, the civil war in Syria is more than six years old, and the far right threatens to become part of Europe’s political mainstream? It is tempting to conclude from Cornelia Parker’s inane attempt to engage with some of these realities that it can’t. Perhaps our time is simply too strange and surreal for artists to get their heads around. Imagination shrivels and dies faced with the enormity of the news headlines.
It is no doubt the unreal, monstrous, mad character of those headlines that Parker was trying to capture when she got a bunch of young kids to copy them out on blackboards. Children aged five, seven, eight cor and 10 have created a series of chalked up newsboards in varying degrees of legibility, translating the violence, absurdity and ugliness of adult reality into their innocent scribbles. There’s even some youthful optimism. “LABOUR COULD WIN A SNAP ELECTION”, declares News at Eight (Make the Moon Great Again) (2017). Or was it Jeremy Corbyn’s actual spokesman who miscalculated the space needed for the word “election” and had to trail off in tiny letters?
Related: Cornelia Parker: ‘I don’t want to tick anyone else’s boxes’
Continue reading...April 21, 2017
Ofili tapestries, Hockney etchings and Apple's HQ – the week in art
Mat Collishaw’s new cinematic sculpture questions the origins of art, while Langlands & Bell recreate Silicon Valley campuses – all in your weekly dispatch
Mat Collishaw
A surreal cinematic sculpture that advances a provocative theory about the origins of art by this intelligent analyst of the power of images.
• Blain Southern, London, until 27 May
Degas and Constable and McTaggart: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Statues of the Little Dancer – such as the one in the Tate Modern – were made after the death of the great French artist, based on a wax sculpture he worked and reworked over many years. Now, what appears to be a plaster cast of the original – as first exhibited at the impressionist exhibition in Paris, 1881 – has resurfaced. This dancer looks more childlike and less elegant than the image everyone knows and it’s all the more moving for that.
Stair Sainty Gallery, W1, 27 April to 26 May
April 17, 2017
Refugees, aristocrats and modern British painters – the week in art
Ben Uri Gallery’s exhibition of German artist émigrés opens this week, while the Scottish National Gallery shows off two masterpieces of nature’s power – all in your weekly dispatch
Refugees: The Lives of Others
This exhibition looks at German artistic émigrés to Britain – from Frank Auerbach, who came to Britain as a child to escape the Holocaust that killed both his parents, to the expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner, who fled Hitler as a mature and well-known artist. Eva Frankfurther, who has a parallel show until 18 June, came as a child, studied alongside Auerbach and painted immigrant communities in London’s postwar East End.
• Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London, until 4 June
April 14, 2017
Anish Kapoor and Graham MacIndoe: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The celebrated artist continues his exploration of colour, while the photographer displays the self-portraits that documented his heroin addiction
One of our greatest artists, this modern Rubens continues the exploration of colour and its emotional power that started with his early experiments in bright-hued sculptural forms in the 1980s. In his latest works, he plays with the idea of painting in the same way a child might play with a doll – by pulling it apart. Spectacular, intensely vivid, somehow erotic wall works deliberately confuse two dimensions with three and voluptuously celebrate the power of art.
Lisson Gallery, NW1, to 6 May
April 12, 2017
Jeff Koons' Louis Vuitton bags: a joyous art history lesson
In championing the likes of Fragonard, Rubens and Titian, Jeff Koons’ line of Louis Vuitton accessories brings high art to the high street – and shows off his sincere passion for painting
High art needs all the friends it can get. Museum attendance is dropping all over the world, and earnest attempts to court the young and identify with the new are clearly not working. Something more eloquent is needed: unequivocal enthusiasm for great art in a language people in the 21st century understand.
How about a Louis Vuitton bag with RUBENS written on it in big gold letters over a reproduction of that 17th-century painter’s violent, exuberant and gorgeous work Tiger, Lion and the Leopard Hunt?
Koons' subtle passion for art is concealed by his apparent belief in banality
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