Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 132
April 7, 2017
Sensual colour, spooky portraits and cold turkey – the week in art
Anish Kapoor’s latest work goes on show at Lisson Gallery in London, while Rachel Kneebone’s ceramics arrive at the V&A – all in your weekly dispatch
Anish Kapoor
Ecstasies of colour and sensuality from this endlessly creative titan of 21st-century art.
• Lisson Gallery, London, until 6 May
Cerith Wyn Evans and Gillian Ayres: this week’s best exhibitions
From an ambitious commission by the Welsh artist to a timely retrospective of the veteran painter via west Africa and a Cornish beach
New works on paper by the globally renowned west African modern artist, who transforms junk into something beautiful. Salvage and recycling have become central to art in 21st-century Africa, and his ability to give new meaning to found objects has a lot in common with Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters. Yet the romanticism and passion for reflected light are all his own.
October Gallery, WC1, to 13 May
April 6, 2017
Damien Hirst: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable review – a titanic return
Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice
Artist has once again found the underwater grotto in his mind where monsters live, making a fool out of all of us who lost faith
Art is magical. It is a fairytale. It can make you rich. It can make you poor. It can turn everything you thought you knew inside out and upside down.
It has made Damien Hirst rich, colossally so, and now it has done something else. It has redeemed him. For years he has appeared a figure of strangely wasted and ruined promise, whose commercialism snuffed out his artistic spark. Yet with his exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which fills not only a Venetian palace but also the capacious halls of the ship-shaped Punta della Dogana at the mouth of the Grand Canal, the arrogant, exciting, hilarious, mind-boggling imagination that made him such a thrilling artist in the 1990s is audaciously and beautifully reborn.
Continue reading...April 3, 2017
Blood, fire and mayhem: the art of Britain’s conflicts with Spain
Sabre-rattling Brexiters should look at the paintings that depict the barbaric wars between the two European nations
One unlikely beneficiary of the rapid descent from triggering article 50 to sabre-rattling over Gibraltar is the City of London’s Guildhall art gallery, whose largest and strangest painting suddenly looks relevant again after more than 200 years. John Singleton Copley’s The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar is so vast, at nearly eight metres wide, that a special space had to be designed to accommodate it, yet as recently as five days ago it was as obscure as it was colossal. After all, it shows a forgotten moment in a forgotten war against a nation we have not fought for centuries.
In this giant “history painting”, which took nearly 10 years to create, Copley shows the foiling of a foul Spanish plot. With Britain distracted by the American revolutionary war, Spain made an opportunistic attempt to reconquer Gibraltar in 1782 using the ingenious novelty of floating gun batteries to bombard the Rock. The painting shows the floating platforms sinking in flames after the British battered them with superheated cannon shot. It is a horrific scene, with Spanish soldiers jumping in the sea and the magnanimous British commander, George August Eliott, ordering their rescue.
Continue reading...March 31, 2017
Queer painters, neon dreamers and a century of ceramics – the week in art
Cerith Wyn Evans’s neon installation illuminates Tate Britain along with a major survey of queer British art – all in your weekly dispatch
Queer British Art 1861–1967
This ought to be an exciting alternative history of British art and its sexualities from the age of Oscar Wilde and John Singer Sargent to the coming of David Hockney.
• Tate Britain, London, 5 April–1 October.
March 27, 2017
Feminism doesn't need more female statues – it needs political action
Bulgarian artist Erka has rightly protested against Sofia’s total lack of statues of women by erecting her own pop-up versions. But permanent statues don’t advance feminism – they trap people in the past
Images of women recently invaded the streets of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. Placed there by artist Erka, working with socially engaged art platform Fine Acts, these colourful pop-up busts protest against the total absence of monumental artworks dedicated to women on Sofia’s streets.
Related: Diana deserves the best of British sculpture – not some tacky statue
Continue reading...March 24, 2017
Whaling, worship and a farewell to Howard Hodgkin – the week in art
The National Gallery pits Rubens against Rembrandt, while the National Portrait Gallery hosts Howard Hodgkin’s posthumous show – all in your weekly dispatch
Howard Hodgkin
This exhibition serves as a farewell to the great British painter who recently died. His works may seem abstract at first sight, but each one is a passionate evocation of people, places and lost time.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, until 18 June
From Gillian Ayres to Fred Tomaselli: this week’s best UK exhibitions
New paintings, woodcuts and prints from the renowned British expressionist go on display, and pages of the New York Times are twisted into surreal new forms
Untitled (Cerise), painted in 1972, is an almost six-metre-wide abstraction with the embracing sensuality of a water lily painting by Claude Monet. This startling vision is at the heart of a show that also includes new paintings and woodcut prints by the 87-year-old Ayres. She joyously defies every cliche about what British art is supposed to be like. Her paintings burst with echoes of Matisse and Miró, and insist on a direct emotional response to their waves of colour. Ayres is more like an American abstract expressionist than a parochial British painter.
Continue reading...March 21, 2017
The art of colour: why Victoria Beckham is channelling Van Gogh this season
One of spring’s biggest trends is duo-toning – wearing two contrasting hues. Art critic Jonathan Jones explains how 17th-century colour theory is influencing your wardrobe
Isaac Newton was not a man of fashion. He spent more time on calculus than catwalks. Yet the great 17th-century scientist’s discoveries are the ultimate source of this season’s scintillating experiments in colour.
When Newton used a glass prism to break up a beam of sunlight in a dark room, he produced a spectrum of colours and proved that white light is a mixture of all the colours of the rainbow. He mapped these colours on to a circle and created a way of thinking about colour that has fascinated artists and designers from Vincent van Gogh to Gucci. When you look at a colour circle, it reveals relationships between colours and what happens when they are put next to each other – effects that seem all the rage this spring from Victoria Beckham dressing like a walking Van Gogh painting in blue and orange, to Gucci playing with pink and green.
Continue reading...Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth is fine for horses, but not avant garde art
The new works destined for London say pithy things about the modern world – but they keep sculpture trapped in the 19th century
I’ve never been convinced that Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth public sculpture project, in London, is a marvellous thing for art – it is a completely outdated way of displaying sculpture that modern art specifically and, I thought, finally rejected a long time ago.
Related: Winged bull and giant dollop of cream to adorn Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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