Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 17
July 15, 2024
Bill Viola made video art ask the biggest, most universal questions
The artist, who has died aged 73, used his medium to explore survival, reason, life, death and the soul. In a world of oversaturation, his art gave stillness
Bill Viola: obituaryBill Viola: ‘the Rembrandt of the video age’My most intense memory of Bill Viola’s art is watching his video of a man sinking passively underwater, before rising slowly again, with the cold North Sea actually below me. I’d travelled from London to Orkney to see a small retrospective of his works, including this piece, Ascension, at a gallery on a pier at Stromness. It was completely worth the journey. Ascension especially, with its hypnotic soundtrack of bubbling water, was an uncompromising embrace of a near-death experience.
I hope his death, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was as peaceful as he makes near-drowning look. Viola traced his interest in watery graves to his own experience of submersion in a lake as a child. Water however isn’t the only way of dying in his art. In his series Martyrs, installed in St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 2014, a man sits impassively as flames rise around him. You can certainly describe this as a religious work.
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July 12, 2024
A very British surrealist and the Tories’ legacy in cartoons – the week in art
Drift inside Leonora Carrington’s strange dreams while Ben Jennings parodies 14 years of political failure in a graphic Rake’s Progress – all in your weekly dispatch
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary
Strange dreams and a passionate life make this a seductive summer celebration of a very British surrealist.
• Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, West Sussex, until 26 October
July 11, 2024
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary review – wild dreams of a titan of surrealism finally get their due
Newlands House Gallery, Petworth
This is an ecstatic reminder of all that is liberating in surrealist art by an extraordinary artist who was still unlocking her unconscious well into her 90s
Surrealism is a century old, if you date it from the publication of its first manifesto in Paris in 1924. Leonora Carrington claimed never to have read it. She was only seven when it appeared, growing up far from the Left Bank in a gothic English mansion where Nanny filled her head with fairytales. Yet when Carrington died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of 94, she was one of the last living participants in the original surrealist movement. This exhibition in a rambling rural gallery is an ecstatic reminder of all that is liberating in surrealist art.
It’s also an encounter with a woman now getting her due as one of modern art’s greats. In May, her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for $28.5m at Sotheby’s, making her the most expensive British female artist of all time. Yet when her (much younger) cousin the writer Joanna Moorhead, who has lovingly curated this show, sought her out in her later years she was largely forgotten. Think of it: a living surrealist, still working in her cabinet of curiosities of a home in Mexico where she’d settled in the 1940s, unnoticed, unfussed over back home through the 90s and noughties, while the British art world got excited over the latest Hirst or Perry.
Continue reading...July 9, 2024
‘It’s like Where’s Wally in broken Britain’: Ben Jennings on his Tory-era take on A Rake’s Progress
A millennial navigates the gig economy, fights in pubs and gets kettled on a demo in Snowflake’s Progress, the Guardian’s political cartoonist’s Hogarthian epitaph for the last 14 years of Conservative rule
Guardian cartoonist Ben Jennings and I stand forlornly before Sir John Soane’s Museum in London as we are told that is it closed. We had planned to see William Hogarth’s tragicomic painting cycle A Rake’s Progress, the model for Jennings’ Snowflake’s Progress – his personal picaresque survey of broken Britain.
Like a couple of ne’er-do-well Georgian fops, we have mucked up – until another journalist generously phones the director, Will Gompertz, who comes down to size us up. The former BBC arts supremo apparently thinks what the hell and gives us a VIP tour of Soane’s atmospheric house.
Continue reading...July 5, 2024
Barbie graces London and the Rokeby Venus heads to Liverpool – the week in art
Plus Dominique White’s subaquatic sculptures, Lonnie Holley’s salvaged objects and a new Rembrandt at the British Museum – all in your weekly dispatch
Dominique White
Subaquatic sculptures that speak a powerful abstract language, by a hugely promising young British artist.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 15 September
July 4, 2024
Lonnie Holley review – America’s wreckage made into magical art
Camden Art Centre, London
The artist and musician reclaims beauty and meaning from rubbish, decay and death, using materials from rusted padlocks to old organ pipes. It’s raw, inspiring and absolutely joyous
Should you review the art or the artist? With Lonnie Holley it’s hard to tell them apart, and completely impossible to separate his creativity from the mystery of being alive. When I arrive at Camden Art Centre to review his show, I find the artist making a little sculpture from bits and pieces he has found laying around outside. He starts with a drawing of a woman, then creates her portrait in copper wire, screwing up the drawing to make her hair, then finally gives her a “bow” that’s a discarded grape stem. “She heard it on the grapevine”, he jokes. Transformation, salvation, music – it’s a hypnotic demonstration of his work.
There’s more magic upstairs in a film of Holley performing his 18-minute punk-blues anthem I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, over a montage of images of his present and past. And what an extraordinary past it is. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, Holley learned the value of recycling from his grandmother, who used to take him to salvage whatever they could from the scrapyard. He compares his way of making art with the resourcefulness of Martin Luther King who, in prison in Birmingham, Alabama, for fighting its segregation laws in 1963, “wrote on toilet paper”.
Continue reading...July 2, 2024
Dominique White: Deadweight review – a beautiful, twisted sea monster
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Woven throughout this compelling collection of sculptures from the Max Mara prizewinner is a ferrous thread of hooks and spikes that drags the cruel history of slavery to the surface
Enter Dominique White’s tolling sea-bell of an exhibition and you will be hooked, then dragged down deep. Four big sculptures are dimly illuminated in a gallery creeping with blue shadows. It is meant to feel as if you are under the sea. Give it time and you will believe you are probing tangled fragments of a shipwreck. Tendrils curl in and out of a sunken cannon. A humanoid hunk of driftwood lashes at you with red swirling tentacles bearing sharp steely points.
Nautical history fascinates London-born White, 31. As winner of the Max Mara art prize for women, she received a six-month residency in Italy to research and develop this show. A film, with the glossy production standards you’d expect of the Max Mara fashion house, shows her exploring the vast harbour of Genoa with its 16th-century lighthouse. It includes interviews with leading Italian scholars of the history of the Mediterranean; one of them quotes Fernand Braudel’s classic work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Continue reading...June 28, 2024
Giants of Ukrainian art, Henry Moore goes to war and Chris Ofili’s myth making – the week in art
A showcase of modernist greats from Malevich to Delaunay, the Yorkshire sculptor’s Blitz drawings and Ofili’s tapestry returns home to Scotland – all in your weekly dispatch
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s
Some of the greatest art of the early 20th century has close connections with Ukraine. This survey of its modernist achievements includes Malevich (or Malevych), El Lissitzky and more.
• Royal Academy, London, from 29 June to 13 October
June 21, 2024
No perky cockneys? How Henry Moore’s sheltering souls puncture our blitz bravado
On the eve of a general election, the artist’s drawings of Londoners sheltering from Nazi bombs in the Underground come as a sobering yet welcome reminder of British decency
When the blitz began in September 1940, Londoners sought the safety of deep Underground stations and tunnels – and Henry Moore, the most famous British modern artist of the age, went down there to sketch them. His eerie drawings of people neatly lying in rows or sitting haggard in vortex-like ashen tunnels are startling and disorienting because they don’t bear any resemblance to our myths about the second world war.
Where are the perky cockneys defying the Nazi bombs? These people burrowing into the earth to survive look desperate rather than indomitable. The works don’t even look very British: instead of dwelling on quirky details of Underground posters or clothing that would localise them, Moore abstracts his sheltering souls. The drawings seem to embody suffering across all of 1940s Europe.
Continue reading...Blue Black portraits, electric light relief and sugar in space – the week in art
Claudette Johnson’s intimate observations, Anthony McCall’s gleaming geometry and Tavares Strachan’s rocket launch – all in your weekly dispatch
Claudette Johnson: Darker Than Blue
The enigmatic portraits of this Turner-nominated artist hold you and haunt you with their mixture of careful observation and conceptual suggestiveness.
• Barber Institute, Birmingham, 22 June to 15 September
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