Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 26
November 8, 2023
Artes Mundi 10 review – an exotic plunge into broken, borderless worlds
National Museum, Cardiff and venues across Wales
From the marshlands of Iraq to a beach in Bougainville, this Wales-wide art extravaganza feels like a passport to the entire planet
Despite coming from Wales, I dropped Welsh for Latin at my comprehensive school, so I know what Artes Mundi means. But I am all at sea watching a video in Arabic that has Welsh subtitles. Or rather I should be, but I am actually not: I am absorbed. A youth is punting a boat through the reeds in a sunbaked marshy estuary. As he speaks, the subtitles describe him as “bachgen” and I do know what that means: “boy”. It takes me back to when I was a bachgen.
Artes Mundi plunges you into a polyglot assembly of artists from all over the world dealing with problems and projects apparently remote from local Welsh concerns. The results are curious and wonderful: a Kurdish church in ruins, a beach in Bougainville, Lebanese portraits – and languages as diverse as the settings. Then again, are the world’s concerns really so remote from Welsh port cities and seaside towns? “This land is a poem of river healing,” says a poster-style artwork by Carolina Caycedo plastered across the front of Chapter Arts in Cardiff. The words are printed over a maplike painting of a landscape of green hills and blue water. This flowing land could be in Mexico or Brazil or Wales itself.
Continue reading...
November 3, 2023
A feminist fightback, exploring the fourth dimension and a Greek odyssey – the week in art
A survey of female protest hits the Tate, the dazzling sculpture of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui and the drawings that made Genoa a Renaissance powerhouse – all in your weekly dispatch
Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement 1970–1990
Survey of feminist art and protest with Ingrid Pollard, Mary Kelly and more.
• Tate Britain, London, 8 November-7 April
October 31, 2023
David Hockney review – a dazzling victory parade from a boundless lover of life
National Portrait Gallery, London
Whether channelling Picasso, depicting Celia Birtwell or capturing Harry Styles, the artist communicates profound joy – and his most recent paintings really boom with energy and hope
Enjoying life sounds like a simple, even banal aim. Yet the art of David Hockney shows what an achievement it really is to stick with that goal and raise it to an ideal. He has dedicated his gifts to the pursuit of pleasure since the 1960s and, in the bubbly, enthusiastic new paintings unveiled in his latest exhibition, he’s still at it. Insisting on your pleasures, from sex to cigarettes, has rarely looked as fun, nor as serious.
Hockney holds a cigarette emphatically in a recent self-portrait, which comes at the beginning of this victory parade of an exhibition. It’s a happy and accepting work: in his mid-80s, no longer looking much like his younger, iconic self, he contentedly sits before you in a multicoloured houndstooth suit and flat cap, smouldering ciggy in one hand, paintbrush in the other.
Continue reading...Dog-faced demons and a pitchforked penis: the world’s most terrifying artworks
Sinners being eaten alive by serpents, the antichrist seizing power on Earth, a bound penis menaced by a goat-footed devil … in a Halloween special, we look at four devilish masterpieces. Warning: graphic content
The devil comes out to play at Halloween – but people haven’t always viewed hell and its creatures as good clean fun. When artists 600 years ago painted their satanic scarefests, they weren’t just trying to entertain. Medieval Europeans believed in the existence of hell as a physical place. Paintings in parish churches across Britain depicted the damned being led into hell by clawed, scaly cloven-footed demons. In Flanders and Germany, painters competed to make the legions of the devil and the horrors of hell seem utterly real.
That’s how the world’s scariest satanic works of art were created. Gothic paintings have a belief in the demonic world that gets deep under your flesh. Here are four devilish masterpieces that survive to thrill us from a lost age of fear – and one wicked modern update.
Continue reading...October 28, 2023
No one can draw from life like David Hockney – but more than ever are trying
Growing numbers of hobbyists are attempting to emulate the artist and capture the truths of the human body at life drawing classes
David Hockney draws better than anyone else alive today. There may be other fine painters around, but on paper, with charcoal, ink pen or even crayons in hand, he is incomparable. So of course his retrospective of portraits on paper opening this week at the National Portrait Gallery is called Drawing from Life.
Hockney has always had a deceptively simple and absolutely captivating ability to look at his own face in the mirror, or at his “muse” Celia Birtwell, or at flowers in a vase, and set down what he sees, in clear, confident lines that vibrate with vitality.
Continue reading...October 27, 2023
Hockney bounces back, a Myanmar blockbuster and fantasy in the library – the week in art
Hockney’s life and art, the crises of modern Myanmar, new works by Yinka Shonibare, and a celebration of the many worlds of fantasy – all in your weekly dispatch
David Hockney: Drawing from Life
This exhibition, returning after its original run was cut short by Covid, is a moving chronicle of Hockney’s life in his art.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 2 November-21 January
October 25, 2023
‘Some of the most startling portraits in existence’: Hans Holbein’s mini masterpieces
The great Renaissance artist exploded into England on the run from anti-art crusaders – and his spellbinding portraits of 16th-century grandees are going on display at last
I am in the Haus of Holbein, to quote the techno number from the hit musical Six. Or anyway, I am in the house of Windsor, which still owns many of Renaissance artist Hans Holbein’s portraits of the Tudor court. They will go on show at the Queen’s Gallery next month but I’m getting a sneak preview in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
The man in front of me could do with a shave. I can see the dark stubble on his face as he seems about to break into a gentle smile. That five o’clock shadow is part of the informality of Holbein’s drawing of Thomas More, the author of Utopia who was executed in 1535. It makes me feel that I am actually meeting this Renaissance thinker.
Continue reading...October 24, 2023
RB Kitaj review – kaleidoscopic collage-paintings haunted by the Holocaust
Piano Nobile, London
The weight of history hovers over this American postwar figurative artist who settled in the UK, with an increasing focus on the experience of Jews
‘Cézanne said he wanted to do Poussin over again after nature,” said the painter RB Kitaj. “I like the idea that one might try to do Cézanne and Degas over again after Auschwitz.” London gallery Piano Nobile has created an intimate exhibition that shows you how Kitaj came to such a conception. It’s the story of an artist who painted history, and a life lived in its shadow.
The eeriest image of Jewish suffering here is a tall sliver of a canvas in which a blue-uniformed figure stares officiously, suspiciously, into an open doorway, against gold sunlight. You assume he’s looking into a railway carriage, or is it some deeper void? The painting is called The Gentile Conductor, suggesting an authority figure in 20th-century central Europe, inspecting identity cards, possibly hunting Jews.
Continue reading...October 20, 2023
Mat Collishaw review – AI plants put the shock and sensation back into British art
Kew Gardens, London
The artist gleefully tricks us with his digital creepers, disappearing oak trees and blossoming flowers made with AI. The message? Nature will have its revenge
Something evil is blooming in a shady corner of Kew Gardens. Poisonous plants produce red fleshy flowers and sinister insects pretend to be harmless petals – or are the petals posing as insects? Mat Collishaw has created a creepy and beautiful, horrible and exquisite cabinet of botanical curiosities that puts the shock and sensation back into British modern art.
This clever, complex meditation on all the ways we humans represent and imagine the natural world contrasts brutally with Damien Hirst’s flower paintings, recently unveiled at Frieze art fair. It’s as if these two artists, who were contemporaries at Goldsmiths in the 1980s, have made some devilish bargain: Hirst got the money and Collishaw the brains, passion and integrity. Where Hirst now paints inane floral scenes, Collishaw digs deep into the gardens of the mind to leave you thrilled and moved.
Continue reading...Creepy AI blooms, Raphael’s crafty treasures and a neglected pop star – the week in art
Plus Picasso’s enduring influence on modernism, brand new work from Derek Boshier and Venus dries her hair – all in your weekly dispatch
Mat Collishaw: Petrichor
Creepy and disconcerting flower pictures, fabricated using AI and resembling Dutch still lifes corrupted by sin.
• Kew Gardens, London, until 7 April
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