Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 47
May 27, 2022
Munch masterpieces, open-air Emin and a pint-pulling EastEnders jamboree – the week in art
Munch shows his bleak brilliance, Tracey goes pastoral, the Queen Vic opens all hours and Hockney gets sketchy – all in your weekly dispatch
Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen
Some of Munch’s most powerful and bleakly beautiful paintings in a quietly devastating display.
• Courtauld, London, until 4 September
May 26, 2022
Zombie workers and sexual hang-ups: how Edvard Munch foresaw our lonely lives – review
Courtauld Gallery, London
From the grief of loss to the despair of impotence and the misery of work, the Scandinavian master wallows gloriously in pain, filling the soul with the ecstatic sorrow of his colours
We love anniversaries. This year is being pushed as the centenary of modernism, since The Waste Land and Ulysses were both published in 1922. But Edvard Munch had TS Eliot and James Joyce beat. In 1892, Munch painted the first modernist masterpiece of the city, anticipating their radical visions of urban life by a full three decades. Now that masterpiece, Evening on Karl Johan, has come to Britain as part of a precious loan of incendiary Munchs from a collection in Bergen, Norway.
These people really need to work from home. They come towards us at the close of day, their faces harrowed by the misery of the office or factory. They are ghoulish grey cartoons of loneliness and sadness lit by yellow glowing windows. A woman stares out with white circles for eyes, her pupils shrunk to dots, while a man in a funereal top hat has a shrunken skull-like face, as if modern life has reduced him to one of the walking dead. In fact, they are all workaday zombies, their bodies stunted, their pace robotic, approaching in a single mummified mass.
Continue reading...May 20, 2022
Goddesses, she-devils and a tangle with textiles – the week in art
Lonnie Holley scours Britain for material, demons seize the British Museum and feminist fabrics come to Cambridge – all in your weekly dispatch
Lonnie Holley: The Growth of Communication
This evocative assemblage artist born in Birmingham, Alabama, shows work inspired by recent visits to the UK that use found British stuff.
• Edel Assanti, London, until 2 July.
May 13, 2022
Crumpled trumpets and state-sponsored psychedelia – the week in art
Cornelia Parker is crushing it at the Tate, the artist better known as Vic Reeves exhibits his moving bird paintings, and Jake and Dinos Chapman split up – all in your weekly dispatch
Cornelia Parker
This retrospective of the surrealistic shed exploder and musical instrument crusher should be full of fun.
• Tate Britain from 18 May until 16 October
May 12, 2022
The Warhol of bird painting – Vic Reeves, AKA Jim Moir, and his uncanny avians
Grosvenor Gallery, London
The artist and comedian is a keen birdwatcher – and it shows in these intense, meticulously detailed portraits that are both funny and full of pop art twists
Art by celebrities is often risible. But there is nothing unintentionally funny about the technically excellent paintings of Jim Moir, AKA Vic Reeves. Nor is he playing it for laughs. There are no jokes here, just precise, intense portrayals of birds.
Moir, a keen birdwatcher, has clearly spent a lot of time looking at nature, even longer finessing his style. His studies of wrens, finches, water birds, a red kite, a nightingale and more are finely observed, lovingly detailed works of ornithology. The studied objectivity of these avian portraits – nicely capturing the crinkly skin and claws of feet that grasp branches, the softness and structure of feathers and bright hues against the sky – brings back to life the Victorian tradition of meticulous animal art.
See Them Richards? Paintings by Jim Moir (Vic Reeves) is at Grosvenor Gallery, London, 13-28 May.
Continue reading...May 11, 2022
‘We had a seething disdain for each other’: Jake Chapman on splitting from brother Dinos
One of the most enduring partnerships of the YBA movement is over. Yet their gleefully nasty, provocative aesthetic lives on in the first solo show by the ‘Colonel Kurtz of the Cotswolds’
Jake Chapman’s new exhibition is called Me, Myself and Eye so I shouldn’t have been surprised that he, himself, him was there at the door. This pop-up show is, he says, just a small taster of a huge quantity of work he’s made recently. And it’s appetising, if like me you enjoy the grotesque, comical, outrageous art he’s been making since the 1990s with his brother Dinos. But why me, myself and no Dinos? The answer is so unexpected I have to change my plan to simply review his show and start recording his utterances.
I assumed this was just a side project from the career of Jake and Dinos Chapman, an artistic partnership that seemed as close and enduring as that of Gilbert and George and Jane and Louise Wilson. But no. It turns out this is the end. The split. The brothers who made their names playing the twisted court jesters of the Young British Artist generation have fallen out and broken up.
Continue reading...May 9, 2022
Dreamachine review – as close to state-funded psychedelic drugs as you can get
Woolwich, London, and Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh
Unboxed (formerly the Festival of Brexit) offers a free trip inside your own head courtesy of a flashing light technique pioneered in the 1960s. Our writer is addicted
The entire population of Britain is to be given LSD in a government-sponsored attempt to cheer us up after the pandemic and make us forget about inflation. Well, almost. Dreamachine, one of 10 national projects in Unboxed UK – formerly known as the Festival of Brexit – is as close to state-funded hallucinogens as you can get.
This is a free trip inside your own head. It’s a 21st-century version – fully credited – of a psychedelic technique patented in the 60s by Brion Gysin, friend and collaborator of Naked Lunch author William Burroughs. The insight Gysin came up with, while smoking kif in Morocco and popping pills in Paris, is that being exposed to a simple flashing white light while you have your eyes closed can induce intense visual hallucinations. Light flickering at between eight and 13 flashes a second synchronises with the brain’s alpha waves to set off this freaky phenomenon.
Continue reading...May 6, 2022
Gallery-goers take a twisted trip and history’s visionaries set sail – the week in art
Ceramics smash against abstract art, a trans painter tells her story and crop circles get a late reappraisal – all in your weekly dispatch
Dreamachine
A hallucinatory visual experience that promises to subvert your senses. Judging by the health form you have to fill in, it’s pretty intense.
• At various locations including London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh from 10 May.
Radical Landscapes review – ‘Is loving green fields really wicked?’
Tate Liverpool
It has some fabulous works, from a canal by Constable to a gnarled old tree by Tacita Dean, but this show’s radical v conservative thesis gets caught in the brambles – and the climate section is catastrophic
Poor John Constable. What did he ever do except go out in the fields and paint? For that apparently harmless pursuit, it seems Tate Liverpool cannot forgive him. Its attempt to define a “radical” British landscape art keeps kicking Constable as a convenient shorthand for the “conservative” landscape tradition it rejects.
His painting Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) is shown near a looped clip from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. If you can shut out this insulting reduction of Berger to an intrusive soundbite, you have to contend with a lengthy wall text that tells us Constable’s “idealised image of nature and rural life” creates an idyll “in contrast to the reality for workers of the time”.
Continue reading...April 29, 2022
Golden age inspiration, green neon in Dorset and the raw power of nature – the week in art
Modern artists draw on classic Dutch painting, Jeremy Deller gets subversive and the plein-air roots of impressionism – all in your weekly dispatch
Reframed: The Woman in the Window
Rachel Whiteread, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and others reveal how the depiction of women in Dutch golden age paintings has inspired contemporary artists.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 4 May to 4 September.
Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
