Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 59
July 9, 2021
British Art Show 9 review – is this really the art of a country in crisis?
Aberdeen Art Gallery
There’s lots of self-indulgent ‘radicalism’ here but plenty of humour too – and a magic mushroom-inspired Dracula
I am not a dog person and nor apparently is the artist Patrick Goddard. The talking dog in his film Animal Antics has an irritatingly smug voice and an unpleasant view of the world, predicated on its own sense of superiority to animals not blessed with the gift of speech. Yet it is a dog and a dirty one at that. “Have you ever tried to eat penguin poo?” it asks its owner. “Because I have.”
This appalling pooch is voiced by Goddard. It’s definitely one of the highlights of the British Art Show 9, the Hayward Gallery Touring’s three-yearly trawl of contemporary British art, which kicks off in Aberdeen before touring. But I am worried Goddard may be wasting his comedy talent in the art world when this stuff surely deserves a bigger audience. Then again, it is probably only in an art gallery that anyone could get away with the stuff this evil doggy says about David Attenborough.
British Art Show 9 is at Aberdeen Art Gallery until 10 October, then touring to Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth.
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From a Dada pioneer to a tragic goldfish bowl – the week in art
Sophie Taeuber-Arp gets a UK retrospective, Aberdeen surveys British art, Kneebone makes connections, and Walpole’s cat is honoured – all in your weekly dispatch
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
An overdue fresh look at this modernist pioneer who helped invent both Dada’s punk ethos and abstract art’s spiritual calm.
• Tate Modern, London, 15 July-17 October.
July 5, 2021
Paula Rego review – phenomenal paintings, shame about the decor
Tate Britain, London
This bold retrospective shows that Rego came into her own in the 90s – when the BritArtists overshadowed her. So why show her work on garishly painted walls?
In the most staggering room in Paula Rego’s retrospective of seven decades’ painting, women crouch, crawl, kneel and sleep. One, called Dog Woman, goes down on all fours and contorts her face as if she is barking or howling. In the neighbouring picture, Bad Dog, a woman is seen from behind as she assumes a similarly abased position on a bed.
There are no men in any of these paintings but the strange poses into which the women are twisted could be dictated by an invisible man, grunting commands. Then again they might not. They might be suffering for God. Since these two scenes of torment and anguish, expressed in a physical casting down, seem to echo the 17th-century Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera’s paintings of the punishments of the damned. Rego was born in Portugal in 1935 and her art is steeped in Iberian experience, from Catholicism to 20th-century dictatorship. It is a distinctive blend of that history and the meat-and-potatoes realism of the UK, where her parents sent her to escape Portugal’s authoritarian regime: a dream marriage of Hogarth and Ribera, with Goya and Buñuel under the bed.
Related: Paula Rego: ‘Making a painting can reveal things you keep secret from yourself’
Paula Rego is at Tate Britain, London, from 7 July to 24 October.
Continue reading...July 2, 2021
Poet Slash Artist review – if this show is art’s future, it looks good to me
Home, Manchester
A show about the relationship between seeing and reading feels like a return to romanticism – a belief in the passionate expression of the spirit
Poets and artists have been influencing each other ever since the Renaissance versifier Angelo Poliziano said to Sandro Botticelli: “Why not do a painting about spring?” At least that is a Eurocentric way of looking at it. One of the first things you notice in Poet Slash Artist at the Manchester international festival is that few cultural traditions distinguish word and image as starkly as the west. In classical Chinese, Arabic and Persian poetry, calligraphy connects the verbal and visual in ways that make poetry and art practically the same thing.
That way of seeing words is remade for today by Imtiaz Dharker in her captivating drawing My Breath. Stripes flow magically out of her body into space. The lines continue their journey through a second picture, then in the third become words, lines of poetry repeated, repeated, repeated through entire blocks of text.
Poet Slash Artist is at Manchester international festival until 18 July.
Continue reading...Tracey Emin finds her inner voice and raging architects build a revolution – the week in art
Artists and poets present a manifesto in Manchester, Amilton Neves captures the magic of Mozambique and a towering talent arrives in London – all in your weekly dispatch
Poet Slash Artist
This joyous and visionary exhibition brings together artists, poets and poet-artists, including Lubaina Himid and Tracey Emin, in a manifesto for sensitivity and the inner voice.
• Home, Manchester for Manchester international festival.
July 1, 2021
An awkward, lifeless shrine – the Diana statue is a spiritless hunk of nonsense | Jonathan Jones
The only provocative thing about Ian Rank-Broadley’s characterless sculpture is how shamelessly it plays up to mawkish Diana worship
Ian Rank-Broadley’s statue of Diana, commissioned by her sons, was kept secret until its unveiling as if it might be wildly provocative. Looking through the artist’s previous oeuvre, I noticed he has a taste for the nude and created a statue for the late Felix Dennis called Lord Rochester, His Whore and a Monkey. That raised the fascinating prospect of a naked Diana for everyone to get furious about.
Instead, he’s let it all hang out in a different way. The sentiment splurges across the flower beds like an uncontrolled wail of artistically absurd pathos. A larger than life Diana, who stands in an awkward, stiff, lifeless pose and has a face that’s more manly than I remember, modelled apparently with thickly gloved hands and no photo to consult, protects two children in her arms while a third lurks behind her.
This sculpture invites us to see Diana as a modern Mary – and they say they don’t want it to be a shrine?
Continue reading...June 26, 2021
Giant horses’ heads and 10-metre sculptures: massive art to see right now
After a year of squinting at art in books, online or as NFTs, it’s now time to immerse yourself in the UK’s most colossal artworks
Modern Toss on Big ArtOne aspect of art you really cannot get at home – not by looking at it online or even in the most XXL of art books, and especially not with the screenlocked world of non-fungible token artworks – is the sheer, sensual thrill of bigness. It is time to think big, see big and feel big.
Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips
Continue reading...June 25, 2021
Bieber the icon, and photographers clicking to win – the week in art
Paul Pfeiffer’s installation makes religious imagery from pop star Justin Bieber, while conceptual images by shortlisted Deutsche Börse prize contenders go on show – all in your weekly dispatch
Paul Pfeiffer
An installation that merges Catholic religious imagery with pop to portray Justin Bieber as a suffering Christ.
• Thomas Dane Gallery, London, until 7 August.
June 24, 2021
Julian Opie review – we need so much more from art than this empty irony
Pitzhanger Manor, London
Staged in Sir John Soane’s Ealing mansion, Opie’s brand of dot-eyed simplicity – epitomised here by a sterile model town showpiece – is stuck in the 90s
A Julian Opie woman is striding towards the facade of Sir John Soane’s mansion in Ealing. This animated, larger-than-life figure in the forecourt is a flat sculpture for the digital age, flickering in white lines on a black screen mounted on a plinth. If you don’t know what I mean by a Julian Opie woman, she’s a line drawing in profile of someone in the street, stylish and contemporary. Other women in the show look at phones or tote bags in similarly simplified delineations.
I couldn’t help wondering what happens when she reaches the house. Will she bump her head? Or will the structure crumble into ruins under the impact of the 21st century? For Opie’s exhibition at Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor is not so much an encounter between new and old as a car crash in which a high-end motor smashes into a centuries-old yew tree.
Related: Julian Opie's portraits in motion: this is what genius looks like – review
Julian Opie is at Pitzhanger Manor, London, from 25 June until 24 October.
Continue reading...June 20, 2021
‘Paradise exists!’: Sebastião Salgado’s stunning voyage into Amazônia
The voyage wrecked his knee and almost cost an eye – but it took the Brazilian photographer into a world of shamans, hidden tribes and infinite rainforests. He relives an extraordinary odyssey
‘The captain of the boat would not allow us to swim in the river,” says Sebastião Salgado. “There were a lot of caiman about. They are so big in Amazônia – they’re the size of crocodiles. There are lots of constrictor snakes, too. They are not poisonous but they are huge. When one catches you, you’re finished. It will break all your bones and eat you. Then there are the piranhas.”
Salgado is not just talking to me via Zoom from Paris, where he has his studio. He is leading me on a breathless quest into Amazônia, the world’s most extensive rainforest. The photographer, clearly enjoying himself, admits that his favourite moments in life are when he’s setting out on a journey. “I am inside my transport – a plane or a boat – anything that brings me there. I am going to see something!”
Amazônia by Sebastião Salgado is published by Taschen. The exhibition is at Philharmonie de Paris until 30 October.
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