Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 6
May 30, 2025
Leonardo Drew review – are these towers of debris the ruins of America?
South London Gallery
Floating on walls, strewn across the floor and rising in heaps, the detritus here feels less like an echo of Jackson Pollock and more like, well, random rubbish
This place looks like a storm hit it. The winds have ripped up houses, shops, factories and art studios, whirled the pieces in a mighty twister and smashed them to earth in pulverised fragments. Now they scatter South London Gallery, towering over you in two random heaps, with other pieces gathered in clusters, floating on the walls, thrown all over the floor. Crunch, crunch – you can walk on broken bits of wood carpeting the ground, negotiating your way around bigger debris, as you inspect the ruins of America – and, sadly, of American art.
Seven decades ago, Jackson Pollock put America at the forefront of abstract art with looping and spiralling vortices of energy that he created by pouring and flicking paint on to a horizontal canvas. Leonardo Drew grew up in a housing project in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 60s and is consciously influenced by Pollock, whose work he first saw in a book at his local library. Where Pollock threw paint, Drew scatters splintered wood, yet his sculpture can also be seen as painting, since before breaking up many of the boards and planks in this show, he painted them. The entire installation can be seen as a huge action painting in 3D. Drew even numbers his works like Pollock did: the alternative title of Ubiquity II is Number 436.
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Rachel Whiteread hits the countryside, Derby’s great hero and museums reinvented – the week in art
A brand new outdoor/indoor art foundation opens with a spectacular show by the British sculptor, and the V&A unveils its extraordinary public Storehouse – all in your weekly dispatch
Rachel Whiteread
The Sussex countryside is haunted by grey concrete ghosts and white mortuary slabs as Whiteread proves her vision is as melancholically powerful as ever.
• Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex, 31 May to 2 November
May 29, 2025
Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights
Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex
From a concrete cast of a mortuary table to another of a staircase, this spectacular exhibition provides a perfect setting for the Turner prize winner’s stark sepulchres
I feel like I’ve stumbled into a 1970s album cover for the Who or Led Zeppelin that juxtaposes nature and post-industrial malaise. Emerging from woodlands on the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, you see a massive concrete cast of a staircase in a lush green field – a spectacular, surreal collision of urban grit and English pastoral. This is Rachel Whiteread’s Down and Up, a brutal intruder in the landscape.
Leafy woods and glorious views – I contemplated Down and Up through a veil of rain but was assured you can see down to the sea on a sunny day – create a dramatic setting for her stark sepulchres. In a forest clearing stands another work, Untitled (Pair) – two bone-white rectangular slabs that look like death. That’s no accident, for their shallow concave tops were cast from mortuary tables. Alone with this monument, the tall trees standing guard around me, I don’t so much ponder mortality as silently scream.
Continue reading...May 27, 2025
Fancy a masterpiece? Just pop one in your basket! V&A’s new open-access outpost will thrill art-lovers
V&A East Storehouse, London
The Victoria & Albert’s new warehouse boasts a mind-boggling 250,000 artefacts. Our art critic tries its ‘order an object’ service and gets intimate with some national treasures – including ‘the biggest Picasso in the world’
• ‘The national museum of absolutely everything’: our architecture critic visits the Storehouse
On a table in a study room at the new V&A East Storehouse, a silk-embroidered Alexander McQueen dress decorated with Hieronymus Bosch paintings has been laid out for me to see intimately. Creatures from The Garden of Earthly Delights cavort and gurn in my face, including a bird monster perched on a high stool that defecates out sinners. Ah, the privileges of a critic – except it isn’t my special experience at all. This opportunity for a personal encounter with an exquisite object is available to everyone and anyone, free of charge, as part of this unprecedented reinvention of the Victoria & Albert Museum that is V&A East Storehouse. It isn’t even difficult to arrange. All you do is look up the collection online and, if an object is in the Storehouse, you add it to your cart of up to five treasures, place an order, and in a fortnight they will be available for your private delight.
You can choose anything from theatre posters to Renaissance paintings to shoes. If they’re movable they will be brought to the study room, if not you go to them. I recommend the Ajanta paintings in the ground floor storage facility where I found one towering over me, its damaged parts covered with what looked like sticking plasters, adding to the mystery of this great mass of red and green out of which emerge sharply portrayed people. It’s a full-size copy of one of the Ajanta cave paintings in India – one of 300 made for the V&A in the late 19th century by a team from Bombay School of Art.
Continue reading...May 23, 2025
Gilbert and George go to hell and back while Marina Abramović sexes up Manchester – the week in art
Provocations from the original living sculptures, and 70 performance artists prepare to re-enact ancient sexual rituals – all in your weekly dispatch
Death Hope Life Fear
Provocative and personal, public yet intimate pictures created by Gilbert and George in the 1980s and 90s – including their first naked self-portraits.
• The Gilbert and George Centre, London until end of year
May 18, 2025
Ancient India review – snakes, shrines and sexual desire power a passionate show
British Museum, London
A lovable elephant deity and a floating serpent goddess are just two of the highlights in this sensual show about three of the country’s great religions
About 2,000 years ago, Indian art went through a stunning transformation led, initially, by Buddhists. From being enigmatically abstract it became incredibly accomplished at portraying the human body – and soul.
You can see this happen in the bustling yet harmonious crowd of pilgrims and gift-givers you meet about a third of the way through this ethereal and sensual show. Two horses bearing courtiers or merchants are portrayed in perfect perspective, their rounded chests billowing, their bodies receding. Around them a crowd of travelling companions, on horseback and foot, are depicted with the same depth. Their bodies and faces are full of life, in a frenetic pageant, a bustling carnival, yet this human hubbub is composed with order and calm.
Continue reading...May 16, 2025
Gods arrive from India, myths grow Tinguely and meat gets sensual – the week in art
A blockbuster show of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art, a revolutionary marriage and Helen Chadwick inside a washing machine – all in your weekly dispatch
Ancient India: Living Traditions
Ambitious blockbuster that shows how Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art assumed their shapes and inspired the world.
• British Museum, London, 22 Mayto 19 October
May 9, 2025
A sumptuous rehang, jumbo jellyfish and naive manly paintings – the week in art
The revamped National Gallery offers a new take on its glorious wonders, a psychoanalytical painter tackles masculinity, and abstract watercolours rise from the deep – all in your weekly dispatch
The Wonder of Art
New ways of seeing European art from Jan van Eyck to Cézanne and Picasso in a sumptuous rehang of one of the world’s richest and deepest art museums. And all for free. Read the five-star review.
• National Gallery, London, from 10 May
May 7, 2025
National Gallery rehang review – ‘A momentous retelling of the story of art’
National Gallery, London
It is one of the world’s greatest museums and this revamp starts with a thrilling embrace from Leonardo, unfolding to Titian, Van Eyck, Monet and more – all bolstered by cool new architecture and lighting. What a wonderland!
There are so many twists, turns and fascinating detours in the National Gallery’s rehang you have to pick up some kind of thread. In my case, perhaps distracted by the thought of the National’s new restaurant, Locatelli, it’s foodie still lifes.
Two huge paintings of cheese take pride of place in one of the Dutch rooms. In Floris van Dijck’s 1616 still life, a black gouda rests on top of a yellow one, their cut and recut surfaces like walls of fat. In another room you can see Gustave Courbet’s great, melancholy Still Life With Apples and a Pomegranate, which manages to express the defeat of the Paris Commune in battered, pockmarked fruits. Finally, at the climax of Britain’s free national collection of European art from the middle ages to the birth of modernism, three revolutionary still lifes hang together so you can see how Cézanne’s pictures of fruit begin to rip apart perspective and make way for Picasso’s mind-boggling 1914 cubist masterpiece Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin.
Continue reading...Huma Bhabha review – ‘Giacometti is a foil to her flamboyance. She is today’s Picasso’
Barbican, London
The Pakistani-American sculptor’s traumatised patchwork people more than hold their own against the great Swiss artist’s striding, emaciated statues in this thrilling clash
An artist has to ask big questions and have intense thoughts to get away with exhibiting among the profound masterpieces of Alberto Giacometti. I didn’t give much for Huma Bhabha’s chances. But she takes the Barbican’s new daylit art gallery by storm.
Grey morning light from windows that look across the brutalist ponds at St Giles Cripplegate pours through big holes in her 2019 sculpture Mask of Dimitrios. This roughly assembled human figure has plastic bags for breasts – not inflated but sagging pieces of dirty polythene – a metal chair for a skeleton enhanced by blackened dog bones, plaster arms and legs, a battered tray for a face, all tacked together over an inner emptiness.
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