Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 8
April 11, 2025
Cosmic visions, Edwardian bling and Middle Eastern monuments – the week in art
Ravishing photos of space, glittering images of a golden age and Ali Cherri’s archaeological sculpture – all in your weekly dispatch
Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument
This Beirut-born artist creates contemporary monuments that echo the archaeology of the Middle East.
• Baltic, Gateshead, from 12 April to 12 October
April 8, 2025
David Hockney 25 review – so moving I had tears in my eyes
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
As reliable as spring daffodils, Hockney reminds us how beautiful the world is with this captivating life-review in paintings and iPad drawings
It’s that time of year. Blossom is on the trees, the air is warming up and David Hockney has a show.
Five years ago,, Hockney spent lockdown in his garden in Normandy painting the spring, bud by bud, sharing his iPad pictures with whoever was in his address book, like the last artist on Earth sending out signals of hope. The slogan he coined then – “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” – is now written over the entrance to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, as urgent as it was during Covid.
Continue reading...April 4, 2025
Adventures in AI, inner children unleashed and provocations from a master prankster – the week in art
Mat Collishaw’s cutting-edge experiments, a delirious meeting of two legends and more mischief from Maurizio Cattelan – all in your weekly dispatch
Mat Collishaw: Move37
How many artists are really “cutting edge”? Collishaw is. He catches the essence of now in this eerie experiment with AI.
• Seed 130, London, until 31 May
April 3, 2025
Giuseppe Penone review – an ecstatic realm where trees and humans merge
Serpentine, London
From the moment we inhale the scent of this remarkable show – in which trees blast open and boulders perch on branches – the Italian artist intoxicates us like a shaman communing with wood sprites
It’s the aroma that lures you in. Deep and difficult to place, it comes from the thousands of laurel leaves that pad the walls of the Serpentine’s high central space. Laurel is the sharp-leaved evergreen tree sacred to the god Apollo and through him associated with victory and the arts. Poets are crowned with it. In Botticelli’s Primavera, a nymph is chased through laurel trees. A marble sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicts Daphne transforming into a laurel to escape Apollo’s unwanted lust – a reason this tree is sacred to him.
So much cultural baggage. It can’t be easy to be a modern Italian artist with ancient Rome, the Renaissance and the baroque on your back. One of the captivating things about Giuseppe Penone’s meditative selection of his works is how easily this artist has cast off that weight of tradition ever since he started his life in art in 1968.
Continue reading...April 2, 2025
Yoko by David Sheff review – a queasily one-sided defence
The artist and musician is a brilliant subject for an epic, in-depth biography, but this is merely hagiography
In 1966 a woman sat down at the Destruction in Art Symposium at London’s Africa Centre and invited people to cut off her clothes. It was an era when Yves Klein used naked women as paintbrushes and Allen Jones made sculptures of fetishistically dressed women posed as furniture. But Yoko Ono was in control of her own self-sacrifice. It was the third time she’d performed this paradoxically passive action, and each time it was the audience who exposed themselves as they took scissors to her clothing.
This was also the beginning of a sojourn in London for the Japanese-born New York artist that would catapult her from avant garde obscurity to global fame. Her exhibition at the Indica Gallery that same year was visited by John Lennon, who climbed one of her artworks, a ladder to the ceiling. At the top he used a magnifying glass to read the tiny word “YES”. The love kindled that day would be blamed for breaking up the Beatles.
Continue reading...March 28, 2025
Towering trunks, disturbing dolls and deep-sea daydreams – the week in art
A veteran environmentalist celebrates trees, the Quay Brothers create an atmosphere and artists take a deep dive below the waves – all in your weekly dispatch
Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots
This veteran environmental artist has been celebrating trees for almost six decades. Does his bark still have bite?
• Serpentine, London, 3 April to 7 September
March 25, 2025
José María Velasco review – proudly dull Mexican was wasted in wonderland
National Gallery, London
The 19th-century artist worked at a time when the Americas were a wonderland of discovery – but his unromantic, objective view of ancient rocky formations is sadly quite boring
José María Velasco’s 1894 painting Rocks is the size and format of a grand portrait but, instead of a socialite in taffeta or tails, it portrays a huge reddish-brown rock formation. It isn’t even a very special outcrop, rather the kind of shapeless mass you might encounter on any mountain walk. That’s the point.
Velasco is a scientific artist who worked at a time when the Americas were a wonderland of discovery. He identified a new species of salamander that lives in a lake near Mexico City, only one of the many finds, living and fossilised, uncovered in his era across the New World. In 1902, the first Tyrannosaurus rex fossil was excavated in Montana; in 1909, very early life forms were found preserved in Canada’s Burgess Shale. Most important of all, back in the 1830s, Charles Darwin found the first evidence for evolution in the rainforests and rocks of Brazil and Peru.
Continue reading...March 21, 2025
Gale warnings, gothic fantasies and a masterpiece of a garden – the week in art
Victor Hugo seduces, big names tackles a world in permacrisis and Hélène Binet challenges the Englishness of the country house – all in your weekly dispatch
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo
These gothic fantasies and nature studies by the author of Les Misérables transport you to a surreal, seductive inner world. Read the full review.
• Royal Academy, London, until 29 June
March 18, 2025
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo review – masterpieces from a man with a heart as big as the Notre Dame
Royal Academy, London
From hanged men and inky cephalopods to shadowy gothic castles, these cosmic, horror-tinged works let the Les Misérables writer and liberal political campaigner speak directly to us
Victor Hugo is the French equivalent of Shakespeare and Dickens. The inventor of Quasimodo and Jean Valjean is so universal that we absorb his myths even if we have never picked up one of his books. Yet how much do most of us know about Hugo himself, behind the books, the films, the musicals? By dedicating an exhibition to this versatile creator’s visual art, which started with a few caricatures and developed into sublime and surreal masterpieces, the Royal Academy does something unexpectedly moving. It takes you into the secret heart of a man we tend to think of only as a classic.
For instance we discover that Hugo campaigned against the death penalty nearly two centuries ago. His 1854 drawing Ecce Lex (Behold the Law) is a macabre inky portrait of a hanged corpse, part of his doomed campaign to save a condemned murderer called John Tapner. Hugo opposed capital punishment on principle, but a few years later gave permission for this drawing to be made into a print protesting the execution of American anti-slavery activist John Brown. If there was a liberal cause, Hugo threw his huge heart into it.
Continue reading...March 14, 2025
The inner life of India, Warhol’s America and the Munch bunch – the week in art
Edvard Munch’s weird and creepy portraits, Arpita Singh’s first major UK exhibition and a sea view from East Anglia – all in your weekly dispatch
Arpita Singh: Remembering
First major UK exhibition for this veteran Indian painter of modern life.
• Serpentine North, London, from 20 March until 27 July
Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
