Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 83

Art Beyond Limits review: MND show pushes at the event horizon of existence

Gallery@Oxo, London
From the photographer paralysed from the neck down to the roboticist aiming to be the world’s first cyborg, this show for the Motor Neurone Disease Association is full of courage and passion

The power of photographer Simon Adams is to make you see the crystalline beauty of any given moment. A City crowd is moving in all directions, under two old-fashioned clocks in a panoramic black and white print that is radically focused so that while the background is all a blur, faces in the foreground are picked out in super-lucid detail. It’s a freeze-frame of the quotidian wonder that we take for granted – but Adams doesn’t. His pictures hold life with intense appreciation.

In 2012, Adams was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. He is paralysed from the neck down, dependent on carers who, in addition to their medical responsibilities, help set up his digital camera to shoot his big, wide-eyed images of the city and nature. An owl stares at you with hypnotic predatory intent; a purple sky broils over an aquamarine sea … these are photographs full of awe and passion, celebratory works of art that make you see afresh.

Art Beyond Limits is at Art@Oxo, London, until 6 October

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Rembrandt's Light review – glorious art needs no gimmicks

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
In imagining the artist as a cinematographer, this exhibition misses the bigger picture – and in any case, his love of murk would make him a terrible filmmaker

If Rembrandt were alive today, claims Dulwich Picture Gallery, he’d be a cinematographer. It’s a very precise posthumous career choice. Why not a director, special effects wizard, installation artist … or even painter? But this inventive exhibition, which marks the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death, is certain he’d be photographing films. It has even brought in Peter Suschitzky, cinematographer of The Empire Strikes Back, to help craft the show in a way that brings out the great artist’s genius for telling stories with light.

I can’t help thinking that, as a cinematographer, Rembrandt would annoy audiences hugely. When the Game of Thrones makers dared to light a nocturnal battle scene as it might look in a world without electric light, many viewers expressed outrage. I liked it, not least because it was reminiscent of Rembrandt – you won’t find a more mysterious night than the one that engulfs the people hunched around a campfire in his wonderful Landscape With the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. What would those complainants make of a scene in which a maester sat reading in an inky-black room, as a philosopher does here? Or an elderly couple all but disappearing in the gloom of a chamber, lit just by a dwindling fire? These are typical of the extreme lighting effects that Rembrandt uses in this exhibition, in sublime paintings and prints lent from such great collections as the Louvre and Rijksmuseum.

At Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 4 October until 2 February.

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The Turner prize kicks in and Rembrandt goes dark – the week in art

Kara Walker takes over Turbine Hall, artists battle motor neurone disease and the late Zaha Hadid’s new Beijing airport wows the world – all in your weekly dispatch

Rembrandt’s Light

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2 October-2 February

Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London, 2 October-5 April

Turner Contemporary, Margate, 28 September-12 January

Gallery@oxo, Oxo Tower Wharf, London, 2-6 October

Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, 30 September-30 December

National Gallery, London

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Grayson Perry: Super Rich Interior Decoration review – a super stupid anti-rich binge

Victoria Miro Mayfair, London
Selling the mega wealthy crudely stereotyping scenes of their excessive lifestyles is worse than trite. But is the joke really on them?

Grayson Perry bites the hands that feed him in his new exhibition Super Rich Interior Decoration. Except he doesn’t really give them a serious wound. He just titillates wealthy fingers with a sexy nibble that makes buying his babbling ceramics, ranting wall hangings and anything-but-magical carpet feel naughty and fun for the super-rich art collectors who will shortly be rolling up for London’s Frieze art fair. Yes, that’s right – Perry is showing satires on the wealthy at a commercial show in the heart of Mayfair, its streets fragrant with expensive perfume and even more expensive cigar smoke, specifically to sell to the very elite he mocks.

The joke really is as trite and cynical as that. In an age when democracy itself is being chewed to pieces by ever more absurdly extreme postures, Perry may be the artist we deserve. His woodblock print Sponsored By You is a supposedly biting take on America and the 1%. It’s a big brightly coloured picture of monstrous, skeletal rich people driving a green sports car across an arid wasteland. The word PANAMA is plastered on its front to tell us this is about the rich using tax havens while their high-octane lifestyle destroys the planet. And the funny thing is, they’re going to buy this …

At Victoria Miro Mayfair, London, until 20 December.

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What to see this week in the UK

From The Goldfinch to the Turner prize, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days

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Es Devlin review – a bendy bamboo history of the world from Adele's designer

Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London
The artist and designer, who has made stunning work for Adele and the Royal Opera House, has created an epic map of history that takes in everything from Buddha to Rosa Parks

The Georgian architect John Soane would have found a lot to enjoy in the curious artwork that stage and gig designer Es Devlin has created in his even more curious home. Soane started out as a bricklayer, went on to design Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Bank of England, and bequeathed Britain his delirious one-man museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He also built the delightfully odd Pitzhanger Manor in west London where Devlin has installed an epic 3D map of world history.

Devlin’s Memory Palace is a railway modeller’s paradise. Using cut bamboo, she has created a capacious warped pale-grey landscape that curves all around you, covered in buildings and mountains and even the sacred fig tree under which Siddhartha sat. Her sprawling diorama is ordered chronologically not topographically – it’s a map of time, not space – so the Buddha’s tree is located near the Athenian Acropolis where, Devlin points out on a printed key, Socrates taught. Up near the ceiling are the pyramids of Giza, and in front of a skyscraper island stands the Statue of Liberty.

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Es Devlin: Memory Palace review – her sprawling world history is a railway modeller's paradise

Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London
The artist and theatre designer has created a vast, poetic sculptural map of world history that maps time not space, where Rosa Parks’ bus sits alongside the Buddha’s fig tree

The Georgian architect John Soane would have found a lot to enjoy in the curious artwork that stage and gig designer Es Devlin has created in his even more curious home. Soane started out as a bricklayer, went on to design Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Bank of England, and bequeathed Britain his delirious one-man museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He also built the delightfully odd Pitzhanger Manor in west London where Devlin has installed an epic 3D map of world history.

Devlin’s Memory Palace is a railway modeller’s paradise. Using cut bamboo, she has created a capacious warped pale-grey landscape that curves all around you, covered in buildings and mountains and even the sacred fig tree under which Siddhartha sat. Her sprawling diorama is ordered chronologically not topographically – it’s a map of time, not space – so the Buddha’s tree is located near the Athenian Acropolis where, Devlin points out on a printed key, Socrates taught. Up near the ceiling are the pyramids of Giza, and in front of a skyscraper island stands the Statue of Liberty.

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Anna Maria Maiolino review – roll up for a witty surrealist sausage party

Whitechapel Gallery, London
Intended as a comment on the sort of dictorships she has lived though, the Brazilian artist’s subjugated phalluses and intriguing orifices are one great splurge of freedom

There are phallic images all over the place in Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino’s witty and weird show, but this is no triumph for the male member. Like a once cocksure prime minister, the sausages and worms of freshly shaped clay that open the show seem crestfallen. Long reddish-brown tubes are stacked up like dead fish. A clay salami has been chopped into slices. Look out for this artist and her knife.

Maiolino is a surrealist who finds the inner secrets of physical existence, while seducing the senses with frolicking lines and supple surfaces. Her subjugated willies are just the half of it. While snakes and chipolatas flop about uselessly, very vaginal-looking orifices lead the mind into hidden places. A series of sculptures made last year resemble cross-sections of a landscape that has been pockmarked and excavated by tiny tunnellers. Caverns open in the earth and lead to underground cities you can’t help trying to see into. These messy subterranean networks are halfway between a termite colony and a lost South American civilisation.

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The Cimabue in the kitchen: is the miraculous discovery all that it seems?

We all love a good story of a long-lost masterpiece turning up in an unlikely place, but inconvenient questions about provenance need to be asked

It’s amazing what you can find in an old French house! A painting attributed to Cimabue, the 13th-century genius who started the Renaissance, has turned up in Compiègne, where its elderly owner hung it for years above a hotplate between her kitchen and lounge.

This is the second such discovery of a lost masterpiece by a golden name of western art in France in the last few years. In 2014, a painting of Judith and Holofernes turned up in an attic in Toulouse and was sensationally attributed to Caravaggio. This summer it was sold in a private deal. And wait – the same expert who has authenticated this domestic discovery and is selling it together with Senlis auction house Acteon is also the man who defied doubters to successfully promote the Toulouse Caravaggio.

Related: Woman discovers Renaissance masterpiece in her kitchen

The identification of old paintings is and always has been fraught with peril. It shouldn’t be accepted solely on the seller’s say-so, or because it makes a good story.

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A rebel sharpens her pencil and Hirst spreads his wings – the week in art

Devlin stages a takeover, Cattelan washes his hands of guilt and Turner lets off some steam – all in your weekly dispatch

The Art of Innovation
Science has been inspiring art ever since Leonardo da Vinci tried to fly, and this exhibition surveys their interconnection from the Enlightenment to the age of the Hubble Telescope.
• Science Museum, London, 25 September to 26 January

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