For a curator, coming up with an original proposition for a museum show of an artist as revered and exhibited as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) can be quite the challenge. The solution devised by the curator Aurélie Verdier was to invite audiences to “re-read” the French artist.
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The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence, avoidance or — as Jenny, the dissatisfied housewife in Natasha Randall’s droll debut novel, calls it — life’s ‘marshmallow numbness’.
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There is a confidence that comes from being a part of a larger whole. And yet, group membership invites invidious comparisons: who’s getting it right?
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As the title warns us, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The way grief relentlessly nibbles away at a family. The emotional and physical torment inflicted on and by children.
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In her art, Linder tussles with the stories we choose to tell. Born Linda Mulvey in Liverpool in 1954, she emerged with her ambiguously gendered moniker in the Manchester punk scene in the 1970s.
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It’s hard to keep track of the ways in which Picasso’s 80-year career has been examined (and re-examined), but few curators attempt to cover his entire oeuvre. Picasso and Paper does so through the lens of a medium he liked to manipulate.
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I'm sitting on a beanbag in a dark room, staring at a split-screen scored with apple-green blips and streaks of light that – much like a heart monitor – record signs of life.
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Dóra Maurer’s most recent paintings are nothing if not playful. In the fifth and final room of her first UK retrospective, colours are caught mid-flight.
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This exhibition at Pallant House Gallery tells the story of a group of early-20th-century female artists in Britain who engaged in progressive art, literature and politics.
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Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread, Gerhard Richter. These may not be names that spring to mind when you think of the British Museum, but they all have work filed away in its extensive archive of prints and drawings.
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Halfway through the first-ever exhibition devoted to Lucian Freud’s self-portraits is a tiny canvas of the artist with a black eye. After getting into a scrape with a London cab driver, Freud hurried to his studio to document the effects of the blow.
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Think ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ and you picture luminous paintings of waify maidens with copper-coloured hair, loose clothing and a far-off look in their eyes. Prostitutes, mistresses, sorceresses and other ‘fallen women’ in need of masculine intervention.
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At London’s National Gallery, the first exhibition devoted to Gauguin’s portraits begins with a bang: a room of self-portraits and the announcement that ‘Gauguin was undoubtedly self-obsessed.’
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It’s only fitting that a gallery should focus on portraiture at Frieze Masters. After all, the characters who frequent this fair — and particularly its glitzier sister, a short walk through Regent’s Park — are scrutinised as carefully as the art.
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A streak of light stealing through a crack beneath a closed door. Tadpole-like raindrops wriggling down four window panes. Lois Dodd’s paintings capture the ordinary in an extraordinary way.
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When she was about eight years old, Cindy Sherman began compiling a family photo album. She called it ‘A Cindy Book’, drew a circle around herself if she was pictured alongside others and added a pithy caption below each of the 26 images: ‘That’s me’.
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There’s a ghostly quality to Helene Schjerfbeck’s paintings. Her interiors and landscapes are devoid of people, while her intimate portraits capture people in moments of quiet introspection.
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Cross the threshold into the exhibition of works by Madge Gill and you’ll find yourself in a silken web. All four walls of the small space are filled with the self-taught spiritualist artist’s feverishly detailed drawings, embroideries and textiles.
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Of all the Russian avant-garde artists of the 20th century, Goncharova was the most experimental. She absorbed the artistic styles around her, from religious icons to the latest trends in modernism.
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At times, the artwork of the Chicago Imagists verges on the gross: that big green bogey dangling from the nostril of Officer E Doodit, a beady-eyed policeman with a bulging neck in Jim Nutt’s painting of 1968, is just the beginning.
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