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Art review: Subodh Gupta, What does the vessel contain, that the river does not, Hauser & Wirth, London

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:20:09 +0100

I recently returned from the Keralan coast, South India, where the storms and power-cuts at night made the sea and sky appear as black as each other, and the lights of the fishing boats floated on the horizon like a distant city. The monsoon months are coming.

Art review: Dieter Roth, Diaries, Camden Arts Centre, London

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:06:08 +0100

In the early 1980s, German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth was close to death due to his excessive drinking and eating. He spent time in a health clinic in Switzerland, and emerged 30 kilos lighter. His life was saved but he had another problem: his exquisitely tailored Viennese suits no longer fitted him.

Art review: Anish Kapoor, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:02:32 +0100

Some of Anish Kapoor's ventures into gigantism have been questionable successes.

Charles Darwent on visual Houghton Revisited: There's much to learn by taking a dim view of art

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:15:00 +0100

As it did 250 years ago, Velázquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X peers into the gloom at Houghton Hall. It is an extraordinary image in an extraordinary space.

Art review: Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, London

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:32:43 +0100

There is something curiously lacklustre about much of this show. Why? It is not that the majority of these representational portraits – there are more than 200 of them in all - are not good examples of their kind.

Art review: Leon Kossoff – London Landscapes, Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:19:35 +0100

A small correction. Kossoff does not paint landscapes. He paints and draws the cityscapes of London, and he has been doing so for the last sixty years or so.

Art review: Richard Patterson, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:10:24 +0100

This survey of YBA Richard Patterson’s career so far is bold, sensuous, and feels fresh rather than old hat recycled from the Freeze/Sensation years.

Charles Darwent on Uncommon Ground, Land Art in Britain: It may not be big, but it is clever

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:10:00 +0100

I have had one piece of hate-mail as art critic for this paper, in 2003, from a land artist currently in a show called Uncommon Ground at the Southampton City Gallery. "You just don't get it, which is your perogative [sic]," hissed the letter. "You are both, but it is worse to be an amateur than a cynic." Ouch.

Art review: Sir Robert Walpole collection, Houghton Hall, Norfolk

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:59:14 +0100

This is a story about making amends for cultural asset-stripping in the grand style. A little over three hundred years ago, the debt-ridden grandson of Sir Robert Walpole, England's first Prime Minister, sold off to Catherine the Great of Russia the great art collection amassed by his grandfather.

Gavin Turk: a YBA up to his old tricks

Sun, 05 May 2013 19:31:11 +0100

The YBAs, those edgily aggressive provokers of outrage of the early 1990s, seem thoroughly tamed by now. Tracey votes blue and wears hats. Damien's stock, once so high, is on the gentle slide. And what of Gavin – Turk, that is? Although he didn't go to Goldsmiths, he was among them, wasn't he, with his posturing waxwork of a gun-totin' Sid Vicious in the Elvis pose? Now, 20 years on, and with the support of a respectable and beautifully appointed gallery in a quiet Mayfair mews, the script has been polished and redrafted, and we are calmly being invited to look back at 20 years of his development as a serious artist. Prestel has just published the very first monograph of his work – 400 pages of it, for a cool £45. Turk, it seems, was always quietly cerebral and slightly set apart from the rest, keen to be investigating serious issues of process, identity, art-historical authenticity.

Charles Darwent on Ellen Gallagher: AxME - The dog ate my homework, Miss Gallagher

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:08:25 +0100

Last week I spoke to a gifted young painter, a Jerwood Fellow, about his work. The conversation went like this. Me: “The two small pictures are particularly strong. I really like them.”

Art review: Birth of a Museum, Manarat al-Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:27:19 +0100

Stalled by downturns, delays and even the threat of a boycott by artists over the conditions of the building workers, Abu Dhabi’s masterplan to convert a vast sandy swathe of Saadiyat Island into a world-beating “cultural quarter” has sometimes looked like a desert mirage.

New Order: British Art Today, at the Saatchi Gallery: this new order is far from sensational

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:01:14 +0100

You have to give the Saatchi Gallery credit for what has done for contemporary art. Ever since it opened its first gallery in north London in 1985 it has bought, succoured and promoted new art from the US, the Middle East, China, Russia, India and wherever else it felt something was happening that needed to be brought to the attention of the British public. Now, 20 years after it first launched a new generation of home-grown artists and coined the moniker YBAs (Young British Artists), it has chosen to make another push with young artists making their way with New Order: British Art Today.

Charles Darwent on Alexander Calder: The man who put the 'post' into modern

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 18:30:00 +0100

On the face of it, Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp make an odd pair. Calder is plump, jolly and American: the famous Pathé film of him operating his 1927 Circus shows a 63-year-old kid in a red flannel shirt. Duchamp, by contrast, was sulphurously French and intellectual – the man whose urinal, Fountain, upended the aesthetic apple cart and bequeathed conceptual art to the world. That he might have influenced Calder – that it was Duchamp who, in 1931, came up with the word "mobile" for his friend's moving sculptures – is hard to credit.

Michael Glover: Let’s hope the Turner Prize judges can stop giggling

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:38:04 +0100

Shall we agree to agree that art’s pretty lightweight when all’s said and done? That it’s jokey fluff and flummery for the most part? Life’s certainly a fun house over at the Turner Prize this year.

Art review: Quicksand John Armleder, The Dairy Art Centre, London

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:17:09 +0100

This week a new art centre opens in north London in the premises of a former dairy in Bloomsbury. Two collectors of contemporary art, Frank Cohen, a home-improvements' millionaire from Manchester, and Nicolai Frahm, a Dane based in London, have brought it into being. Free to enter and not-for-profit, it will operate as a kind of kunsthalle for shows of emerging and established artists.

Beautiful minds: Outsider art at the Wellcome Collection

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:01:15 +0100

Art has been employed as therapy for the mentally ill ever since psychiatry began. But if you think of it as a tool to exorcise the demons through self- expression that is not how the Japanese view it. For them it is a matter of occupational therapy, a means of work and concentration to soothe the troubled mind. You don't use art to work through issues but to ease them

Charles Darwent on art: Saloua Raouda Choucair - An eye on the future, a feeling for the past

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:40:00 +0100

Saloua Raouda Choucair's painting Two = One is arresting for all kinds of reasons, the most obvious being the holes in its canvas. The Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana didn't start his famous series of punched-through pictures, Buchi, until 1949. Two = One dates from 1947, which makes Choucair very avant garde indeed. Or it would have done, had she put the holes there herself. In fact, they were made by a bomb that fell near her flat in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s.

Art review: Celia Paul: Recent Work and Separation, Marlborough Fine Art, London

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:13:20 +0100

Celia Paul is the least noisy portrait painter in oils imaginable. Her subjects - which usually tend to be relatives, close friends or herself - exist within a kind of religiose hush of rapt self-absorption.

Charles Darwent on art: Paul Nash, The Clare Neilson Gift - A modernist moment in the sun, and retreat to the shade

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 19:30:00 +0100

A small image in a small show: a woodblock print, an inch and a half by three, by Paul Nash. The engraving is in a slim volume of verse, A Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevitch, by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov. It is in Gothic type on Japan paper – the kind of literary objet de luxe turned out in its day by small publishing houses with names such as The Golden Cockerel Press. This one is by The Fleuron. Everything about the book says "Arts and Crafts" and "1869". The label, though, says "1929".

Charles Darwent on the Rijksmuseum reopening: At last, the Dutch really do go Dutch

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0100

To the ill-disguised joy of galleries the world over, the revamping of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has run years and many euros over budget. Now it is almost done. On Saturday, Queen Beatrix, in her last major act as Dutch monarch, will declare the remodelled museum open. As Head of the House of Oranje-Nassau, she will walk on an orange carpet; there will be a dozen fanfares to greet her, one from each province of the Netherlands. The Rijksmuseum is central to Dutch life, to the country's cultural imagining of herself, as no equivalent institution is in Britain.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Happiest Man (**) and Two Mountains ()

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:59:20 +0100

Ambika P3 is a vast gallery underneath the University of Westminster campus at Baker Street. It is difficult to find, but more than worth the effort.

Bernadette Corporation, 2000 Wasted Years, ICA, London

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:56:53 +0100

“I had never been cool. I liked the same music as my mother,” writes an anonymous member of Bernadette Corporation, the New York artists’ collective, founded in the early 90s, whose oeuvre spans fashion, literature, film, and installation.

Charles Darwent on art: Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum - The day that death hung on the breeze

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:15:00 +0000

At some time in the second half of AD79 – accounts differ as to date – Mount Vesuvius erupted in a 30-kilometre-high jet of mud and gas. As it cooled, the superheated cloud collapsed. It fell first as a pall of ash on the town of Nuceria Alfaterna, killing her population outright. Hours later, Salemum and her people were buried in a surge of roiling ooze.

Visual art review: Rodin comes acalling at Henry Moore's place ... it's the great bronze off!

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:15:00 +0000

Defy the traffic beside the Houses of Parliament and you can see, to one side, Henry Moore's Knife Edge Two Piece and to the other, Rodin's The Burghers of Calais. Or you could do, until what the French sculptor called "my novel" was trundled up the A10 to Perry Green in Hertfordshire, to Moore's home, studio and gardens. Here, for the first time, the great modernist's work is being shown alongside that of another artist. Other collaborations will follow, but Rodin is the obvious first guest – Moore treasured an early volume about him, bought his work, liked the things he liked.

The Mad Women of Mad Men actually represent us all

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:00:47 +0000

Behind every successful Mad Man is a female character that any actress would audition every day for a year to play. Mad Men may be set in a world where gender equality is a distant dream, but it's written and produced in the future: by the third season, more than half of its writers were women, which is a vanishingly rare statistic.

Art review: Sharjah Biennial, Re:emerge: Towards a New Cultural Cartography

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:54:47 +0000

In an age of confusing, sprawling art exhibitions, the current Sharjah Biennial stands out as an intelligent, tightly curated show featuring some hard-edged works that ever so slightly unsettle the delicate political and cultural ecosystems in the Gulf.

Charles Darwent on art: George Bellows was knock-out – but he was always playing catch-up

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

When good Americans die, they go to Paris; when bad Americans die, they stay in America. Thus, at least, thought Oscar Wilde. So where is the late George Bellows, who was both the most American of painters and the most French?

He comes in colours: Craigie Aitchison at the Waddington Custot Galleries

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:00:05 +0000

While most of his contemporaries were slapping on the paint, Craigie Aitchison went thin, so thin his diluted oil paintings of skies and flowers and dogs became almost translucent. Yet they always retained a colour and a life which remained unique to himself.

Mark Wallinger, Labyrinth, London Underground Tube Stations, London

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:29:35 +0000

“You learn to know where people want to go even if they don’t know themselves,” one tube employee at Bank station told me, as I wandered around the labyrinth of tunnels, escalators, and platforms in search of Mark Wallinger’s own Labyrinth – artwork number 142 out of 270.

Photography review: Landmark, the Fields of Photography - Planet Earth in all its glory and the macabre beauty of desecration

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 19:15:00 +0000

What is landscape photography, in this day and age? Monuments of natural beauty, frozen in perfect light? Or the opposite of that, scenes of desecration, revealing how we have mauled and mutilated our inheritance? Or, given the vast potential opened up by digital photography, has it become a visual offshoot of fantasy or science fiction?

Charles Darwent on Mark Wallinger: Underground artist leads travellers astray

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 19:15:00 +0000

Mark Wallinger has always had an itch for public transport: witness Threshold to the Kingdom, filmed at City airport, or Angel, which featured the artist walking down a station up-escalator reciting St John's Gospel backwards. The 2007 Turner Prize-winner is also fascinated by signs and codes. So if anyone was going to make an artwork for each of London Underground's 270 stations, then Wallinger was he.

Classical review: LA Phil New Music Group/Dudamel/Adams, Barbican, London

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:09:22 +0000

‘Good evening!’ Wild applause. ‘Sorry for my very Latin accent.’ Tumultuous applause. Gustavo Dudamel knows how to play his audience, and audiences know how to play up to him. It was a nifty move for the Barbican to install him as one of its intermittently-resident International Associates, and here he was, proclaiming that new music was not the future: ‘New music is the present!’ And to prove it, he’d brought two new works. First up was Joseph Pereira’s Concerto for Percussion and Chamber Orchestra with the composer himself as soloist, and though his programme note described it as ‘a concerto of co-operation, not conflict’, ‘domination’ might have been nearer the mark, because he kept the musical spotlight firmly on himself throughout, with nobody else getting a word in edgeways.

Purity Ring, St John's at Hackney, London

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:57:25 +0000

It's the sort of gig where every appreciative tweet comes with an instagram snap attached. And there's no denying that duo Purity Ring look the part in St John's Church in hip Hackney, lit by flickering candlelight and cocoon-like lamps suspended on branches over the stage, which pulsate with multicoloured lights. Much of the sound is beaten out on an impressive drum pad-come-lighting display, with eight hittable wasp-nest like domes, which glow as they're struck.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Apollo Theatre, London

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:22:15 +0000

“We may have a Warhorse on our hands,” declared novelist Mark Haddon in an interview the other day. He was talking about this stage version of his best-selling book which won rave reviews when it opened in the Cottesloe and has now transferred to the West End. Was that vainglorious of him? A hostage to fortune? Not really. He could well be right.

Art review: Tate Britain's self-reflexive new commission 'Phantom Ride' by Simon Starling is elegantly executed but too restricted

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:58:29 +0000

Public galleries make much of their artist commissions these days. The more traditional their collections, the more directors want to give a contemporary zing to their establishments by presenting a new work by a contemporary artist. But they are, by nature constrictive. You ask an artist to make a statement about the collection, the edifice or whatever, but too often it remains just that: a statement rooted to a place by the terms of the deal.

Charles Darwent on art: Chuck Close Prints - Process and Collaboration

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Notice the way the eyes follow you around the room. Well, the glasses at any rate, this being a portrait of Chuck Close. Bespectacled, bearded and rising 73, Close is no Mona Lisa. He may be like the man who painted her, though, unexpected as that may seem.

John Piper – the Mountains of Wales; Richard Long – Land Art; Beryl Korot – Text and Commentary; Michael Landy – Four Walls; Callum Innes – New Watercolours; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:55:04 +0000

Some great regional galleries have very special collections indeed and are overlooked at our peril. The Whitworth in Manchester, for example, has a textiles holding second only to the V&A's in London, and is also strong on wallpaper, landscape painting, and drawings both historic and contemporary. A few months from now, it will close for a major refurbishment which, when complete, will see the galleries dramatically open out to the park at its back. How to mark this transitional moment?

Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration, White Cube Bermondsey, London

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:20:44 +0000

Chuck Close suffered a spinal aneuryism in 1988, and the story of the making of his large-scale, painted portraits, works often composed of lozenges of colour organised inside grid-like patterns which cohere visually the further you recede from them, often goes hand in hand with a general acknowledgement of his tremendous battle against physical adversity. He's the man who is forever fighting to make it new from the maddening confines of a wheelchair.

Antoni Tàpies, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:40:51 +0000

Antoni Tàpies was recovering from a lung infection in a mountain sanatorium during his late teens when he began reading the fiction and philosophy that would shape his later oeuvre. The year was 1942.

Visual art review: RB Kitaj, Obsessions - The rise and fall and rise again of an embittered virtuoso

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Although R B Kitaj lived in Britain for nearly 40 years, he ended up an obsessive, wounded outsider.

Charles Darwent on art: Barocci, Brilliance and Grace - For my next trick, the start of the Baroque!

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A family name can be a burden or a blessing. Jacopo Comin got his – Tintoretto, "little dyer" – from his father's trade, a stroke of luck for a man who would find fame as a colourist. Barocci, a painter of pretty pink Madonnas, was born Federico Fiori, or Frederick Flowers. That would have done nicely, too. Whoever dubbed his father's family Barocci did him no favours at all. Barocci, in some north Italian dialects, are ox-carts – a singularly hefty nickname for the artist now on show at the National Gallery.

Charles Darwent on the Tate's Lichtenstein retrospective: Oh boy, Roy, that's a really dotty picture. There must be a catch ...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago, I saw a Mondrian show in Pittsburgh. A career in one room, it began with a farmyard scene in the Dutch genre style Mondrian favoured in 1900 and ended, 20 years later, with a colour-rectangle Composition. In between, things changed incrementally – Mondrian finding Cézanne, then Cubism; his eye becoming more linear, grid-like; his abstraction less a rejection of nature than a refining of it. The show's history may have been on the tidy side, but it was compelling for all that.

Robert Rauschenberg, Jammers, Gagosian Gallery, London

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:11:57 +0000

There is a photograph of American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) relaxing on a lilo in the swimming-pool of the Villa de Madame Sarabhai in Ahmedabad, India. The year is 1975.

Review: Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, Tate Modern, London

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:03:03 +0000

With an artist quite so well known as Roy Lichtenstein (can anyone not be aware of his imagery?), it is always tempting for a gallery to try and freshen him up with a novel interpretation. Mercifully Tate Modern, which has been particularly guilty in the past, has decided this time to play it straight.

Visual art review: Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 - Portrait of the artist as quixotic genius and grieving friend

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Courtauld Gallery's new show has a catchy title that prompts a question: becoming which Picasso? There were, after all, several – Picasso the Surrealist, the Classicist, the Analytic and Synthetic Cubist; the Blue Period Picasso, the Rose Period Picasso .... Which will we find as we climb the steep stairs in Somerset House?

Becoming Picasso, Courtauld Gallery, London

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:55:45 +0000

The Courtauld Gallery, which has brought us a succession of tightl focused small exhibitions in recent years, has come up with another real stunner. Becoming Picasso is the story of the Spanish painter’s arrival – brash, determined and hungry for the bohemian life – in the French capital in 1901.

Paul de Monchaux, Fixing Memory: Sculpture 1986 – 2013, The Piper Gallery, London

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:52:07 +0000

According to Mayan legend, The Pyramid Of The Magician was created over a single night. Some versions state that the magician was a dwarf, hatched out of an egg under the spell of his mother, a witch.

Rosemarie Trockel, A Cosmos, Serpentine Gallery, London

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:35:41 +0000

Last month German painter Georg Baselitz dismissed female artists on the grounds that they lacked the instinct for creative destruction. His compatriot Rosemarie Trockel was a case in point. He said condescendingly: “There is a lot of love in her art, a lot of sympathy.”

BP British Art Displays: Looking At The View, Tate Britain, London

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:59:30 +0000

To walk through this display of mostly British landscape artists from the Tate collection is akin to walking through the British countryside itself: bracing, meditative, green, and, at times, dull. However, many exceptional works are included.

Art review - Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind - From the depths of the Ice Age, the Lion Man roars still

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:00:54 +0000

Don't forget your glasses at the British Museum's new exhibition: most of the pieces in Ice Age Art would fit on a reindeer rib. Whatever this work was for, it was not intended to be displayed in a museum.

Art review: Light Show - Sometimes it pays to look into the light

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you have doubts about art made from light, consider Michelangelo's Pietà. Deeply incised, highly polished, the work breaks itself down into shadow and gloss, the chiaroscuro of the Resurrection told as a tale of dark and light. Were you to lock the Pietà in a blackened room, it would, conceptually, cease to exist. Having seen Light Show at the Hayward Gallery, I'm surprised no one has thought of it.

Art Stage Singapore: South Asia's flagship art fair bursts out of its basement venue

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:11:59 +0000

There were two grand hopes for Singapore’s flagship art fair when it first launched - that it would become a central meeting point for the nouveau riche in South Asia’s mushrooming art market, and that it would provide the nation’s own emerging art scene with an exhibiting platform.

Eva Hesse 1965, Hauser & Wirth, London

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:14:59 +0000

Eva Hesse was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex during the 15 months that she spent in a disused textile factory near Dusseldorf from 1964-5. She noted in her diary how de Beauvoir’s feminist existentialism was impacting on her own work: “Transcendence to arise above beyond into another space.”

Wildness, Wu Tsang, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:38:41 +0000

Nostalgia for more “urgent” times compelled artist and film-maker Wu Tsang, 31, to document the life of a transgender bar called the Silver Platter in MacArthur Park, L.A.

Charles Darwent on Schwitters in Britain: Sweet wrappers that made fascists quail

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Tate's new show sounds like a send-up. What would the madcap Merzman be doing here in the Lake District for seven years?

The Console: Scribblenauts Unlimited is an ambitious creation – but it needs a bit of help to become a true classic

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 19:00:07 +0000

Scribblenauts Unlimited, £39.99 Wii U, 3DS, PC Nintendo

Aboudia, Quitte Le Pouvoir: New Paintings by Aboudia, Jack Bell Gallery, London

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:49:26 +0000

During the 10 day battle for Abidjan, when violence in the Ivory Coast turned into civil war, Ivoran artist Aboudia remained in the city and hid in his basement studio, listening to the sound of gunfire. He went outside to see what was happening and then returned to paint. That was in March 2011.

Visual art review: Manet has to go a little further nowadays

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Like many of Manet's paintings – like his work as a whole – The Railway is a game of two halves. To the left of the picture is a woman with one of those pouty French mouths, shaped by generations of going pffffft. She is Victorine Meurent, Manet's favourite model. Next to her, back view, is a child in a white dress and blue sash. She is sometimes identified as the daughter of Manet's friend, Alphonse Hirsch, although, since we cannot see her face, her identity is neither here nor there. She exists as a foil to Victorine.