http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/?service=Rss http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/european-fields-hans-van-der-meer-host-gallery-london-1816767.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/european-fields-hans-van-der-meer-host-gallery-london-1816767.html <p>Hans van der Meer wanted to get away from the modern hyperbole that surrounds football's global superstars enclosed in expensive stadiums, and the clichéd pictures they produce. He wanted to return to the basic formula of 22 people on a pitch. </p> Reviews Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/van-goghs-letters-the-artist-speaks-van-gogh-museum-amsterdambrthe-arts-of-islam-institut-du-monde-arabe-paris-1816770.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/van-goghs-letters-the-artist-speaks-van-gogh-museum-amsterdambrthe-arts-of-islam-institut-du-monde-arabe-paris-1816770.html <p>You'd imagine that an exhibition in Amsterdam of Van Gogh's letters and another in Paris of the Khalili Collection of Islamic art would have little in common, and you'd be right. The only tenuous connection I can think of is that Vincent's great-great-nephew, the film-maker Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004, and that the Khalili exists in part to point out that barbarism and Islam do not go hand in hand. The other likeness between the shows is that both are diffuse, one in a bad way, the other good. </p> Reviews Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/jann-haworth-art-gallery-wolverhampton-1813580.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/jann-haworth-art-gallery-wolverhampton-1813580.html ]]> <p>Does the Pop Art movement of the 1960s represent a battle between the Unserious and the Overserious? It can look that way. Nothing is more shockingly dissimilar to a silkscreen of a Campbell's soup can by Warhol from the 1960s than a giant work of monochromatic abstraction by Robert Motherwell from the 1950s. Abstract Expressionism seems to have almost no common ground with Pop. One seems to smile and dance around out in the world, while the other glooms and navel-gazes with an enormous sense of macho self-importance. </p> Reviews Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/wild-thing-epstein-gaudierbrzeska-gill-royal-academy-london-1812608.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/wild-thing-epstein-gaudierbrzeska-gill-royal-academy-london-1812608.html ]]> <p>From its title, you might think Wild Thing was going to be a Tom Stoppard play. Its leading players certainly read like the cast list of one: Jacob Epstein, a bolshie New York Jew; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, young, French, and doomed; and Eric Gill, the omnisexual son of a nonconformist Sussex clergyman.</p> Reviews Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/the-artists-studio-compton-verney-warwickshire-1810369.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/the-artists-studio-compton-verney-warwickshire-1810369.html <p>We all want to know what artists do inside their studios. By the time the work reaches a gallery or a museum, much of the evidence of labour has been smoothed way. The work looks as if it reached this level of perfection – or charming imperfection – without the intervention of the human hand. It becomes just another made thing. </p> Reviews Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/the-sacred-made-real-spanish-painting-and-sculpture-16001700-national-gallery-london-1808819.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/the-sacred-made-real-spanish-painting-and-sculpture-16001700-national-gallery-london-1808819.html ]]> <p>At the heart of the National Gallery's new show, The Sacred Made Real, lies a question intended to vex: why do we find 17th-century Spanish religious painting so easy to look at, 17th-century Spanish religious sculpture so hard? Why does Zurbaran's canvas of St Francis Standing in Ecstasy strike us as sublime, Pedro de Mena's wooden effigy of the same subject as cheesy?</p> Reviews Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/yinka-shonibare-willy-loman-ndash-the-rise-and-fall-stephen-friedman-gallery-london-1806802.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/yinka-shonibare-willy-loman-ndash-the-rise-and-fall-stephen-friedman-gallery-london-1806802.html <p>It's an old adage, but it's worth repeating: a human being looks taller, and gets to see further, when he climbs up on another man's shoulders. What can this possibly mean when applied to the practice of artists? It's quite simple. When you make a work, you give it added gravitas by claiming that it refers to, or incorporates elements from, great works of the past. They needn't be works by visual artists alone. They could be by writers too. Samuel Beckett, for example, has been flogged to death in this respect. As a consequence you half-suggest – it is really super-subtle – that you are claiming some kind of parity of achievement, or perhaps that by this simple fact of incorporation of elements from the past, you are even surpassing what you have borrowed from or alluded to.</p> Reviews Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/beatles-to-bowie-the-60s-exposed-national-portrait-gallery-london-1805590.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/beatles-to-bowie-the-60s-exposed-national-portrait-gallery-london-1805590.html ]]> <p>The Sixties? It was the decade when popular music in Britain threw off the shackles of America, became shaped and defined by photographic imagery as never before, and when the worlds of pop and fashion eagerly jumped into bed together. This comprehensive show at the National Portrait Gallery, which looks at Britpop year by year, gives us many of those defining images by Beaton, Bailey and others, and much else too – umpteen examples of the new pop and fashion magazines that flourished in that decade; sheet music; archival film of such pioneering TV shows as Ready, Steady, Go!; record covers, and all this to the accompaniment of the music of that decade.</p> Reviews Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/maharaja-the-splendour-of-indias-royal-courts-va-london-1805072.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/maharaja-the-splendour-of-indias-royal-courts-va-london-1805072.html ]]> <p>It would be difficult to find a more visually ravishing show than this one in the whole of London. The objects – from palm leaf fronds on the end of tapering silver stems to cool an emperor's brow, to the silver accoutrements of an elephant; from gorgeous Indian miniatures showing shapely young female royals depending, languorously, from the end of a kite, to paintings of tremendous royal processions that seem to go on and on and on, at such a languid pace, until we run out of wall space – are dazzling, and the setting, from first to last, coyly razzmatazz.</p> Reviews Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/ed-ruscha-50-years-of-painting--hayward-gallery-london-1804624.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/ed-ruscha-50-years-of-painting--hayward-gallery-london-1804624.html ]]> <p> Of the several ways of looking at Ed Ruscha’s Box Smashed Flat (Vicksburg), the least obvious is as a self-portrait. </p> Reviews Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:08 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/miroslaw-balka-tate-modern-london-1804627.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/miroslaw-balka-tate-modern-london-1804627.html <p>Go for a spin on the London Eye! Gawp at the living statues! Pop into Tate Modern for a disturbing meditation on the physical manifestation of the Holocaust! </p> Reviews Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/eduardo-paolozzi-the-jet-age-compendium-raven-row-london-1802073.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/eduardo-paolozzi-the-jet-age-compendium-raven-row-london-1802073.html ]]> <p>Eduardo Paolozzi is usually remembered for his hulking bronze sculptures, such as those in London outside the British Library and Euston station, or for the labyrinthine patterns tiled in the mosaics he produced for Tottenham Court Road tube station. Much less discussed is the dissemination of the artist's graphic work outside the gallery; his designs for everyday objects, such as textiles and wallpaper, and his text and image contributions to the avant-garde magazine Ambit.</p> Reviews Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/rosalind-nashabishi-richard-wright-ica-gagosian-gallery-london-1801696.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/rosalind-nashabishi-richard-wright-ica-gagosian-gallery-london-1801696.html ]]> <p>Rosalind Nashabishi is a film-maker and photographer who specialises in the depiction of voyeurism and role-play. Her films are self-conscious meditations upon the nature of film-making; broodings upon the processes that the material undergoes as it is being wilfully transformed into a spectacle fit for human consumption. Every element of the film is picked apart before our eyes – how image is manipulated by the overlaying of sound; how a camera angle can determine a mood. Many of them are shot on 16mm film, so that the whirring and the antique-sounding clatter of the projector at our back are all part and parcel of the experience. This is how the film experience comes to be what it is. That is what she is saying to us.</p> Reviews Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/michael-glover-a-journey-into-the-terror-of-sensory-deprivation-ndash-nearly-1801781.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/michael-glover-a-journey-into-the-terror-of-sensory-deprivation-ndash-nearly-1801781.html <p>Things are getting worse and worse and worse! Those words, once uttered, with the most resounding lugubriousness, by the great poet and translator Michael Hamburger, ring in my ears as I approach Miroslaw Balka's giant black, ship's container-like installation at the back end of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. (You can't even really see it as you walk down the ramp from the entrance.) Its title is How It Is, which is, of course, a straight steal from Samuel Beckett, who wrote a novel of that same name in which the hero (hero?!) crawls through mud everlastingly.</p> Reviews Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/turner-prize-2009-tate-britain-london-1800770.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/turner-prize-2009-tate-britain-london-1800770.html ]]> <p> Is it just one’s senescence that makes this year’s Turner Prize seem so safe, so traditional? </p> Reviews Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/maharaja-the-splendour-of-indias-royal-courts-victoria-and-albert-museum-london-1800776.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/maharaja-the-splendour-of-indias-royal-courts-victoria-and-albert-museum-london-1800776.html ]]> <p> Try it on your tongue and it's a procession of long, drawling syllables. Maharaja. The word contains the stateliness and grandeur of India's courtly past and, like Versailles, triggers associations of limitless opulence. </p> Reviews Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100