http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/?service=Rss http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/david-hockney-1960ndash1968-a-marriage-of-styles-contemporary-nottingham-1823091.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/david-hockney-1960ndash1968-a-marriage-of-styles-contemporary-nottingham-1823091.html ]]> <p> How wise is it for a brand new art centre in a major provincial city to open its doors with a show by David Hockney? Isn't the Hockney story – and aren't Hockney's works in general – just too well-known to deserve yet another outing? </p> Reviews Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/lynn-painterstainers-prize-exhibition-painters-hall-london-1821719.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/lynn-painterstainers-prize-exhibition-painters-hall-london-1821719.html ]]> <p>Representational painting is alive. Of course it is, you fool. But at what level of creativity can it be said to be alive? Is it a little moribund and wistfully backward-looking? One place to look for an answer would be The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, currently on display in one of the City's livery halls. This particular prize has been in existence for five years. It exists to encourage not only representational painting in general, but also to nurture skills of draughtsmanship. The rewards for winning it are not to be sniffed at: a first prize of £15,000, and lesser sums for the runners up. This year more than 80 works have been chosen from a little under 1,000 submissions. The means are relatively traditional – oil on board, oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, etc. The range is, at first glance, familiar: landscape, ruminative portraiture, still life. </p> Reviews Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/frank-auerbach-london-building-sites-195262-courtauld-gallery-london-1820738.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/frank-auerbach-london-building-sites-195262-courtauld-gallery-london-1820738.html ]]> <p> The most intriguing work in the Courtauld Gallery's show, Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62, is not a painting but a drawing, Study for Oxford Street Building Site. This, prosaically, depicts the new John Lewis department store under construction, the old one having been bombed in the Second World War. Auerbach, like centuries of painters before him, has gridded up his sketch in red crayon the better to transfer it to canvas. A contemporary photograph of the scene shows the half-finished John Lewis as a similar composition of grids, its steel frame a sign of both its modernity and its Modernism. </p> Reviews Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:39 +0000 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