14 October 2023 • daniel barnes
Dripping, posing, pleading, vacantly staring into and through the viewer, the figures in Charlie Stein’s paintings are at once grotesque and hyperreal reflections of our fragile selves, splintered and strewn across the airwaves of social media, and yet all neatly packaged up.
21 July 2023 • daniel barnes
Where the Land Meets the Sea. On the surface, everything is as it should be: Damien is collaborating with Heni again; an auction house is the venue for a sell-out show;
17 July 2023 • daniel barnes
It would have been easy in recent years to have given in to the twenty-first century’s special brand of polarising hysteria when it comes to landscape painting.
6 March 2023 • daniel barnes
Taking cues from science fiction, esoteric clubs, film, literature and the deepest recesses of human invention, Nelson chips away at our sense of what it is to inhabit space.
14 February 2023 • daniel barnes
In a world obsessed with soundbites and headlines, Peter Doig’s secondary market prices are the stuff of art market legend, which is likely more a curse than a blessing for Doig, who is the first living artist to exhibit at the Courtauld Gallery since its 2021 renovation.
26 January 2023 • daniel barnes
As one of the leading figures of post-war abstract painting, Kenneth Noland’s commitment to line and colour is unparalleled.
27 June 2022 • daniel barnes
Cornelia Parker’s work is all about that liminal thing and, in this show at Tate Britain, it looms large. Indeed, one quickly forms the impression that she – intentionally or otherwise – is making the art that this fractured, restless world deserves.
13 April 2022 • daniel barnes
Back in 1991, when Damien Hirst began showing his Natural History works, the Daily Star ran the headline “£50,000 for fish without chips”.
14 January 2022 • daniel barnes
Do you not feel that sometimes we become so swept up with the hidden meanings of art or with the artist’s identity that we forget to savour the sensation of art itself?
17 July 2021 • daniel barnes
Brooding, silent, inert, the works in this exhibition are far beyond death, having passed through rigor mortis, decomposition and mumification… Read More
15 July 2021 • daniel barnes
It was on a warm August morning back in 2014, sitting in a curry house in a side street off Brick Lane, when Gilbert told me he had been at Wembley for the 1966 World Cup Final.
24 May 2021 • daniel barnes
Art is something we experience, and not just something we see. And learning this lesson is crucial if we are to avoid the very intellectual fabric of art being eroded and lambasted by travesties such as Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, which plays into the hands of populism but does egregious harm to the integrity of the experience art.
1 April 2021 • daniel barnes
$69.3 million is a lot of money to spend on something you cannot touch, that does not occupy space and that cannot even be seen without flicking a switch. Now the dust has settled on Beeple’s epic auction debut, it is time to soberly consider whether it is worth it. Spoiler – it probably is! We are, after all, living in the future.
22 February 2021 • daniel barnes
It’s been a while, but the column about the value of art is back. I wrote the first 100 instalments… Read More
11 April 2016 • daniel barnes
Display Gallery is to present a series of expressionist cloudscapes by photographer Benedict Redgrove.
29 March 2016 • daniel barnes
Young British artist Hayden Kays returns this spring with a new body of work.
18 December 2015 • daniel barnes
Readers of this column will have noticed that I am the only person in the world who actually likes Damien Hirst despite not making any money from him.
11 December 2015 • daniel barnes
In his latest exhibition, Gazing Ball Paintings, at Gagosian New York, Koons oversteps the mark of decency and demonstrates that the most horrifying thing about his art is its sincerity.
4 December 2015 • daniel barnes
On the 24th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s death, 28th April 2016, the artist’s first definitive catalogue raisonne will be published, including over 100 previously unseen works and missing 4 that remain untraceable.
27 November 2015 • daniel barnes
If you think about it, you’ll realise you’ve had a funny feeling too. London has felt incomplete, bereft as if part of the furniture is missing but you cannot quite put your finger on what it is or where it has gone.
20 November 2015 • daniel barnes
In the fight again relativism and subjectivity in aesthetic judgements, I have been outlining how we might approach objective judgements of value.
13 November 2015 • daniel barnes
One of GFest’s core functions is to remind us that although some of us are privileged to live without fear of state persecution or backward mob rule, not everybody in the world is. Thus the themes of this year’s festival is aptly (Complacent Present)…Fragile Future?
6 November 2015 • daniel barnes
The perennial question that dare not speak its name on pain of heresy is this: what, precisely, is it about Basquiat that inspires such adoration and extravagance?
30 October 2015 • daniel barnes
The death of Brian Sewell heralded the death of art criticism. Or so I said. It was an inflammatory claim, designed to rile, but there was a grain of anxious serious in it. Sewell was not just a contrarian, he was an astute critic of refined tastes and a conscientious objector.
