The nude is potentially difficult territory in the #MeToo era, the more so as almost all of the examples at Photo London are of women. Instagram doesn’t allow them anyway, so my stream’s choices from Photo London were landscapes and portraits. And yet I found myself drawn to several interesting nudes, mostly from the rear… […]
Continue Reading...YOU ARE BROWSING: Author: Paul Carey-Kent
Let’s Talk About Normal: Peter Fischli
If you attend exhibitions of contemporary photography – or Photo London, opening today – it won’t be long before you see what look at a glance like everyday images of everyday subjects presented as art. What’s that about?
Continue Reading...Through a Glass, Clearly
It’s hard, you might think, to get too excited about a glass of water. Yet not only did Michael Craig-Martin famously present such a glass as an oak tree, the subject of a simple glass without so much as a still life to complement it crops up pretty often in paintings.
Continue Reading...Sophie Layton’s Japanese Prints
I recently visited Sophie Layton at her workshop in the Shakespeare Business Centre in Brixton. It’s a print studio which operates on a hot desk basis so that some 30 printmakers can share the impressive facilities.
Continue Reading...Hair Today
Hair is an interesting subject for art: of the body, and yet at a remove; and its own aesthetic area in the day to day. The most famous sustained body of work featuring its styles is probably the work of the Nigerian photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere
Continue Reading...Social Media In Painting
There’s an obvious danger that painting – even in its expanded sense which uses the language but doesn’t necessarily involve paint – might feel rather old-fashioned in the face of the rise of social media.
Continue Reading...We are still mused
There seem to be plenty of idealised beauties-come-muses, 19th-century style, in London galleries just now – though maybe there are always some around if you look
Continue Reading...Art of the Franz Jest
The Tate’s Franz West retrospective catches the irreverent humour of the Austrian artist – and how his art often lay in its pretending not to be art.
Continue Reading...Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico
I’ve had the chance to look comprehensively at the work of Graciela Iturbide, through an extensive show of her work in Frankfurt (which itself has a sizable catalogue) and the sumptuous and informative catalogue of an even bigger show in Boston.
Continue Reading...Blind Sided: Sargy Mann and Phoebe Boswell
My very first weekly column – this is the 300th – considered the matter of blind art and the absence of a powerful congenitally blind artist. That hasn’t changed, but..
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