Most days Art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
16 April 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
The Dallas Art Fair has taken a hybrid position in response to the coronavirus: it has stuck to its original dates of April 14-23, but only online, postponing the physical fair to October 1-4. Here’s a choice of six works you can see and buy in advance at https://www.dallasartfair.com/online should you happen to have the requisite amounts to hand…
8 April 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Want some consolation during the lockdown? Covid-19 is far from being as lethal as the bubonic plague which, for example, killed a quarter of London’s population in 1665-6.
1 April 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
My heading comes from Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’, and given that the band also recorded ‘Isolation’, they must be the go-to musical precursors of our current ‘social distancing’. What about visual artists?
26 March 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Will the enforced move from physical to virtual exhibitions and fairs during the corona restrictions accelerate a permanent shift in the balance? It’s hard to say, but there is certainly plenty of online content available. Here are four things which came to my attention in the first few ‘stay at home’ days.
21 March 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Art Basel viewing Rooms (available 18-25 March following the cancellation and return of 75% of fees) shows no particular platform innovations in allowing galleries to showcase what would have been at the fair.
18 March 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
The sudden death of Rebecca Fairman (1960-2020), who ran ArthouSE1 from 2014-20, dismayed the artists and curators connected with the gallery, witness the many who attended her funeral last week.
11 March 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Helen Cammock, a member of the collective which shared last year’s Turner Prize, has been in residence at the Wysing Arts Centre, just outside Cambridge.
5 March 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
It’s easy enough to ignore the genre of portrait painting in the age of the camera, but the best examples do plenty apart from that. David Hockney carries on the tradition in his new show at the National Portrait Gallery, but it isn’t hard to find interesting portraits on elsewhere. Here are three…
17 February 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
The more that orthodox places close in challenging market and cost conditions – Blain | Southern being the latest – the more reason there is to appreciate alternatives spaces. School Gallery, attached to a studio complex near Wimbledon, and managed by artist Michael Hall, is one such example
12 February 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
American painter Eric Fischl’s new show at Skarstedt (‘Figures’ to 9 April) presents, approximately life-sized, people on the beach. They come from Fischl’s own photographs of characters and poses which interest him – ‘I can’t tell people what I want’
5 February 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Let’s suppose people can be split into those who believe that the world is essentially binary and those who don’t. The former group might readily agree that exhibitions can be divided into those by living artists and those by dead artists*
26 January 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
The 133-gallery Brussels Antiques & Fine Arts Fair (26 Jan – 2 Feb) is wide-ranging: more ancient, classical and modern than contemporary, but covering many areas and eras of art, design and collectibles
22 January 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Pre-Raphaelite painting can often come across as inert, but the designs of the tendency’s primary ceramicist – William De Morgan (1839 -1917) – are always full of characterful life and implied movement.
15 January 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Birth is obviously a rather important event in all lives, yet outside of the nativity, it hasn’t received commensurate attention as a subject for art – compared with the less creative matter of death, for example.
8 January 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva has been shown little in the UK, so Waddington Custot’s substantial survey is well worth catching (to 15 Feb*)
2 January 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
It is perhaps a little ridiculous for me to set out my own forthcoming show, but then it is called ‘Ridiculous!’. The cool new venue of Elephant West, 100 yards from White City tube station, presents in exhibition, film and performance – my choice of 18 artists who are not afraid to look stupid.
19 December 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
There are two ways to go if you have a large museum space available: one or two big shows or the combination of several smaller shows.
11 December 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
These days Bilbao’s art fame rests mainly on Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim, finished with 33,000 titanium sheets and containing eight of Richard Serra’s massive works from the series Torqued Ellipses, 1996-98. Gehry and Serra fit with a – rather macho – tradition of working sculpturally in heavy materials consistent with the Basque region’s industrial base. Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) and Jorge Otieza (1908 –2003) are the most famous Basque artists of the 20th century, but I found contemporary practitioners, too, on a recent visit.
4 December 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
How can art accommodate the burning issues of global warming in the context of our history and the possible end of it? Several shows in a recent visit to the Netherlands seemed to touch on such matters…
27 November 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
Pieter de Hooch (the Dutch say ‘hoe-k’) was born in Rotterdam in 1629, but lived in Delft during the 1650’s, where he painted 40 of his 150 known works before leaving for Amsterdam in 1660, where died around 1680. In Delft now, only the second solo show ever of his paintings* aims to lift him ‘out of the shadow’ of Delft’s most famous son, Vermeer.
20 November 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
I’ve lived in Southampton for 25 years, and it has now reached its best state yet for art tourists:
13 November 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
Hans Hartung (1904-89) seems to be an increasingly highly regarded artist, whether measured by market or exhibition profile.
6 November 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
I visited the current recipient, Alice Anderson, and it was immediately obvious what can be gained. The spacious house is isolated in a classic Loire Valley landscape. The natural world, from which Calder abstracted many of his forms, is right up close through the extensive windows of the thirty-metre long studio. Not surprisingly, Anderson is taking the chance to work on a larger scale..
30 October 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
The western profile and marketability of contemporary Asian art has risen sharply in recent years, principally through the Japanese Gutai (‘concrete’) and Mona-ha (‘school of things’) and the Korean Dansaekhwa (‘monochrome painting’) schools, with their distinctive titles
