I like it when art takes me somewhere I might not otherwise go. Bracknell, the Berkshire new town of 100,000 where many IT companies have their offices, has something of Slough’s unglamorous cachet without the double-edged compensation of having been the setting for ‘The Office’.
Continue Reading...YOU ARE BROWSING: Paul Carey Kent
Textile Arts of Peru
Textile art has an increasing profile, witness Phaidon’s new ‘Vitamin T: Threads & Textiles in Contemporary Art’, which presents 100 current practitioners. A logical place to see it must be the Fashion & Textile Museum in Bermondsey.
Continue Reading...Animal Alert at Masterpiece
Masterpiece (which runs on to Wed 4th July) prides itself on quality and variety, both in evidence in my selection of lively animals from the 10th edition:
Continue Reading...Looking up and down the Royal Academy Summer Show:
This year’s RA Summer Show features several rooms more obviously ‘curated’ than I recall previously: animals; climate change; abstraction; politics; light and time… But the essence isn’t about to alter:
Continue Reading...Venice: Beyond The Consensus
The 58th edition of the Venice Biennale – open through to late November – has been greeted by critical consensus: France, Lithuania and Ghana are the national pavilions of choice
Continue Reading...Confusing Times at the Venice Biennale
Ralph Rugoff’s theme for the 58th Venice Biennale (to 24 November) is ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’. There was plenty of work to confuse on show, and that may well be a consequence of such an age. So I found myself asking…
Continue Reading...Ravens and Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945
Why are there so many good Japanese photographers? Lena Fritsch, talking at the Japan Foundation launch of her impressive book ‘Ravens & Red Lipstick’ (Thames & Hudson, £35), didn’t feel any ‘national style’ could explain that – rather she cited the diversity of approaches and thought it more likely a numbers game
Continue Reading...Photo London: All the Nudes Not Fit to Put On Instagram
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...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.
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