Paul's Art Stuff Archives

Everybody’s Doing It: Painting at Art Basel

Art Basel and it’s satellite fair seem to be back to normal this year. There’s plenty of variety – more so than at Frize London last year –

Christmas Already?

What makes art so inexhaustible? Not only does it responds to a vast and ever-changing world, but the artist chooses… Read More

Plenty of Pissarro

Camille Pissarro in 1900 Do you fancy owning a Pissarro? Perhaps you’ve been to his most substantial UK show in… Read More

Edward Munch, very much a painter, is easily Norway’s most famous artist, and a new 13-floor building – ‘Munch’ as it is styled – was recently opened in his honour. Walking around Oslo, though, it would be easy to think that sculpture is the national preference: statues dot the streets and I visited four sculpture parks. For example:

Parallel strategies: Barbara Walker and Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid: from ‘Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service’, 2007 Two current shows mine parallel strategies with effect to foreground… Read More

Still Working in the Studio?

Perhaps, then, the studio is slipping towards historic status. Not that there’s anything wrong with a historic survey (‘A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020’ to 5 June)

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So This Is Permanent

It’s easy to find that, because there’s a time limit on changing exhibitions, you concentrate on those becasue you might miss them and never quite get round to looking at institutions’ permanent holdings, deep in the memory as they may be. So on visiting major new shows recently, I’ve also thought: let’s take a ride out, see what we can find…

Waking Up to Woking

Woking may not be trendy… but it’s only 19 train minutes from Clapham Junction and has a new shopping centre! What do you mean, you still don’t want to go? It also has plenty of art at the moment:

Seeing Through Glass

Now the show in Leeds presents a 50-50 mixture of glass specialists and wider-ranging artists working in the material, all illuminatingly categorised by the material property foregrounded in the processes used. ‘SOLID’ features cast or moulded glass; ‘GAS’, sculptures made by blowing into the glass; ‘LIQUID’ the results of manipulating molten glass. Here’s one of each that order:

Time for One’s Selfie

Want an art selfie? The most obvious chances are currently provided by the two mirror rooms in Tate Modern‘s Yayoi… Read More

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In the Shadows of Bacon

The Royal Academy’s ‘Man and Beast’ offers the chance to see many prime paintings by Bacon

Cloudy

It is easy to assume that artists want to leave a permanent mark, to make a work that will endure… Read More

What to See in February

What to see in London in February? Here’s my pick of ten shows which are (a) free and (b) open… Read More

The New Courtauld

Some galleries – the Hayward is exemplary in this regard – close for years to refurbish, only to leave re-visitors… Read More

Art at UCL, Japanese special

I hadn’t clocked University College London as much of an art destination until recently: sure, the campus between Euston and Warren Street boasts the agreeably off-beat Grant Museum of Zoology and Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, but art?

Obsessions, Old and New

I’m not sure you have to be obsessive to be an artist, but plenty of artists have made bodies of work that are naturally described that way. The best-known examples tend to be individually produced:

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On with the Not-So New

It’s not entirely out with the old in the gallery world. Here’s a choice of ten free-to-visit London shows which… Read More

Art of Glass

The old distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ have reduced sufficiently in recent years that ceramics and textiles can now be… Read More

Art for Christmas?

A seasonal tradition has developed of showing works small and affordable enough that they could plausibly make gifts. Flowers Gallery have the longest-running current exhibition with such a premise: this is the 39th year of ‘Small is Beautiful’