Having commenced her career in the 1970s, French artist, France Mitrofanoff, has a vast body of work behind her. Over the years she has tackled many themes: the monster, urban living, alienation and reconstruction. In the past decade she has turned away from the city and has focussed on the cosmos and nature. Her star-studded…
Category: Art Exhibition
In Search of Dora Maar
Model, Assia Granatouroff photographed by Dora Maar As I was about to enter the Tate Modern show on Dora Maar, a question wouldn’t go away. Would Maar’s best work turn out to be what she produced during her years with Picasso? The Barbican show I had attended on artistic couples, in January of this year,…
Inspired by the East at the British Museum
Young Woman Reading 1880 by Osman Hamdi Bey Reading the British Museum press release of Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art, I was preparing myself for a big show. The exhibition was promoted as “Covering five centuries of artistic interaction”, and since it was a paying show for the…
Bridget Riley retrospective mesmerises and excites at Hayward Gallery
I still remember the first time I saw Bridget Riley’s vivid, abstract paintings. It was at a provincial gallery, Wolverhampton or somewhere similar, in the mid-1970s. Coloured stripes and shapes shimmered and bounced, their contrasting yet consonant colours jostling and vibrating on the large canvasses. I was fascinated by the rhythm and energy of these…
Into the Night at the Barbican
Shadow Theatre at Le Chat Noir, Paris. I always look forward to the Barbican Gallery’s exhibitions. Theme-based with enticing titles, they always manage to capture the imagination. The last show I covered there, entitled Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde (see here LOVE IN A CREATIVE CLIMATE) in January of this year, had been riveting. With the…
‘Rembrandt’s Light’ lights up Dulwich
A new show has opened for autumn at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s called Rembrandt’s Light. It’s intelligent, empathetic, surprising and at one point breathtaking, and I urge you all to go and see it as soon as possible. Dulwich, the UK’s earliest purpose-built public picture gallery (it was founded in 1811), was designed…
Kollwitz’s War and Grief at the British Museum
‘Woman with Dead Child, 1903. Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt, is not a name I had come across in the art world until the British Museum’s show. Born in 1867, in Königsberg, East Prussia, Kollwitz established herself as a leading, influential graphic artist by the time the First World War came about….
Olafur Eliasson’s Show: Pioneering and Powerful.
Beauty 1993 A trip to the Tate Modern almost always involves me taking a left at the Turbine Hall where I know I will end up in familiar art territory, one which preferably involves paint! Going right on the other hand, into the Blavatnik Building, constitutes more of an art departure for me: tech art…
Dulwich Printmaking Show Impresses
Dorrit Black, Music, 1927-28 I had never heard of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art until I set foot in the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Founded by wood engraver, Iain Macnab in 1925, the Grosvenor School was different from other London-based art schools of the time. There were no exams, students enrolled on courses when they could,…
The Art of Recycling: THE ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION 2019
The RA Summer Exhibition, with its whiff of the London season, the cocktail party and the 19th-century Paris salon, is always a bit of an oddity, and all the better for it, IMHO.
ARTMUSELONDON 