art blog since 2009
Urban nature is my favourite kind. Parks where ice cream is sold. Botanical gardens serving good coffee. Flower shows curated like art festivals. Tree lined streets leading to civic amenities. And, of course, residential gardens which allow metropolitan types to contemplate collections of plants, ready and to hand, like the contents of bookshelf. Nobody ever …
May 28, 2024
The Instruction Manual by John Ashbery is a poem of some 74 lines, which mentions more than 30 colours. And these colours evoke Guadalajara, Mexico, a place the speaker hasn’t even seen. But having said that, he pictures it well. His senses appear to have been sharpened by the deadline for a technical writing gig, and they …
February 10, 2016
There’s the painting you can see and the work of art you can only grasp in the mind: 96 panels that will soon make their way through the world’s postal networks and scatter the material object. Shane Finan’s painting is a landscape jigsaw, where interiors and exteriors interrelate and a bridge connects the artist’s studio …
January 8, 2016
There is something maddening about Corinna Spencer’s installation. Her 1,000 portraits have a compulsive, destructive streak which would surely destroy the mental equilibrium of any sitter. The lady in question is already disintegrating. Eyes look out from somewhere behind the face. The lipstick is smeared on quick, perhaps as if for a public appearance in Bedlam. Each …
November 5, 2015
Painting is an empty pocket. The content it once contained, the paint itself, has in many cases gone. In all cases now, a stretched canvas is a blank canvas. Put in it what you will. So the unadorned white t-shirt you see here, the unifying image from a show which shares its name, is more …
September 22, 2013
He might not know it yet, but the subject of The Hunted is right where Adrian Ghenie wants him. This baboon has been cornered on a coffee table. That’s the kind of place you would expect to find a book about art. And indeed this photolike monkey fades into a black outline on what could …
September 27, 2011
As widely noted, the biggest shock of this year’s Turner Prize shortlist is painter George Shaw’s affinity with the enthusiasts who build model Spitfires. He doesn’t hide the fact that Humbrol enamel is his medium of choice. And it now looks like a conceptual statement carried to an extreme. He will have got through gallons. …
June 21, 2011
Although there may be no candles in these painted scenes, there is arguably candlelight. There is certainly romance and the echoes of a nocturnal interior by, say, Georges de la Tour. And in this light the vulnerable nudes, of which there are three, also call to mind Rembrandt. It may be worked out they are …
May 31, 2011
One thing we can know about cave paintings is they tended to show stuff outside the cave. So art got started as a way of showing what was not actually visible at the time. Take this scene of a passenger jet stranded in a jungle. A film crew would have gone all the way to …
November 22, 2010
The first words which spring to mind are of course ‘dogs’ and another beginning with F. Whichever order you put them in will depend on your attitude to the animals and act in question. But either way, it first reduces the painting to a cheap joke at the expense of painting itself. Although there seems …
November 18, 2010