Category: contemporary painting

Andrew Sim, two rainbows and a forest of plants and trees (2024)

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…

Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (travel adaptor), 2014

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…

Shane Finan, ADA (2015)

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…

Corinna Spencer, Portrait of a Lady (2015)

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…

Ben Ashton, 01:23 Monday, 13:30 Sunday, 13:04 Sunday, 23:39 Wednesday, 20:00 Thursday, 15:37 Sunday, 13:35 Sunday, 04:23 Saturday and 17:45 Tuesday (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…