I went to the BM to see the exhibition of art from the medieval west African kingdom of Ife (now in Nigeria). Ife is most famous for some extraordinarily high quality naturalistic heads cast in brass or copper, although the exhibitions also has various other pieces, including terracotta heads in the same style, jewellery, animal pieces and [...]
Posts tagged with ‘exhibitions’
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Chris Ofili at Tate Britain
22 February 2010 – 10:33 am
Chris Ofili is a contemporary British artist who is, I suppose, best known for using balls of elephant dung in his paintings. Indeed I’ve been well-disposed towards Ofili for years, ever since The Daily Mail or some other self-consciously philistine rag decided to be terribly outraged when he was nominated for the Turner Prize. It’s [...]
‘The Real Van Gogh’ at the Royal Academy
3 February 2010 – 7:20 pm
Not that rubbishy fake Van Gogh that other galleries having been fobbing us off with, then.
The exhibition’s full title is ‘The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters’. The inclusion of some of Van Gogh’s letters supposedly provides a bit of biographical-intellectual-psychological context for the paintings. Which is an interesting idea, but calling it [...]
‘Mini Picture Show’ at the Bankside Gallery
19 January 2010 – 3:48 pm
I was given a membership of The Art Fund for Christmas. For those who don’t know, The Art Fund uses membership fees and other donations to help British museums and galleries to buy art for their collections; membership gets you discounted or free entry to a range of museums and galleries. So that was a [...]
Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the NHM
26 November 2009 – 5:12 pm
I made my annual trip to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum. Which was, as always, well worth a visit. Obviously I recommend you visit it in person, because little jpegs don’t do the pictures justice, but if you can’t do that, you can see all the pictures online [...]
‘Points of View’ at the British Library
10 November 2009 – 4:09 pm
I just visited the slightly uninspiringly titled ‘Points of View’ exhibition at the British Library, which is an exhibition of nineteenth century photography. I’ve been very impressed with the BL’s temporary exhibitions since they moved to the new site; they obviously have an absolutely staggering amount of stuff in their collections and they do a [...]
‘The Sacred Made Real’ at the National Gallery
27 October 2009 – 2:44 pm
To quote their own blurb:
‘The Sacred Made Real’ presents a landmark reappraisal of religious art from the Spanish Golden Age with works created to shock the senses and stir the soul.
Paintings, including masterpieces by Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán, are displayed for the very first time alongside Spain’s remarkable polychrome wooden sculptures.
By ‘polychrome wooden [...]
‘Pop Life’ and ‘John Baldessari’ at Tate Modern
16 October 2009 – 4:43 pm
Two superficially very different exhibitions at Tate Modern at the moment. One is Pop Life: Art in a Material World; to quote the blurb:
Andy Warhol claimed “Good business is the best art.” Tate Modern brings together artists from the 1980s onwards who have embraced commerce and the mass media to build their own ‘brands’. Pop [...]
‘Moctezuma — Aztec Ruler’ at the British Museum
9 October 2009 – 4:43 pm
So, I went to see Moctezuma at the BM this week. And yes, if you’re wondering, Moctezuma II (or even more correctly, according to Wikipedia, Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin) is the man I always thought was called Montezuma: the ruler of the Aztec empire when Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors conquered Mexico. Except that apparently they weren’t ‘Aztec’ [...]
Futurism at Tate Modern
18 June 2009 – 3:06 pm
I went along to the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. Having sometimes commented on the excellence of past Tate exhibition websites, I have to say they’ve fallen down on this one — nothing to see at all. And they also didn’t have any exhibition booklets, so I have no aide-mémoire at all.
EDIT: they now have [...]
Van Dyck at Tate Britain
1 May 2009 – 3:27 pm
I went to see the van Dyck exhibition at Tate Britain the other day. I can’t say I was very excited by the prospect, but I’m a member and it seems silly to miss exhibitions I can get into for free. Perhaps especially if you’re English, Anthony van Dyck seems like the most establishment figure [...]
‘Sickert in Venice’ at DPG
4 March 2009 – 4:53 pm
A exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery of Walter Sickert’s paintings from Venice. I’m not a fan.
Darwin and wildlife photography at the NHM
10 December 2008 – 1:23 pm
I went along to the Natural History Museum to visit a couple of exhibitions: Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Darwin.
The WPotY exhibition is an annual treat; some years are better than others, but it’s never less than enjoyable. My long-term gripe is that the overall winner is almost always a portrait of a large charismatic mammal (usually one of [...]
‘Byzantium 330-1453’ at the Royal Academy
27 November 2008 – 1:33 pm
The latest blockbuster exhibition at the RA is Byzantium 330-1453. It’s a big show, but then it does survey a millennium’s worth of art from a big empire.
It’s odd; I think most people who have even a general interest in history and culture have some knowledge, however sketchy or inaccurate, of classical Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and [...]
Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery
10 November 2008 – 5:02 pm
Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian is an exhibition that does exactly what the title the suggests: it’s a selection of portraits by van Eyck, Titian, Raphael, Holbein, Botticelli, Dürer, Cranach and their contemporaries. Room after room of rather solemn looking people — no smiling for portraits back then — wearing their most expensive-looking velvets [...]
Flemish paintings at the Queen’s Gallery
1 November 2008 – 5:48 pm
I went yesterday to see Bruegel to Rubens — Masters of Flemish Painting at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. I wasn’t really sure what to expect; you have to love Bruegel, but I’ve always found Rubens easier to admire than to enjoy.
It turned out to be just the one Bruegel on show, with seven or [...]
Francis Bacon at Tate Britain
14 October 2008 – 7:55 am
I went to see the Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain today. And I enjoyed it, if enjoyed is the right word for work which is quite so bleak. He was an atheist who made a habit of painting crucifixions; and without the theology, a crucifixion is just a man being tortured to death.
So there were lots of trapped, screaming, [...]
Rothko at Tate Modern
7 October 2008 – 3:35 pm
I went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern today. The show is of his ‘late series’: the centrepiece is the Seagram Murals (i.e. the group of dark Rothkos which have been in the Tate for years, plus some related works that normally live in Japan), but there are also some other groups of works [...]
Hadrian at the British Museum
11 September 2008 – 9:26 pm
Today I went to the BM’s exhibition about famous wall-builder Hadrian. Its not just the wall, though; he also built the Pantheon, as well as a staggering villa complex at Tivoli. He inherited the Roman Empire from Trajan when it was at its biggest and actually reduced its size slightly, abandoning some of the less manageable extremities and [...]
Divisionist Painters at the National Gallery
25 July 2008 – 10:47 am
Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910, to give the exhibition its full title. Divisionism is a style of painting where the image is built up of lots of individual brushstrokes of pure colour which, ideally, merge together for the viewer but create a more luminous effect than if the colours were blended on the palette.
If [...]
British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain
16 July 2008 – 11:52 am
The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting is an exhibition of ‘the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930’. So the East here is Cairo, Jerusalem and Constantinople, and not Bombay, Singapore or Nagasaki.
You can hardly touch on the subject without a name-check for one [...]