The Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates its 165th anniversary with a rather radical shift in its gallery space: the Exhibition Road Quarter. Opening the V&A up to visitors from the pedestrianised Exhibition Road side of the museum, this marks the V&A’s largest architectural intervention in over 100 years, creating a new public space for London…
The National Gallery’s very first acquisition was a collaboration between Michelangelo and Sebastiano, The Raising of Lazarus. It’s a huge canvas, with the biblical subject of Christ raising a man from the dead depicted in vivid, glowing colours. A fine start to a great collection. Creative collaboration then is not such a modern concept, and…
NUSHIN ELAHI went to see a ground-breaking exhibition in Paris, Icons of Modern Art – The Shchukin Collection which reunites of one of the great art collections of the early twentieth century. One of the world’s most magnificent Impressionist collections is in Russia. The reason for this was a rich yet self-effacing man, Sergei…
What started out as a small offshoot African art fair at the time of the Frieze has quietly grown and placed a very big African footprint on this London show. From a few rooms on one side of Somerset House four years ago, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair now fills almost the entire building. What…
Did you know Van Gogh was one of the first visitors to the newly opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, visiting the Rembrandts just before he moved to Paris? Or that the Nachtwacht was deliberately placed at the end of the gallery of honour in the altar position of a church? Somehow the Rijksmuseum feels to me…
If Georgia O’Keeffe for you is simply animal skulls on desert plains and sensual full-blown flowers, you are in for a surprise. Tate Modern presents a huge retrospective of the core six decades of her life (until 30 Oct), showing how the two strands of abstraction and modernism ran throughout her life. It is the…
It’s quite an audacious project: 83 canvases of identical size, each portraying an individual looking at the viewer from the same chair with the same backdrop. If the artist were anyone other than David Hockney, it certainly would have bombed. As it is, while some portraits seem to capture the uniqueness of the sitter, they…
What do painters put up on their walls? Is it only their own work, or do they also collect other artists, to admire and inspire them? The National Gallery continues its series of instructive exhibitions with this intriguing question in Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck (until 4 Sept). Sweeping across five centuries, it…
By Nushin Elahi This May I was delighted to be one of an international panel of judges for the Cramum Prize, an Italian contemporary art prize in Milan. Visiting the city and talking to the organisers, contestants and others in the arts, I found a vibrant drive to create a new landscape for art in…
It’s a numbers game, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (until 21 Aug). Now in its 248th year, it is the only open submission show in the UK, and the largest in the world. Twelve thousand submissions get whittled down to 1200 entries, two thirds of which are from Joe Public. Last year’s exhibition was a…
It looks like a who’s who of British modern art today. In fact, it is Cornelia Parker’s long-term installation at the Foundling Museum, tucked away in a secluded corner of Bloomsbury where you can stroll through the museum and see the quirky, often funny, sometimes downright silly collection of Found (until 4 September) objects that…
It seems the stuff of myth. Cities lost under the sea, now revealing their buried treasure. But this isn’t Atlantis, and it is not myth. The Nile delta over the past twenty years has given up secrets that have lain buried for thousands of years. Cities that were written about in the ancient world are…
Sinister life-sized cheese graters, a wooden cabinet filled with coloured glass perfume jars in the shape of hand grenades, a Fifties kitchen interior that hums with the electricity which lights up certain parts of it – these are some of the familiar objects that Mona Hatoum casts in a new light in her retrospective at…
Tate Britain seems to offer rather pedantic treatises on art, in an attempt to showcase its collection. Conceptual Art in Britain 1964 -1979 (until 29 August) is exactly this – a dull and boring collection of works from a largely self-conscious era where British artists agonised over the nature of art, rather than just creating it.…
Celebrated in Norway, Nikolai Astrup (1880 – 1928) is barely known elsewhere, largely because all his work remains in his native country. The Dulwich Picture Gallery presents this landscape artist and innovative printmaker in Painting Norway (until 15 May). Astrup’s work has none of the depressively dark Scandinavian atmosphere the recent Munch show had.…
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