It’s hard to get away from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in London right now, but you don’t have to be a fan of royalty to find the National Portrait Gallery exhibition of The Queen: Art and Image (until 21 October) interesting. There are photographs of her posed throughout her reign, some of the most familiar…
Sometimes design can still feel modern nearly a century later, and certain items that date from the Bauhaus era are startlingly fresh, such as the tubular steel chair by Marcel Breuer from the mid-twenties. The movement is associated with architecture largely because Mies van der Rohe was at the helm when the Nazis closed it…
As something of a companion-piece to the Tate’s fabulous Picasso exhibition, the British Museum is showing the full collection of Picasso Prints: The Vollard Suite (until 2 Sept), a series of 100 etchings the artist completed in the mid-1930s. It is one of only a few public institutions to possess the entire series, which became…
Rappers write rubbish lyrics, right? No, that’s not a tongue twister, but it’s pretty much what I thought until I happened upon Kate Tempest, and her play Wasted which is on at the Roundhouse Studio Theatre until next Saturday. It’s some of the most inspiring, energetic and poetic new writing I’ve seen in a long…
What to do when the rain is lashing down on a Sunday? Head over to the V&A Museum where for another five Sundays at 2pm there is a free screening of a play filmed live in performance. These screenings celebrate the 20th anniversary of the National Video Archive of Performance. Remember the Theatre Museum, which…
Perhaps you are either for Damien Hirst or against him. I thought I fell into the latter category. Hirst seems to have singlehandedly turned art into a commodity on a production line scale, removed from any form of skill or craft. I wasn’t expecting much from his retrospective at the Tate Modern (until 9 Sept),…
What is quintessential British design? The Mini, the E-type Jag, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, the Brompton Bike? The post-war Olympics of 1948 were called the Austerity Olympics. Sixty years later, and Britain is once again feeling the pinch. The V&A is hosting a look at British Design 1948 – 2012 between the two Games (until…
Gillian Wearing is a YBA (Young British Artist), she went to Goldsmiths and she won the Turner Prize in 1997, two years after Damien Hirst, but that is where the comparisons with him end. The Whitechapel Gallery has ‘a comprehensive survey’ of her work on until 17 June which shows an artist constantly challenging herself,…
Attacks, murder, shooting, crack, porn, paedo, kills – all words that feature in the newspaper headlines that form the basis of Gilbert and George’s 2011 London Picture series on show at two of the White Cube galleries (Mason’s Yard and Bermondsey) until 12 May. Headlines are by their very nature shocking and sensationalist, and these posters…
A major retrospective of Italian artist Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan is on at the Tate Modern until 27 May. Like his compatriot Burri, he is associated with the Arte Povera movement and the show opens with work he made from everyday objects in the late Sixties. He was soon exploring other ideas in his art,…
London Letter 