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,…
Jeremy Deller’s art doesn’t fit easily into an art gallery. In 2004 he won the Turner Prize for his quite extraordinary project of re-enacting one of the bloodiest battles during the miners’ strike of the 80s, something he had seen as a teenager on telly. The Battle of Orgreave, or A Blow to One is…
Ben Nicholson may have connected Picasso’s Cubist period with their coded images of their lovers, but he was even more taken with the abstraction of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, as a small show at the Courtauld (until 20 May) reveals. Mondrian║Nicholson: In Parallel looks at their friendship during the unsettled decade before the war. They…
Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain until 15 July is an extensive and scholarly study of Picasso and his influence on modern British artists. It explores the rather chilly reception Picasso received in Britain, while looking at seven key British artists for whom he was an important stimulus, among them David Hockney, Henry…
Spring has come early in London. The Royal Academy is ablaze with all the colour and life of a new season; the air is heavy with blossom, leaves form a tunnel and a clearing in the woods takes on a green hue. David Hockney’s A Bigger Picture (until 9 April) is not billed as a…
A comedy about Stalin? It sounds outrageous, and in fact it is. Dark, bitter, savage, and very clever, Collaborators is a new play by John Hodge about the Russian playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, who was given a poisoned chalice by the regime when asked to write a play celebrating the life of Stalin. The time was…
London Letter 