Art is Comic, billed as a light-hearted response to terror, is the latest exhibition to embrace rough, industrial brickwork as the perfect backdrop for popular artists with hundreds of thousands of followers and an outwardly casual attitude towards failing politics and social injustice.
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“Matisse in the Studio” does not deliver the sensational overdoses of colour and the full-on confrontation with genius of the Tate blockbusters, but there is a place for this more digestible insight into the transformative way Matisse saw based on examining his use of “objets d’art” as inspiration.
On the whole, the curators have given the works the space they need and brought a coherent approach to displaying them in relation to each other, which provides the viewer with a largely satisfying experience.
Thomas Ovans browses an ambitious anthology of poems inspired by the artist Stanley Spencer and finds that every picture may tell several stories
Following in Fitzgerald’s Footsteps: Brian Docherty reviews Ruth Valentine’s small but politically significant and beautifully illustrated new collection from Hercules Editions
It was the Kingdom of Naples that gave Emma the chance to transform herself into an artist, society lady and skilled operator at the court of Queen Maria Carolina, wife of King Ferdinand IV, its reigning monarch.
Jenny Vuglar visits the Winifred Nicholson exhibition Liberation of Colour currently at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham (4 March – 4 June 2017)
Overlooked for centuries, her paintings were often wrongly attributed to her father, Orazio Gentileschi. In the same period her work sank to a level of obscurity equal to that one of her greatest influences, Caravaggio. His reputation was restored in the 1920’s. Artemisia Gentileschi had to wait a little longer.
Posterity remembers Emma Hamilton as the mistress of Nelson. The reality is her achievements in the society salon were in their way as brave and out of the ordinary as his naval exploits.
The cliché is that first novels are always autobiographical. Dutch writer Jeroen Blokhuis instead hides behind the biographical in his verbal portrait of one of the greatest painters his nation has produced.
Playing with ‘The Rules’: Brian Docherty considers an anthology whose poems could be viewed as case studies in ekphrasis – but also as much more than that.
Arp, The poetry of Forms is a major retrospective of an artist whose work seeks to captures abstract thought. This exhibition is contrasted by Tracey Emin’s My bed and her selection of Turner sea-scapes, that deal with a more visceral response to life.
By Fiona Sinclair • art, exhibitions, installations, painting, year 2017 • Tags: art, exhibitions, Fiona Sinclair, installations