John Craxton: A Modern Odyssey. Review by Barbara Lewis. John Craxton managed to emerge from school without passing a single exam, not even in art. Instead, charm, daring, connections, irrepressible talent and luck served him better than any merely formal qualifications.
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St John’s Hospital in Bruges, dating from the 12th-century, has a history of healing focused on the soul rather than the body. By the time Hans Memling arrived in Bruges in the second half of the 15th-century, that meant the hospital had a clear role for the man who was described at the time of his death in 1494 as “the most accomplished and excellent painter of the whole Christian world”.
Ray Harryhausen: Special Edition Collection. Review by Alan Price. Ray’s unique imaginative insight into his beautifully made models is a great validation for the artistry of stop motion: one artist’s sole painstaking control over his creation – all those hours, in solitude, crafting the finally realised results.
Artist Descending a Typewriter. Review by Clare Morris. If you asked Michael Paul Hogan how to write a book on contemporary art, he would probably reply, ‘On a typewriter – a 1928 Royal Portable to be precise.’ In ‘Artist Descending a Typewriter: Nine Essays on Contemporary Art’, armed with the same typewriter, he takes us on a remarkable journey through the lives and creative output of an array of exciting contemporary artists.
The Avant-Garde in Georgia. Review by Barbara Lewis. Every two years, Belgium and neighbouring countries host Europalia, a four-month international arts festival to celebrate one country’s cultural heritage. Until early next year, the latest biennale focuses on Georgia, a resonant choice given the conflict nearby instigated by Russia.
ReClaim. Review by Barbara Lewis. A thought-provoking display of jewellery-cum-art that leaves us with a renewed awareness that recycling cannot reverse the harm we cause.
Frans Hals Exhibition. Review by Barbara Lewis. Frans Hals (1582-1666) painted portraits, “nothing, nothing, nothing but that,” wrote van Gogh to fellow painter Emile Bernard, but that they were “worth Dante’s Paradise and the Michelangelos and Raphaels and even the Greeks”.
CONFESSIONS OF A HIGHLAND ART DEALER: Kate Ashton reviews a memoir full of hope and persistence by Tony Davidson
Sarah Webb: A Contemporary Realist Abroad. Review by Barbara Lewis. Nashville, birthplace of bluegrass and a Mecca for country music-lovers, is also a city with 18 colleges and universities, some of which are known for their strong views on art. These have included, we’re told, an opposition to the figurative that frustrated Nashville-born contemporary realist Sarah Webb.
Claudette Johnson’s exhibition Presence. Review by Jenny Vuglar. Johnson first came to attention in 1982 while a student at The Polytechnic Wolverhampton. Britain’s ‘black cultural renaissance’ began, not in the famous institutions of London but in the Polytechs of the north: Wolverhampton, Trent, Sunderland.
Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas. Review by Graham Buchan. It is clear from this retrospective of Sarah Lucas’s thirty-five year career that an obsession with tits, toilets, cigarettes, shoes and chairs informs much of her work.
Extérieurs. Review by Barbara Lewis. Annie Ernaux in 2022 became the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after producing a body of work that charts her progress from working class origins, feelings of shame during her years being educated at private school that she was not sufficiently bourgeois, to her career as a teacher, then full-time writer.
By Barbara Lewis • art, exhibitions, photography • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, photography