Bunk’Art 2. Review by Barbara Lewis. In the just over a century since Albania became an independent country, it has been a monarchy, endured Fascist occupation and spent nearly 50 years as an isolated Communist dictatorship, mostly under the rule of Enver Hoxha. Hoxha died in 1985 and the Communist Party collapsed in 1990, heralding a turbulent transition to a market economy.
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Ai Weiwei. Review by Barbara Lewis. This book accompanies the exhibitions Ai Weiwei: The Art of Defiance at Patrick Derom Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (September 19 – November 14) and Ai Weiwei: Life – Revolt – Poetry at the Emile Verhaeren Museum, Sint-Amands, Belgium (September 21– December 13)
Drawn into your Presence. Review by Graham Buchan. This is a very interesting and, in some ways, unique exhibition curated by Jim Grover and Ruth Grover. It links three distinct periods of Christian religious imagery.
British Landscapes. Review by Barbara Lewis. In the depths of World War Two, the British government funded a project called “Recording Britain” that commissioned artists to capture landscapes and buildings at risk of disappearing.
Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam. Review by Graham Buchan. The work of a largely forgotten and unusual Victorian artist is on show at the Royal Academy. Richard Dadd (1817-1886), a product of the Academy, was held in very high regard at the start of his career and then suffered a major psychotic episode (in which he killed his father) and spent the remaining forty-three years of his life in mental institutions.
Leon Spilliaert. Review by Barbara Lewis. Insomniac and largely self-taught artist Leon Spilliaert is the master of absence, silence and solitude. His best-known evocations of emptiness are coastal scenes in his native Ostend informed by nocturnal wandering through the deserted port.
Refik Anadol. Review by Barbara Lewis. Bruges has no need of more tourists and its art hall BRUSK, which opened in May, does not share the ambition of Bilbao’s Guggenheim to put a city on the map.
Connected Worlds of Bruges. Review by Barbara Lewis. As part of the constant flow of luminaries in and out of the cultural and commercial hub of 16th-century Bruges, Henry VIII sent Thomas More there in 1515 as part of a diplomatic mission to settle trade and financial disputes. His visit to Flanders was also when More began his classic work “Utopia”.
A Red that Sings. Review by Barbara Lewis. “The red that sings” is a phrase rooted in the intellectual atmosphere of the 19th-century when scientists first grappled with the concept of synaesthesia, and poets and painters seized on it as a heightened response to the anxiety and excitement of breathless social change.
Van Dyck, The European. Review by Barbara Lewis. A lack of evidence means art historians can only speculate about the relationship between Peter Paul Rubens and his most gifted pupil Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641).
Michaelina Wautier. Review by Graham Buchan. How fantastic it is to have a substantial exhibition of a completely unknown artist; for that artist to be a woman who painted in the 1600’s; and for her work to be so assured, so accomplished and such a pleasure to experience.
Richard Dadd. Review by Barbara Lewis. A friend of the young Richard Dadd when he was one of the stars of the Royal Academy of Arts referred to his “rich voice as full of music as a joy-bell” and his “sportive humour, exciting innocent mirth”. A few years later, Dadd had stabbed his father to death during a psychotic episode. Dadd avoided hanging but spent the rest of his life locked away – first in the Bethlem Royal Hospital and then in Broadmoor.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, art, exhibitions, painting • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, painting