What is Quality in Art? Review by Barbara Lewis. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – or so they say. For Alejandro Vergara-Sharp, art historian and senior curator of Flemish and Northern European Paintings at the Prado in Madrid, art appreciation can be more much objective than that if your standard is quality.
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Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! Review by Graham Buchan. Jantjes earliest work on show here is a range of screenprints where he expresses his rage, not just at the oppression in his own country, but in other colonial territories such as Algeria, Ghana and Mozambique.
Expressionists – Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider. Review by Graham Buchan. The Blue Rider was a diverse group of avant-garde artists from a variety of countries and backgrounds who gathered together in Munich pre-First World War to share their beliefs and enthusiasms.
The Last Caravaggio. Review by Graham Buchan. Sometimes it is more rewarding to spend extended time with one great example of an artist’s work than to work through a whole exhibition. This is the opportunity being offered by the National Gallery’s free show The Last Caravaggio.
Poem-Object and Objective of the Poem: Lisa Kelly reflects on possible new interactions between word and material
Poetry review – GOD’S LITTLE ARTIST: Rosie Johnston considers Sue Hubbard’s perceptive and affectionate poetic biography of the painter Gwen John
Poetry review – TOOK MY WAY DOWN, LIKE A MESSENGER, TO THE DEEP: Edmund Prestwich admires the intricacy of Linda France’s sonnet sequence linking the paintings of Leonora Carrington with the experience of lockdown
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.
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.
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.
The Shape Of Things. Review by Barbara Lewis. Damien Hirst is famously fascinated by death and decay. For him, they are inseparable from an affirmation of life, we understand in the Pallant’s major exhibition, the first of its kind, of more than 100 practitioners of British still life – or, as the French would say, “la nature morte”.
By Barbara Lewis • art, exhibitions, painting, year 2024 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, painting