Kiefer – Van Gogh. Review by Graham Buchan. If you see here echoes of Van Gogh’s last acknowledged, doom-laden masterpiece Wheatfield with Crows (1890), then you will likely find this exhibition at the Royal Academy highly satisfying.
Graham Buchan
Here We Are, by Stephen Sondheim. Review by Graham Buchan. The production of a new work by Stephen Sondheim is a significant event in any cultural calendar.
Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300?1350. Review by Graham Buchan. This, quite simply, is a stunning exhibition. It asserts that the first half of the fourteenth century is when painting came into its own. It was now that painting, as an art form, first became something to be commissioned and acquired.
Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival. Review by Graham Buchan. Wagner divides opinion. Even amongst opera lovers there are those who cannot abide his works, whilst others elevate him to almost God-like status.
Emilia Perez. Review by Graham Buchan. A story about violence as a musical? A drug lord wanting to transition to a woman? A song by a Thai sex-change surgeon? A singer who cannot sing? A director working in a language he doesn’t know? None of it should work. But it does, brilliantly.
Open Wound. Review by Graham Buchan. Open Wound is Lee’s response to the annual commission to make an artwork to fill Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall.
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.
The Zone of Interest. Review by Graham Buchan. What qualifies a film as a masterpiece? Well, if it rattles around your mind for several days afterwards that’s a pretty good sign. The Zone of Interest does this in spades, having already chilled you to the marrow.
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.
Millet: Life on the Land. Review by Graham Buchan. If you have read the classic book on English rural life, Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, you will know that such a life, particularly before farming was mechanised, was one of unremitting hardship and poverty, and definitely not to be romanticised. The French painter Jean-François Millet rendered that sort of life in paint.
By Graham Buchan • art, drawing, exhibitions, painting, year 2025 • Tags: art, drawing, exhibitions, Graham Buchan, painting