1:38pm
Haunting portraits of twins, emasculated mothers, patients and the famous make for an eerie yet emotional experience at the Whitechapel Gallery’s current exhibition, ‘Alice Neel: Painted Truths’.
This is Alice Neel’s (1900–84) first major retrospective, which brings together more than 60 works spanning the nearly seven decades of the American artist’s career, divided into thematic sections. Though the works reveal a variety of evolving styles and subjects, ‘Painted Truths’ does what it says on the tin. Neel’s portraits, almost always set in the interior, are unforgiving and brutally honest – the sick and elderly are deathly pale; children are...
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1:23pm
The run of ‘Andrea Zittel: Clasp’ at London’s Sadie Coles HQ has been extended until 14 August. Visually and physically engaging, with just enough hints of the real word, ‘Clasp’ is a series of multi-media works exploring the notion of experience, which the artist believes can be broken down into four separate modes: the pure, the representational, the ideal and the physical. In layman’s terms, this includes large paintings depicting geometric shapes and diagrams, indicating some kind of coded system of belief, superimposed on the Californian desert landscape where Zittel lives and works. Described as ‘new age iconography’, they bring...
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6:13pm
“It’s that time again, when the art world braces itself for a spurt of bold ideas for what is surely the premier public art spot in Britain.”
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London
On 19 August 2010, new proposals and maquettes by those shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth will be unveiled at the Crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, which will undoubtedly spark debate over the value of public art, yet again. The shortlisted artists are Elmgreen & Dragset, Katharina Fritsch, Brian Griffiths, Hew Locke and Mariele Neudecker.
From 1841 to 1999 there was nothing on the Fourth Plinth...
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1:13pm
Marlborough Fine Art is currently hosting Paula Rego: Oratorio, the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since 2006. The centrepiece is the exhibition’s namesake, a mixed-media triptych (see above) that Rego created for her exhibition with Tracey Emin and Matt Collishaw at the Foundling Museum, London, earlier this year. Larger in scale and with more physical detail than her controversial Abortion series of 1999 – which lead to Portugal’s referendum on the legality of abortion – the works aggressively confront issues of female genital mutilation, or ‘circumcision’. Accompanied by several preparatory drawings, large conté works on paper and 19 etchings...
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2:32pm
Sargent and the Sea presents Sargent the marine painter throughout chronologically ordered rooms of the Sackler wing in the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Beginning with works influenced by his family holidays to the Brittany and Normandy coasts, the exhibition takes us through a biographical tour of Sargent’s relationship with the Sea, including his adult trips to Capri, return to Venice and his late-life studies of various wharfs.
For the main part, the exhibition demonstrates Sargent as a master of white and light, focusing on the sea and sky, with the occasional formal or collective portrait, but always using...
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Now in its 30th year, the London Park Lane Arms Fair returns with its annual array of fine arms and armoury. Elsewhere in the capital, impressive surveys of Freud, Hirst and mid-century British art can be found.
George Gilbert Scott described the dome as ‘the noblest of all forms’, and it appears as a powerful symbol in secular and religious architecture throughout history. On the island of Malta, however, the craze for dome-building reached astonishing heights.
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