Reviews on The Review

It’s business as usual at the White House. The joyous uproar that greeted Barack Obama’s inauguration, the happy incredulity that accompanied America’s decision to install its first black president, is beginning to subside. Obama is busy dealing with an economy on its uppers; the colour of his skin is less an issue than his ability [...]

Francis Bacon is presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition’s ten chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline of organised religion.  Although Bacon regularly objected to any narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the story of [...]

There’s the upstairs and round and about to walk through of Finland, Japan and (most interesting to me actually) the UK, but it happens to be this gallery first, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia (places I’m not sure exactly where they are) – and immediately I’m given pause and, well, transported. And not least by this medieval [...]

Poor Mark Rothko. An intensely private individual whose brooding canvases are enough to reduce one to existential uncertainty (why is that painting moving?), has been rendered banal by over-reproduction of his works – a framed, poster-sized reproduction of sunshine yellow and burnt orange hanging on the wall is as predictable an element of a dinner [...]

Five years ago the V&A attracted bumper crowds for its Art Deco exhibition, with sellout crowds flocking to see the eclectic mix of everything from footage of Josephine Baker dancing to radio sets the size of an average sideboard. Using the same template of a mix of everything from cars to posters, the museum has [...]

It was a bright sunny Saturday for a change, this summer, and the main car park was full at Bretton Hall, home of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The terrace of the main restaurant was full, too, and the wasps were out.

Sophie Ryder’s Lady Hare sculptures are oddly ambivalent things. Barry Flanagan’s series of hare sculptures [...]

SHADOWLAND
 
The artist states that her work, “deals with what is un-seen. Although I operate primarily within the terms of a landscape image, my work concerns aspects of social and personal description as well as the the transience of things. My images are in a sense sets for a potential drama, a scene of anticipation. As [...]