Category: Articles

  • Book review: Fold out futures

    Vol. 1, Chicago project Irene Barberis and Karen Forbes. Melbourne: RMIT Press, 2007 Dr Irene Barberis teaches and researches at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has recently collaborated in Chicago with Professor Karen Forbes of Edinburgh College of Art…

  • An Englishman in Tasmania – Nicholas Blowers

    Nicholas Blowers was born in Chelmsford, England in 1972. He studied locally, and then Fine Art at Southampton, graduating in 1994. In Europe he remains largely undiscovered, but he has already made an impact both in Sydney and Tasmania, where…

  • Photographing Nepal from the Inside Out

    Nepal in Black and White: Photographs by Kevin Bubriski Rubin Museum of Art, New York 14 March–13 October 2008 On 14 March 2008, the Rubin Museum of Art, a venue dedicated to Himalayan arts and culture, opened two exhibits centred…

  • New Tent Architecture – book review

    Philip Drew London: Thames & Hudson, 2008

  • The Whitney Biennial 2008

    6 March – 1 June 2008

  • Peter Doig

    A mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain is enough to cement the reputation of any artist, or else open them up to a critical lashing. Going on the evidence of his best works, Doig deserves his accolade, despite the impression that…

  • Gathering into gospel order: the Shaker approach to design

    A consideration of Shaker-made architecture, furniture and commercial wares – items of remarkable beauty, durability, economy and practicality – inevitably leads to one conclusion: the story of Shaker design is inseparable from the Shakers’ identity as a distinct cultural group…

  • The portrait sculpture of Celia Scott

    Alan Colquhoun. Celia Scott. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008.

  • Papunya painting: out of the desert

    National Museum of Australia, Canberra. 28 November 2007-28 February 2008

  • China Design Now

    Victoria and Albert Museum, London 15 March–23 July 2008

  • Lucas Cranach

    Royal Academy 8 March-8 June 2008 Catalogue: Bodo Brinkmann (ed).Cranach. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008

  • Searching for the Dragon of St George Street

    Earl Cunningham (1893-1977) or ‘The Dragon of St George Street’, as he was called by residents near his Over-Fork Gallery in St Augustine, Florida, left home at 13 to make his way in the world. He spent much of his…

  • Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography

    Hayward Gallery, London 7 February-13 April 2008 Questions about the nature of representation have dogged the medium of photography since its conception. For some, a photographic image quite simply represents a moment. It is a record of what has passed.…

  • Choreographing Cranach

    Artist Douglas Gordon has been on record recently as enthusing over the paintings of Lucas Cranach, no less (now on show at the Royal Academy). Following last year’s ‘Adam & Eve’ at the Courtauld, Gordon became increasingly taken with Luther’s…

  • The fountain of relief

    It is intriguing to be reminded that Duchamp’s famous work ‘Fountain’, around which sanitary perfection the crowds have been eagerly jostling at Tate Modern, is in fact a duplicate of the artist’s original. This is because the original, chosen by…

  • Lost master of the universe

    What has surprisingly not been much commented on in all the valedictory tributes to the late film director/producer Anthony Minghella was his brilliant visual sense, as opposed to his dramatising skills. All his major films are extremely, prolifically stunning in…

  • Ministers come and go

    The typical political hype that caused the last UK culture minister to announce that ‘Britain was on the verge of a “new Renaissance”‘ as a justification for a proposed shift in subsidy policy has gone off like a damp squib.…

  • Non-doms arise and fly

    This may not be the moment to pity the plight of the ‘non-dom’ art lovers. But the effect of Messrs Brown and Darling’s heavily clunking attempts to penalise them has had the direct effect of creating a climate of withdrawal…

  • Book review: The Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922-1932

    Richard Pare and Jean-Louis Cohen. Introduction by Phyllis Lambert New York: Monacelli Press, 2007 This remarkable survey was synchronised with an exhibition of the same title presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from July to October 2007.…

  • Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions

    The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 12 February-11 May 2008 Catalogue: Pierre Rosenberg, Keith Christiansen. Poussin and Nature. New Haven, CT, New York: Yale University Press, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

  • Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape

    National Gallery of Australia, 14 March-9 June 2008 Catalogue: Christine Dixon, Ron Radford, Lucina Ward, 2008

  • Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty

    Fourteen years after Derek Jarman’s death, this exhibition, together with a season of films at three cinemas across London, focuses attention on an artist whose passionate avowal of politics, sensuality, experimentation and vision makes his work as relevant now as…

  • Mars Collects! The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art: Barbican Art Gallery, London

    The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art: Barbican Art Gallery, London 6 March–18 May 2008

  • Art & Today

    Eleanor Heartney London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2008 Art & Today is the fruit of the decade spent by the author as contributing editor to Art in America and Artpress. Her previous works include Postmodernism (Movements in Modern Art)…