Category: Articles

  • Ai Weiwei: Making Sense

    Ai has a genius for incorporating pieces of everyday design into his work as a form of protest at government oppression and corruption, or as a means of questioning our cultural fixations. And where better to parade that talent than…

  • Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney

    While some might be quick to dismiss #WallaceWoofs as kitsch and gimmicky, it is a well-founded and well-grounded exhibition – and gets the lick of approval from my four-legged companion

  • Soutine/Kossoff

    Colour, gesture and expression permeate the works of Chaïm Soutine and Leon Kossoff, but this exhibition cleverly allows each artist to be seen on his own terms

  • Visionaries: Making Another Perspective

    Contemporary Japanese artists celebrate their country’s traditional ancient crafts using natural products as well as looking to the future of design

  • After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art

    Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin are at the heart of this show as it takes us on an exhilarating journey through art’s evolution from the final impressionist exhibition to the eve of the first world war, with many previously unseen…

  • Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America

    This partnership between art institutions of disparate missions and unequal standing and resources has produced a notable exhibition, in which 20 cross-generational artists address the the state of democratic values in the US

  • Retrotopia: Design for Socialist Spaces

    This groundbreaking exhibition brings together 11 countries from the former communist bloc and explores the role of design works made there during the 1950s to the 80s

  • Stefan Brüggemann: Not Black, Not White, Silver

    Spray-painted words ‘deface’ an array of surfaces, vast and small, some fashioned from expensive marble and gold leaf, in this show spanning 20 years of Brüggemann’s output. But does graffiti, once a dramatic way to put across a subversive message,…

  • Treasures of Ukraine – book review

    This book chronicles Ukraine’s rich cultural heritage even as the war with Russia threatens the very existence of its collections and the buildings that hold them, with 21 museums already damaged

  • General Idea

    An elephantine retrospective captures the madcap antics and media theorising of the pioneering Canadian conceptualists