Category: Articles

  • Marcin Maciejowski: ‘I would be happy to always paint my wife’

    The Polish portrait artist reveals the stories behind some of the paintings in his latest exhibition, Unsettled Matters – from his best friend’s wife, who didn’t really like him, to the girl in a YouTube video of a George Michael…

  • Bryan Kneale – interview: ‘I always liked the idea of being totally in charge of the shape’

    From shrapnel from a second world war German bomb to early editions of Studio International, Royal Academician Bryan Kneale talks about the inspiration behind his work and his latest show covering half a century of output

  • Michel François: A Frozen Eagle Melting on the Theatre of Operations

    In his latest exhibition, Belgian multimedia artist Michel François presents fragmented sculptures that toy with our desire to understand 

  • FB55

    This show, while not shedding new light on Francis Bacon himself, does paint a picture of a very restrictive period for gay men and thus highlights the artist’s bravery in producing such provocative work

  • One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works

    The artist’s 60-part work, based on the Great Migration of black people from the south to the north of the US from 1915, is shown here in its entirety. Shifting between the personal and the monumental, it tells the story…

  • Mathieu Lehanneur: ‘If you say, I’m an industrial designer, a chair appears in people’s minds … I would like to push the boundaries’

    Paris-based designer Mathieu Lehanneur talks about combining nature, science and technology in his creative practice, which ranges from a Wi-Fi station in Paris to a rather unusual cafe in Massachusetts, to working with Huawei, the world’s third largest mobile phone…

  • CUBISM 2.0: Post-Cubism in Europe

    This rare and beautiful exhibition presents 18 works by artists from France, Hungary, Russia and the US who shared the aims of cubism as applied to landscape, still-life and quotidian life

  • Martín Ramírez: Forever

    Martín Ramírez, an “outsider” artist from Mexico, who spent most of his life in US mental institutions, created enduring images of his native land and his life before confinement, bringing the importance of emotional experience to the forefront of art-making

  • Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection

    Cats came to Japan from China in the sixth century, aboard ships carrying Buddhist texts. An enchanting new exhibition at the Japan Society presents these frolicsome felines in a distinctly Japanese cast, in ukiyo-e paintings and woodblock prints by Edo-period…

  • Maripol, Clare Stephenson and Zoe Williams: Spring / Summer 2015

    This exhibition of work by Maripol – Polaroid artist, fashion designer and the woman who styled Madonna’s early image – along with sculpture by Clare Stephenson and video by Zoe Williams deliberately blurs the line between artforms

  • Lee Ufan

    Channelling the principles of Japan’s Mono-ha Group, Lee Ufan’s latest collection of reductive paintings and sculptures attempts to reanimate the association between the human and the natural

  • Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art

    The ancient Greeks are held up as the epitome of reason and measured beauty. But, as the British Museum’s current exhibition demonstrates, you don’t need to look far beyond the rationality and philosophical musings to reveal chaos and hidden passions

  • Painting Now

    Painting Now is a survey of contemporary painting, historically the most important form of the visual arts, but challenged by the advent of photography in the 19th century and pronounced dead by Marcel Duchamp when he exhibited his readymade urinal.…

  • The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky

    This exhibition of the art of the Plains Indians reminds us about the native US population’s story of struggle and survival, as European conquerors took over their ancestral lands

  • Anita Witek: ‘I am opening up a gap between image and reality’

    As she was installing her first UK solo exhibition, How to work live better, Austrian artist Anita Witek talked about how she has used magazines to create photomontage while subverting their content

  • Selective Memories

    Paris comes to west London as the Griffin Gallery hosts an exhibition of works by the students of l’École des Beaux-Arts. So what is it like to study at a French art school? 

  • Iman Issa, Lexicon

    In her latest exhibition at the Rodeo Gallery, London, Cairo-born artist Iman Issa takes existing artworks that attempted to capture the zeitgeist of their time and creates new versions that have resonance for a contemporary audience

  • Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

    Fashion it may be, in that every item in this Alexander McQueen retrospective is for wearing, but art is its soul. This show, which charts the trajectory of the designer’s meteoric life is stunning, glorious and unmissable

  • Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market

    Full of impressionist masterpieces, this exhibition looks at how art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel struggled to convince a sceptical public of the merits of these works and, in doing so, shaped today’s art industry

  • Florian and Michael Quistrebert: Visions of Void

    This beautifully drafted exhibition by the Quistrebert brothers is focused, enthralling and atmospheric, with hypnotic videos and paintings that intend the viewer to feel rather than think

  • Jason Rhoades, Four Roads

    From smoke machines to salmon roe, Jason Rhoades’s art of the bizarre and the ‘gleefully vulgar’ at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre will entice and excite. Unless you are under 18 – in which case you won’t be allowed in

  • David Best: ‘My favourite material is people’

    Known for the temples he builds for the Burning Man event in Nevada, David Best has this year brought his idea to Derry~Londonderry. He talks about how his art helps people to deal with grief

  • Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s

    A beautiful exhibition of the Ukrainian avant garde’s theatre design from the 1910s and 20s is establishing a sense of identity for the art of a nation that has been split between its historical ties to the union with Russia…

  • 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience

    Surround Audience includes some strong works, but the New Museum’s Triennial 2015 bombards you with pieces that compete for attention, so while video- and sound-based works hold their own, quieter, more conceptual pieces are easily overlooked