Posted by Official Review
Fred Cuming is an absolute master of colour. I'd defy you to find any artist working today who can incorporate such a range and subrtly of colour into their paintings. I'd say his colours are more inventive than the impressionists and can rival Braque. Within this his paintings also have an atmosphe...
Posted by Natasha Hall
There is so much to see in this exhibition, which can be described as an inspiring imaginary landscape of interrelated paintings, sculptures and installations. The complexity of the visual and conceptual interconnections, the bright colours in the works and the melodic sounds of pinball machines ...
Posted by Official Review
What you’ve got to give Charles Saatchi is the consistency he has in his choice of art. It is a brand - there’s always an element of unsettling surprise, maybe a hint of disgust and certainly something that might just tip you over the edge and make you completely insane if you were havin...
Posted by Official Review
For some reason I expected the show Repre 2 - by a group of nine artists that share a common vision to capture and depict reality - to be purely about representing the human form, but refreshingly it wasn’t. There were landscapes and a giant moon, as well as huge faces made from material. &...
Posted by Official Review
Repre are delighted to announce their second exhibition, Repre 2. The show will take place on the weekend of the 13 & 14 April at Silwex Studios, Quaker Street, London E1 6SN with the private view on Friday 12 April 6-9pm. Please email info@repreart.co.uk to be added to the guest list as capacity is...
Posted by Official Review
Man Ray manages to add an imaginative element to each of his portraits - maybe it’s that surrealist, dada background - but he seems unhappy just to snap the person, there has to be an idea, a route to explaining or expressing more of the person in every photo. Le Violon d’In...
Posted by Natasha Hall
The Private View of Anthony Frost´s exhibition at Beaux Arts in Cork Street, was packed with people animated in vibrant discussions responding to the colourful paintings.The artist himself was surrounded by friendly faces and welcoming embraces. He was often fanning himself in an attempt to ...
Posted by Official Review
What a relief! An exhibition where you don’t need to read the explanation on the wall before you know what the work is supposed to be about. It’s all there for you in the painting. Lictenstein has left nothing that needs to be explained or based on a post-modernist philosophy - it’...
Posted by Official Review
An inspirational exhibition which commences with an artwork by Leo Villareal entitled Cylinder II (2012). It is described in the exhibition booklet as featuring ´light and movement, composed, like a musical score....orchestrated in such a way that they create endlessly changing patterns and sh...
Posted by Official Review
´Panta Rhei´ is a 57 x 50 cm oil painting, on a found painting by Keith Tyson. The original painting was a scene of a sailing boat and was found in a second hand shop, which the artist has painted over with a contemporary harbour scene. ´In that little Panta Rhei painting where I h...
Posted by Official Review
It's easy to forget that Picasso did have a derivative phase - he didn't just appear producing purely original and revolutionary work. Take the first room of this show with Toulouse-Lautrec type pictures with no real focus. They have much more traditional values in them and are essentially copies of...
Posted by Official Review
The exhibition The Bride and the Bachelors (Barbican Art Gallery, London, 14 February – 9 June 2013) examines one of the most important chapters in the history of contemporary art. This is the first exhibition to specifically explore Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968)...
Posted by Official Review
Frieze LondonPress Release16 October 2012 Frieze London 2012: Energetic Atmosphere Equals Strong Sales At the close of the tenth edition of Frieze London, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, galleries report strong sales and high levels of energy in t...
Posted by Official Review
Frieze MastersPress Release16 October 2012 Frieze Masters 2012: Overwhelming Acclaim and Strong Sales at the Inaugural Edition At the close of the first edition of Frieze Masters, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, admiration was expressed by galleries, collector...
Posted by Official Review
Entering Freize London - the heart of contemporary art - right after going around Frieze Masters with it’s museum quality works was frankly weird. Not only did the floor seem more uneven, but so did the quality of the work. I could have spent a couple more hours at Frieze Masters as each piece...
Posted by Official Review
Wow! This art fair is good, really really good - I’d expected to see some great examples of modern art and old masters but I hadn’t expected all the other eclectic works on offer here from Egyptian statues to Indian Miniature paintings to a collection of boomerangs. ...
Posted by Official Review
As soon as you step out of the lift you are surrounded on all sides by colour, crashing and washing over you like a luxurious wave of visual sensuality. One of the people at the bank said that all the dark portraits of the founders of the bank had been removed and replaced with this burst of light. ...
Posted by Official Review
I enjoyed going to this show more than I have enjoyed going to lots of shows recently. It had a really good feeling of variety to it and really got me thinking about the kind of works I make - it inspired me for some reason. Maybe as it’s not some dry big gallery exhibition you could still fee...
Posted by Official Review
As a rule I never usually allow myself to take more than three or four contact cards per show, but during my visit at Slade I could not help myself, eventually leaving with 10 business cards of artists whom I was interested in. The Goldsmiths show was ok; there were some works of very...
Posted by Official Review
This show has torn up my view of the Pre-Ralphaelites. Instead of being bored by the neurotic detail of these paintings I’m now wooed by it as if these works were weird ‘retina-display’ visions; and instead of finding the languid women cheesy there’s a feeling of people tryin...
Posted by Official Review
There's colours you don't quite know in this show, but you want to see them again and again - it's like eating an oyster and that flavour you can't quite put your finger on - you want to try it again to try and see if you can get closer to identifying it Take Monet's painting Geese in the Brook -...
Posted by Official Review
I must remember not to read the white sheet of doom when I go to exhibitions. It's too easy to wander in, grab the sheet and read a short description about everything you will see with an explanation about how it reveals certain things about Cocaine and the drug trade in Mexico - you find yourself s...
Posted by Official Review
Landscape is constantly in motion and changing over time; from the rapid movement of a wave, the flutter of a leaf, the subtle drift of a cloud, and the apparent solidity of a rocky outcrop. Casey writes about the challenge for a painter to Ěcontain something as overflowing as landscape within the v...
Posted by Official Review
This exhibition is heavily authored. The explicit intent is to re-locate Munch – popularly (and literally, with The Scream) the posterboy of fin-de-siecle symbolism – as a twentieth century artist, less post-Impressionist as pre-Expressionist. It is an intent with little rele...
Posted by Official Review
There is something troubling about enjoying photography. Photography seems too easy – capturing rather than recreating, not worthy. So, to re-establish our cultural pride, we split photography into journalism (intriguing for capturing a place or time) or art photography (beautiful but no...
Posted by Official Review
Popularly, when people think of Kusama, they think of polka dots and phalli. Both were in evidence at this comprehensive retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern. However, their infectious superabundance was kept in check by the strict chronology and even-handedness of the show, charting ...
Posted by Official Review
This summer, the Dulwich Picure Gallery is exhibiting a set of four large-scale statues by Philip Haas. Each one represents a season and is inspired by Guiseppe Arcimboldo's renaissance paintings in which fruit, vegetables and plants combined to form a human portrait. Exhibited in...
Posted by Official Review
The summer exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is "Andy Warhol: The Portfolios" and consists of 80 works from the period 1962-1984 when Warhol worked almost exclusively on the silk-screen printing method. Marilyn It may seem surprising to have such a modern artist i...
Posted by Official Review
OK so I’m in The Other Art Fair which means you probably think my review will be a bit biased - it may be, but not much. The show is great - and really is a perfect spot to pick up some quality art at a very decent price. But there’s two things about the show that I really like....
Posted by Official Review
It's a bit like being in Alien or the Matrix, to suddenly find yourself surrouded by this sea of crackling white noise TVs with cables lunging down into their innards from the ceiling - this is the best installation I've seen in a long while and it's only on for one more day (22 April) so if you can...
Posted by Richard Starbuck
Hirst famously said he would never show at Tate Modern, only dead people show there. Is Hirst dead? I don't think he is dead, I saw him on the telly with Noel Fielding the other day, he was very much alive. It is very hard to judge the show whilst trying to ignore all the ridicule and up ro...
Posted by Official Review
There's a real pleasure in looking at these paintings. You can glide up and down the lines and swing back down the scratches and then shift and jump with the blocks of white that almost shift you through time like a layered flickering flim. Then you can walk back and let your eyes fly right acr...
Posted by Official Review
It's the Affordable Art Fair which is always fun. If you fancy buying something or just heading out to the fair for a bit of entertaiment here's our pick of what to look for. In no particlualr order: Gorgeous paintings by Fred Cuming RA can be found at Manya Igel Fine Arts - this ...
Posted by Official Review
The weird thing about this exhibition is that I felt both intrigued and distanced as I was looking at it. And I really did look and try to become engaged, and the more I looked the more it intrigued me, well sort of. I wanted to look at these huge and beautifully produced photographs before...
Posted by Official Review
As soon as you enter you’re surrounded, and the paintings and the space are both so vast that it feels like the pictures are above you as well as all around you. You see and feel these massive and essentially black and white images that seem to ripple with pattern and emblazoned across each im...
Posted by Official Review
Now to be honest I wasn’t too sure what to expect when I was asked to review The South London Black Music Archive by Barby Asante as I knew there would be no paintings or sculptures to sink my teeth into. The show consisted of old t-shirts, magazines, ticket stubs and record sle...
Posted by Official Review
Do you want to take a trip with Alice down a rabbit hole and look at the world through a looking glass, so that it looks just slightly bigger and slightly different - then head on down to the Hugh Mendes ‘Obituaries’ exhibition in Shoreditch. The exhibition consists of small, be...
Posted by Official Review
Legend has it that when Ben Nicholson first visited Mondrian’s studio he didn’t come away with the memory of any particular painting, instead he left with an atmosphere - that the studio was the kind of place where Saints would live. This superb show manages to capture a great deal of th...
Posted by Official Review
This is not only the best Picasso show that I’ve seen in a long time, but it’s probably the best selection of Ben Nicholson paintings that I’ve ever seen together. I was really, seriously pleasantly surprised as not only are there loads of Picasso’s that you would normally on...
Posted by Official Review
Who would have guessed that the small and quirky magic realism paintings that Freud painted in his early career would presage the huge and almost violent nudes he went on to paint. This is one of the best Freud shows I’ve seen as it lulls you into a false sense of security with the gentle, lyr...
Posted by Official Review
Do you want to see some exquisite paintings with extraordinary and imaginative colours? Then this is the exhibition you should go to. I remember a gallerist saying to me, “How can you be imaginative with colour,” well this is the answer. It’s especially interesting to see ...
Posted by Official Review
The first room of the exhibition took my breath away, and then the next room, and the next room and the next room. As soon as you walk in the colours of the paintings just vibrate off the canvas as a life force - its like Hockney has put together this complete vision of existence and colour. ...
Posted by rhian williams
When you go in to the exhibtion and the first painting you see that strikes you is Capatin America vs The Rest of the World. The painting measures about 23ft in length and 5f high and is a maze of illustration and imagination which is constructed into a solid piece of work that stands out, eve...
Posted by Official Review
Revisiting Bermondsey Street to see Kiefer - by Robin MasonWe woke up this morning and decided to go to Bermondsey Street to see the Anselm Kiefer show at White Cube (Mistero Delle Catterali). We rented a studio in Bermondsey Street back in the late 1980's. Then the area was full of semi derelict wa...
Posted by Official Review
Overall I enjoyed this year's fair - but as can often happen it all felt a but underwhelming at the beginning. Maybe it's just because there's so much to look at that it's difficult to decide where to start, but once you find something you like, you begin to get into the vibe. It migh...
Posted by Official Review
So does this show live up to the hype? Yes, yes, yes! With so much written about this exhibition and queues wending their way around the National Gallery the big question is was it going to actually be any good when you got inside. Even celebs were busting to get in with gossip that Jeremy Irons had...
Posted by Official Review
Ice ice baby! This show is so cool that it almost feels like there's a foot of ice between the viewer and each painting. I can't help feeling that Ellen Altfest is just too scared to actually paint a whole person - which is a symptom of the current art world, the terror of being humiliated for just ...
Posted by Official Review
As soon as you enter you're surprised and relaxed by the sound of birds, it strikes you even more than the numerous Christmas trees that have been put up inside this gallery as part of a superb installation and group show. But what's striking about the trees, even more so thinking back abou...
Posted by Official Review
If you can make it to this exhibition before it closes you must. This is an absolutely unmissable show, I'd been waiting years, literally, to see some of these beasts in the flesh - and like all great art shows, or gigs, it wasn't what I expected, but I certainly wasn't disappointed. When I...
Posted by Official Review
This exhibition is absolutely stunning. First and foremost I'm an artist and it makes me want to get back into the studio and start experimenting and painting straight away. Seriously do not miss this exhibition what ever you do. You know the show is going to be good even from the first roo...
Posted by Official Review
You can't deny that this is a great spectacle and the huge film screen at the end of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is really cool and it seriously makes the place look stunning. But the question is whether the film is any good? The film is essentially all chopped up clips of mountains, snails ...
Posted by Official Review
Face it most people can't bear to watch film in an art gallery - as you could see from the person I saw wander into the room and walk straight back out again when they saw it was a film. The three people lurking in the auditorium when I entered stayed a moment and wandered off and didn't wait for th...
Posted by Official Review
This is one of those big fancy Tate shows that you could walk around in about 5 minutes and wander out of thinking little more than: "Nice rabbit." That was certainly the reaction of some of the other people there on the Wednesday afternoon I visited, and there weren't that many of us either, we onl...
Posted by Official Review
Shock! Shock! There were paintings, this year, lots of them! Abstract paintings as well. OK so Frieze is normally full of more radical art and that does make it more fun than a lot of art fairs, but this year the weirdness knob had been turned to low and there were lots of pics. My favourit...