The Latest Visual Arts Reviews From The Arts Desk
There are plenty of big names to conjure with in this weeks visual arts coverage on The Arts Desk
, from Vermeer to Burra to Warhol, not to mention the one major art prize that always gets people talking.
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has pulled off a rather special exhibition in Vermeers Women: Secrets and Silence, acquiring four superb examples of the painters scant surviving works, and augmenting the show with works by many other Dutch masters of the visual arts including Pieter de Hooch and Nicholaes Maes. The theme of the show is, of course, women, and specifically the role that middle-class women in domestic contexts have in these paintings of 17th century Dutch life, something which had come to symbolise safety and stability in the years after conflict in the country. Vermeer may be the chief draw here but all the works are glorious - intricately detailed and revealing about the lives they depict and captivating and seductive in their own way so much so that Fisun Guner crowned this her exhibition of the year.
Meanwhile Howard Male was delighted with Andrew Graham-Dixons treatment of one of his favourite painters in the BBC Four documentary I Never Tell Anybody Anything; The Life and Art of Edward Burra. Unlike many such programmes, he thought, this one was about the painter, not the presenter, providing an in-depth and illuminating biography of the man and a shrewd exploration of his work. Despite one or two differences of opinion, Male thought it a triumph.
As an arbiter of the best contemporary visual art, the Turner Prize often divides opinion. But Fisun Guner was confident that 2011 is a sterling year, in terms of both the artists involved and the shows superb setting, outside of London for once and inside the Baltic gallery in Gateshead. Of the artists themselves: George Shaw, who paints the same Coventry housing estate in meticulous, melancholy detail, was Guners previous favourite, but seeing his more recent works here, which are a little samey, she was left with doubts. She was more drawn to Martin Boyces garden-like installation which cleverly riffs on the sculptural works of 1920s Modernists Joel and Jan Martel and stays with you long after youve left it. Hilary Lloyds LCD screen installation, showing sliding images of a tower block, the Moon, a shirt etc, left very little impression and seemed all surface. This and Karla Blacks works of crunched-up paint-spattered Cellophane and paper were both given more style and intrigue by the Baltics savvy display than they have demonstrated elsewhere, and they benefit greatly from it, but Boyce is still the one to beat according to Guner.
When it comes to Andy Warhol we think weve seen it all before but as the gallery of David McCabes photographs show, put together by Mark Hudson to coincide with the exhibition The Factory: Warhol and his Circle at Proud Chelsea, wed be wrong. Taken of Warhol and his entourage in and around the Factory throughout 1964-65, McCabes images, and McCabe himself, in conversation with Hudson, show a different side to the era-defining artist, and reveal the extent to which Warhol was constantly cultivating his own image with the utmost care, from who he was photographed with to how he did his hair.
And finally, Alexandra Coghlan from The Arts Desk found herself disappointed by Joseph Steeles site-specific work, BIBLE, timed to chime in with the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The artist spent months rewriting the New Testament during his convalescence from an illness, inserting his own name whenever Jesus was mentioned, and the resulting six-metre manuscript is laid out in the crumbling disused church at the centre of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. But whether it was the artists statement read out in the rather deflating visitors centre or the prosaic sight of the work itself, the effect was underwhelming and just not quite radical enough.
by: Steve Alexander
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