ART REVIEWS
From a distance, Matteo Massagrande’s works could be photographs. The rendering of the tiles, the wooden frames of the windows and doors and the exterior seascape and foliage have an extraordinary precision and detail to them. Yet this Italian artist from Padua is anything but a hyper-realist figurative painter. There’s something not quite right about his paintings.
Continue reading “Matteo Massagrande – A Grand Tour”
In so many aspects of our culture – fashion, film, all forms of art in fact – the human body, particularly the female form, has become sexualised. To many feminists, the idea of the male gaze, for example, where men gain pleasure from looking upon a passive female subject, is symptomatic of male oppression and female objectification.
Continue reading “We Sing the Body Electric – Gallery 46”
Confusion, paradox, contradiction, illusion. These are the kind of abstracts that American artist Joshua Hagler addresses in his new London exhibition, Chimera. The title is a reference to the Greek mythological beast that sported the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent. It has come to symbolise something that is hoped for but impossible to achieve.
Continue reading “Joshua Hagler – Chimera”
Female photographers, particularly those concerned with landscape, get very little gallery time compared to their male counterparts. So it’s refreshing to see Flowers Gallery inviting nine women to exhibit their work together, using examples from larger series. It’s above all a very thoughtful exhibition that works on many levels.
Continue reading “Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape”
There’s a certain cinematic quality to much of Emma Stibbon’s work. Her landscape paintings, prints and drawings that have earned her an international reputation, depict environments in a state of turmoil and flux. Erupting volcanoes and retreating glaciers and ice shelves, are meat and drink to her. Her new solo exhibition, Fire and Ice, conveys a sense of drama, not only with what you see in the pictures themselves but also with the way in which they were made. Her subjects show that apparent monumental and permanent geological structures can often turn out to be fragile at the hands of nature and mankind.
Continue reading “Emma Stibbon – Fire and Ice”
“When you paint, you should feel empty and calm and the painting will come out automatically, full of energy, full of life.” So says 64-year-old Chinese artist Mao Jianhua whose first UK exhibition, The Spirit of the Valley has opened at London’s Saatchi Gallery.
The exhibition comprises a series of 48 landscapes in ink on paper rooted very much in the ancient Chinese tradition of Shan Shui. They reflect the philosophy of universal harmony and immortality.
Continue reading “Mao Jianhua – The Spirit of the Valley”
There’s a scene in her son Nick Willing’s BBC documentary, timed to coincide with the opening of this exhibition, in which Paula Rego tells that the first thing her future husband said to her at a party in the 1950s was to ask her to take her knickers off. She complied. It seemed to encapsulate so much of the essence of this remarkable show at MK Gallery – explicit, sexually charged and compliant.
Continue reading “Paula Rego – Obedience and Defiance”
You will have to have been stranded on a remote desert island over the past couple of years not to be aware of the danger to our planet and to our wildlife of plastic pollution. TV programmes such as Blue Planet have regaled us with shocking images of how plastic is choking the life out of sea creatures, and the food industry is almost falling over itself now to reduce plastic bags and packaging to help reduce our dependence on the material.
Continue reading “Caught in the Net – Erub Arts”
Like many sculptors, Emil Alzamora is fascinated and preoccupied with the human form, a form that everyone, from any culture, can relate to on many levels. His new exhibition at London’s Pontone Gallery is dominated by figurative sculptures that are both anonymous and androgynous, being allegories and metaphors for the human condition.
Continue reading “Emil Alzamora – Expanded Present”