After initially preventing him from traveling to the UK, the British government has granted Syrian-born, Sharjah-based artist Thaier Helal’s second visa application, allowing him to attend the opening of his first solo show in London.
London
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Secret London Crime Museum May Open for First Time in 150 Years
London’s infamous and off-limits “Black Museum” of macabre crime artifacts may finally open to the public as the Metropolitan Police faces budgets shortcomings.
Posted inArt
Epic Done Right: Anselm Kiefer in London
LONDON — Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective comes at an odd cultural moment.
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Mixing Classical and Gay Male Teen Desire
LONDON — In the Natural History, Pliny the Elder discusses the origins of sculpture by telling the story of Butades of Corinth, the first Greek modeler of clay.
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Martha Rosler Tackles the Problem of Representation
LONDON — In the ’70s, photographer (and videographer, and rigorous cultural critic, and possible genius) Martha Rosler brought a critical eye, politically and philosophically, to the medium’s seductive pretenses of objectivity.
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The Man Who Feted the YBAs Before Their Fame
LONDON — Genius, unskilled manager, talented art dealer, troublemaker: the figure of Joshua Compston is one of inconsistencies and contradictions, even 18 years after his death.
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The Ruins, Rubble, and Architecture of War in Art
The architecture of war is more accurately the ruins it leaves behind, but there are structures to this destruction. An exhibition at the partially reopened Imperial War Museum in London is looking at both the rubble and the building of war.
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Pyschedelic Plans for a Post-Apocalyptic Paris
Out of apocalyptic ruin, a Parisian street-sweeper imagined his city rising again with staggering spires grasping up to the skies. These artistic “blueprints” by Marcel Storr were long secreted away, but recent exhibitions have brought this restless new world into the public eye.
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Artists Reflect on Death’s Eternity and Ephemerality
HONG KONG — You have to hand it to Richard Harris, whose collection is currently on view at London’s Wellcome Collection in an exhibition of some 300 works titled Death: A Self-Portrait. As far as collectors go, this is a show that gets right to the core of why a collector collects. It is an answer Robert Hughes skillfully extracted from Alberto Mugrabi in five minutes flat: Immortality.
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Gallery Photo Policies Versus the Aura of the Artwork
BRIGHTON, UK — If a picture is worth a thousand words, Nihilistic Optimistic is worth about a million. The new show from Tim Noble and Sue Webster at Blain Southern is super photogenic, and therein may lie its appeal.
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A Home That Makes the Old Masters Come Alive
Art always has some sense of place, whether it is the result of where it was created or the setting it is placed in, but art as a place can be something truly transporting that goes beyond installation to become a world unto itself. I’ve seen shades of this in two current shows, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s Stray Light Grey that subverts Marlborough Gallery into urban backrooms and Andrew Ohanesian’s The House Party at Pierogi’s Boiler Room that brings suburbia to Brooklyn, and even in the ongoing, heavily atmospheric theatre experience Sleep No More with its beautiful 1930s time travel. All of these have led me to think on one of the most engaging and curious of these kinds of art experiences: the Dennis Severs’ House in London.
Posted inOpinion
Damien Hirst Brands a London Restaurant
World-renowned artist Damien Hirst created two art works for a new London restaurant that opened last week, Tramshed.
