Reviews
The last day, of the Last Supper in Pompeii, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. A mosaic-related foray, but much, much, more. This small but exquisitely formed show closed on the 12th January, so little to add beyond a few haphazard thoughts. Paul Roberts, the curator of the show and head of the antiquities department, […]
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
Philadelphia is a place of edifices, of great architecture domestic and imperial in scale, from “Second Empire” to neo-classical of the grandest style. It’s also a place of quotations; the place is littered with sayings by Benjamin Franklin, inventor, revolutionary, founder of the University of Pennsylvania, coiner of meaningful admonitions. Franklin was also one […]
It is the premise of conceptual art, presumably, that artists conceive of a project they can then get others to do. Looking across the Great Hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery at John Flaxman’s white marbled statue of Scotland’s bard, glorifying Robert Burns as something heroic and pure, one feels Douglas Gordon’s vision of […]
Fly 2016 – Visual Art Scotland
There is no longer an art college in Scotland that teaches a dedicated ceramics degree. Which makes the ceramics on show at this year’s Visual Art Scotland winter exhibition more emphatically interesting. Susan O’Byrne graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in design and applied art in 1999. Her wall of fantastical animal heads in the […]
Art Market
Collect: craft heaven at Somerset House
Collect begs the question: where does craft begin, and art end? Or craft end, and art begin? And what are either of them anyway? The show has moved from the Saatchi Gallery to Somerset House after ten years. Somerset House is a far more engaging and established venue, though navigating the various floors and wings […]
Friend of Peter: Andrew Cranston
The Hawick painter Andrew Cranston, 50, was for twenty years a lecturer at Gray’s art college in Aberdeen, until 2017. Three or four years ago dealer Richard Ingleby visited his Glasgow studio and was stunned by what he found. A book on him has got glowing words from Peter Doig, the Scots […]
IF ART sales need confident buyers it was not the most auspicious week for the London Art Fair. Theresa May’s Brexit speech was reverberating during the VIP opening while Friday brings the strange new world of President Donald Trump. Soaring rents and rates in central London have seen two important venues for Scottish art close their doors in the past year, amid […]
Fly 2016 – Visual Art Scotland
There is no longer an art college in Scotland that teaches a dedicated ceramics degree. Which makes the ceramics on show at this year’s Visual Art Scotland winter exhibition more emphatically interesting. Susan O’Byrne graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in design and applied art in 1999. Her wall of fantastical animal heads in the […]
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