How can twenty-first century Pan-Africanism foster solidarity between people who do not exist? 126 years on from its beginnings, the movement is even more fantastical than Du Bois, Fanon, or Glissant imagined.
Rouy’s mid-mortem group portraits betray timidity when faced with their own image.
The social model of disability meets the Romantic notion that consumption makes the artist a truth-seer.
This acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures. it is they that make it great.
What would it take for an artist to take control of the means of aesthetic production?
A racket not useful for sport.
“Colour” and “blackness” changed register during Locke’s life, becoming the subject of far more explicit discourse than the pigments in his allowed.
What’s more 1970 than a Pop art Last Supper on the top of a dining table?
The only way to understand how art reflects the mind is through the aesthetic.
This edition spells ‘stasis’ more than most, and the selectors are to blame.
Ming Wong’s retelling of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom ignores art history—and fails to acknowledge its sources.
Are these dreams, floral fields, or psychedelic visions?
What’s wrong with rights makes no right with painting.
The human mind is mimetic – all art is representation.
Man’s colours are only a small nudge of the wheel from Tretchikoff’s infamous portrait of the Chinese girl.
Biblical floods, the comet’s fall, and the odd tsunami mercilessly toss Nakahara’s protagonists about.
Hawkins’s paint reveals that her studio was no crime scene.
Catch the wrong end of the spectrum and forever remain obscured.
“Sky”, “roof”, “31”, a mantra turns into paint.
There is no trace of the visceral in Saville’s gentle pencil studies, for example.
This show of nearly thirty artists makes a pitch at many extremes, failing to reach any.
Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.
Oh, what is it to be a woman in a world of nothing but!
Byrne has a type. Or rather, he’ll paint you into one.
A Platonic hierarchy of forms rules this enigmatic exhibition.
This menagerie comes with no humanly comprehensible challenge.
Interpreting a tale this grotesque, ugly, and venomous will take thousands of years
Muenzer’s messy show bedroom actually is someone’s messy bedroom most nights of the week.
How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museum’ didacticism and the audience’s dulled expectations? Jhaveri’s ambitious review of India’s testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the period’s Wikipedia entry is full of social tension, abuses of power, even civil unrest. The…
Gabaldón reinvents the pastoral for the Instagram generation.
Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone
Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.
The circus is in town, its acts are the infrastructure of contentment.
It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.
Rhis show is the kompromat in an art generation’s archive.
The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.
If only they were smaller, Piñera Ballo’s paintings would be a great hit in the shopping centre gallery your ex-army uncle just opened in Surrey. He’s gambling with the family’s savings, you condescend, but so is Pace with their show. The market for “young” artists is crashing. Who in London, precisely, would buy 6-meter-wide Cuban…
McGurn has created the visual equivalent of elevator music.
With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic.
Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.
The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.”
There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.
For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction.
This project relies on layers of gimmicks and, sadly, they show through Awuah-Darko’s thick palette knife impasto.
Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntie’s bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick.
Rahman’s zine hand makes this make-believe explicit but not plausible.
Derrien has his audience discussing the nature of paint drying out loud.
Borremans toys with his subjects, his audience, and with art history.
This project outs Rauschenberg as a propagandist if not an outright Fed.
The garish colours which may have carried the story in cinema here are unfitting of their new medium.
But either the curator or the artist should have known better.
One of the novelties in Venice is the artwork that looks good but on reflection isn’t.
Ababri’s paintings for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life.
Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.
Czwartos’ painting proves little and his sign-writer’s hand loses art history’s bet.
Urgessa’s figures are contorted in love, death, or merely life.
This is the fodder of DeviantArt and the last year’s AI engines.
Death by debris falling from building façades is an artist’s occupational hazard.
The lightness of the painter’s gesture cries out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of his doubt.
Oil paint applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them
Rothko’s abstractions are said to have induced tears in viewers overwhelmed by abstraction. Staring at the sun here, however, barely causes blindness.
Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.
There will be no women when this spell breaks. And no need for magic, either.
Who could have thought that these mantras would turn into rote?
Page’s tent, brain, and the cathedral take the same form for a pretty good reason.
What’s left of the show are stage props that feed adolescent imaginations with false memories of the long-finished party.
These works are as garish as they are fun to look at.
The carpet dealer gallerist’s zeal reveals the work’s lamentable inadequacy.
In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.
Westerik catches his figures in deep contemplation in front of the mirror, in the gynaecologist’s chair, or even mid-orgy.
This exhibition mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery she enjoyed during her lifetime.
Aj Tjoe’s paintings could make great scenic backdrops to a David Attenborough documentary on the life of wild rodents
Forrester’s project is timely when foundational concepts like ‘mother’ and their ‘as-though’ counterparts are readily confused.
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