What utility comes in venerating the stylistic minutiae of the French bourgeoisie?
Reyesβs designs pull the rug from under claims of foundational cultural difference.
McCaffrey fails to distinguish between the frame and whatβs inside it.
Does an artist get to participate in the construction of her outsider status?
The ambition of a nearly forgotten art activism group is humbling βΒ but its failures sobering.
Dislocation was once the stuff of excitement. Today, it barely recognises its own homelessness.
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?
Art matters neither to the dictator nor his opponents.
A racket not useful for sport.
Surveying Eminβs lives is like witnessing someone experience ego death, over and again.
βColourβ and βblacknessβ changed register during Lockeβs life, becoming the subject of far more explicit discourse than the pigments in his allowed.
Whatβs more 1970 than a Pop artΒ Last SupperΒ on the top of a dining table?
The only way to understand how art reflects the mind is through the aesthetic.
This edition spellsΒ ‘stasis’Β more than most, and the selectors are to blame.
Ming Wong’s retelling of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom ignores art historyβand fails to acknowledge its sources.
Everything about this show feels lazy.
Are these dreams, floral fields, or psychedelic visions?
Whatβs wrong with rights makes no right with painting.
The human mind is mimetic β all art is representation.
Man’s colours are only a small nudge of the wheel from Tretchikoffβs infamous portrait of the Chinese girl.
Biblical floods, the cometβs fall, and the odd tsunami mercilessly toss Nakaharaβs protagonists about.
Hawkins’s paint reveals that her studio was no crime scene.
Catch the wrong end of the spectrum and forever remain obscured.
An exhibition about⦠cherries confuses Chekhov with Nabokov.
βSkyβ, βroofβ, β31β, 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, heβll 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 someoneβs messy bedroom most nights of the week.
Desire breeds introspection. Desire breeds mistrust.
How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museumβ didacticism and the audienceβs dulled expectations? Jhaveriβs ambitious review of Indiaβs testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the periodβs Wikipedia entry is full of social tension, abuses of power, even civil unrest. The…
Sense finally returns only outside the gallery.
GabaldΓ³n reinvents the pastoral for the Instagram generation.
Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and itβll 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.
Itβs too early for a funeral, yet thereβs no other reprieve in this commodity cult.
Rhis show is the kompromat in an art generationβs archive.
The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.
If only they were smaller, PiΓ±era Balloβs paintings would be a great hit in the shopping centre gallery your ex-army uncle just opened in Surrey. Heβs gambling with the familyβs savings, you condescend, but so is Pace with their show. The market for βyoungβ artists is crashing. Who in London, precisely, would buy 6-meter-wide Cuban…
A palpably stubborn nature unites Huddlestonβs women
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 galleryβs bright lights doesnβt lift their mystery.
The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.β
There is no βtoo muchβ in this fantasy meme game.
For all this bravado, Rooneyβs compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction.
This project relies on layers of gimmicks and, sadly, they show through Awuah-Darkoβs thick palette knife impasto.
Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntieβs bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick.
Rahmanβs 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.
Pakui Hardware, Maria Terese Rozanskaite, Inflammation at Lithuanian pavilion Venice β β β ββ
One of the novelties in Venice is the artwork that looks good but on reflection isnβt.
Ababriβs 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-writerβs hand loses art historyβs bet.
Urgessaβs figures are contorted in love, death, or merely life.
This is the fodder of DeviantArt and the last yearβs AI engines.
Can an installation be too site-specific?
Death by debris falling from building faΓ§ades is an artistβs occupational hazard.
The lightness of the painterβs gesture cries out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of his doubt.
Oil paint applied so thickly that itβs a miracle the canvases donβt bring the gallery walls down with them
Rothkoβs 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?
Pageβs tent, brain, and the cathedral take the same form for a pretty good reason.
Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA.
Whatβs 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 workβs lamentable inadequacy.Β
In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.
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