Featuring nearly 70 works from the latter half of the nineteenth century by artists who worked in France, this exhibition includes landscapes and portraits as well as paintings of interiors. The highlights include Caillebotte’s ‘Skiffs’, Degas’ ‘Woman Ironing’ and ‘Before the Ballet’, Manet’s ‘The Tragic Actor’ and ‘Rouiviere as Hamlet’ and Gauguin’s ‘Haystacks in Brittany’. Also shown are Monet’s ‘Women with a Parasol’ and Vuillard’s ‘Woman Sitting by a Fireside’. The works are on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Around Impressionism: French Paintings from the National Gallery of Art
September 30, 2008 at 4:01 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: art, french, gallery, impressionism:, national, paintings
Corneille
September 24, 2008 at 4:00 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: corneille, domestic, flights
As a founder of COBRA, the late-1940s movement involving artists based in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, Liège-born Corneille (real name: Guillaume van Beverloo) became identified with bold experimentalism. Featuring 35 of his works in several media, this exhibition shows him using garish colours to engage in a bizarre exploration of the links between sex and nature. Most of the paintings here date from the 1990s, proving that the 77-year-old has a creative vigour that many younger artists would envy.
Life in Wartime and Post-Wartime
September 18, 2008 at 4:01 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: life, post-wartime, wartime
Japan’s defeat in World War II changed the country, and Tokyo in particular, in ways that are difficult to imagine for people in the West. Razed to the ground by allied firebombing, Tokyo has been rebuilt from scratch over the last 50 years, and the post-war American occupation meant that Western culture got its first real foothold in Japan since the country’s doors opened to the rest of the world at the end of the 19th century. This collection of pictures and photographs drawn or taken by local people during and shortly after the war reflects a way of life that has all but vanished in just half a century.
Neurotic Realism Part 2
September 16, 2008 at 3:59 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: 2, neurotic, part, realism
Neurotic Realism Part Two: David Falconer’s sculpture resembles an ant hill but, close to, you realise that the elegant stack is made of casts of myriad tiny corpses. Dead mice lie piled up like the victims of a large-scale disaster. From here on everything is beautiful, though sometimes strange. Dexter Dalwood’s paintings of interiors are plausible but unlikely. Based on mental rather than physical images, the paintings are like distillations of dreams. The contrast between Dalwood’s fantasies and Tom Hunter’s photos, taken in tower blocks on Hackney’s Holly Street estate, could not be starker. Enlarged almost to life size, they make you realise you could almost touch both walls of these cells. In Peter Davies’ most recent painting zig zag shapes negotiate inumerable panels switching colour, scale and pattern as they traverse the disjunctive space. Based on diagrams issued by UNESCO to help third world countries build ploughs and pumps from scrap, Mark Hosking’s painted steel structures are Anthony Caro look-alikes. The irony of these aestheticised objects seems tinged with cynicism about first world indulgences.
Yo-Yo Ma + Jeffrey Kahane
September 4, 2008 at 4:02 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: +, jeffrey, kahane, ma, yo-yo
Remix culture is usually more associated with the downtown DJ scene than with Bach and Carnegie Hall, but Yo-Yo Ma – fresh from entertaining President Clinton and Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji at the White House – has decided to inject a little fresh air into Bach. Together with pianist Jeffrey Kahane, he presents ‘The New Goldberg Variations’ by Peter Schickele, Christopher Rouse, John Corigliano, Richard Danielpour and others, based upon the same aria as Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. Classical music cognoscenti are reserving judgement on the experiment. And for those who find the new work a little too innovative, the acclaimed cellist also performs cello sonatas by Bach and Rachmaninov.
GMEA
September 3, 2008 at 4:01 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: fun, gmea, international
The initials stand for the Albi-Tarn Electroacoustic Music Group, a six-man folk music band from southern France. GMEA have recorded several popular Provençal folk tales from native speakers of the Occitan language from Nice, the Auvergne and Gascony, and improvise freely over the pre-recorded tapes. Their instruments of choice range from ones invented by themselves, called concurbiphones, to traditional reed instruments and sophisticated electronic equipment. They are here as part of a massive Provençal music festival being held in Catalonia over the next three months.
