When Rachel Cohen was a child, she tried to etch her future self in her mind. “I hoped, when I grew older, I would be able to somehow come back and revisit this version of myself and tell her what had happened.”
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A woman wheels towards a large blank canvas. In one hand she brandishes a brush, in the other a palette daubed with paint. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her fine silk dress, the lacy white fringe of her chemise curling over the cuffs.
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Zanele Muholi’s black-and-white portraits are as beautiful as they are harrowing.
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The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey.
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Man Ray was a reluctant photographer. His career behind the camera was cash-driven and he famously claimed that ‘photography is not art’.
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For a curator, coming up with an original proposition for a museum show of an artist as revered and exhibited as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) can be quite the challenge. The solution devised by the curator Aurélie Verdier was to invite audiences to “re-read” the French artist.
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The line between obsession and addiction is as thin as rolling paper. Neither are simple and both stem from absence, avoidance or — as Jenny, the dissatisfied housewife in Natasha Randall’s droll debut novel, calls it — life’s ‘marshmallow numbness’.
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There is a confidence that comes from being a part of a larger whole. And yet, group membership invites invidious comparisons: who’s getting it right?
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As the title warns us, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The way grief relentlessly nibbles away at a family. The emotional and physical torment inflicted on and by children.
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In her art, Linder tussles with the stories we choose to tell. Born Linda Mulvey in Liverpool in 1954, she emerged with her ambiguously gendered moniker in the Manchester punk scene in the 1970s.
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It’s hard to keep track of the ways in which Picasso’s 80-year career has been examined (and re-examined), but few curators attempt to cover his entire oeuvre. Picasso and Paper does so through the lens of a medium he liked to manipulate.
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I'm sitting on a beanbag in a dark room, staring at a split-screen scored with apple-green blips and streaks of light that – much like a heart monitor – record signs of life.
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Dóra Maurer’s most recent paintings are nothing if not playful. In the fifth and final room of her first UK retrospective, colours are caught mid-flight.
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This exhibition at Pallant House Gallery tells the story of a group of early-20th-century female artists in Britain who engaged in progressive art, literature and politics.
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Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread, Gerhard Richter. These may not be names that spring to mind when you think of the British Museum, but they all have work filed away in its extensive archive of prints and drawings.
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Halfway through the first-ever exhibition devoted to Lucian Freud’s self-portraits is a tiny canvas of the artist with a black eye. After getting into a scrape with a London cab driver, Freud hurried to his studio to document the effects of the blow.
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Think ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ and you picture luminous paintings of waify maidens with copper-coloured hair, loose clothing and a far-off look in their eyes. Prostitutes, mistresses, sorceresses and other ‘fallen women’ in need of masculine intervention.
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At London’s National Gallery, the first exhibition devoted to Gauguin’s portraits begins with a bang: a room of self-portraits and the announcement that ‘Gauguin was undoubtedly self-obsessed.’
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It’s only fitting that a gallery should focus on portraiture at Frieze Masters. After all, the characters who frequent this fair — and particularly its glitzier sister, a short walk through Regent’s Park — are scrutinised as carefully as the art.
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A streak of light stealing through a crack beneath a closed door. Tadpole-like raindrops wriggling down four window panes. Lois Dodd’s paintings capture the ordinary in an extraordinary way.
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