Categories for Reviews

Zen in the Art of Archery

Eugen Herrigel’s beautiful insight into Zen is also problematic. Does it still have the power to teach?

Review of “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” at Tate Britain

There is nothing commemorative about this remarkably diverse exhibition, which attempts to trace the activities of a number of London-based... View Article

Memory’s Work: The Art of Toba Khedoori

The appeal of Toba Khedoori’s work lies, perhaps, in the enigmatic precision with which her images are made. It lends... View Article

Mark Dion at the Whitechapel Gallery, London

For our modern age – prone to jump to the defence of science, of data-driven evidence – there is something... View Article

David Milne at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

The Canadian artist David Milne was born in 1882. By all accounts he was a modest man with a leaning... View Article

Gursky likes to print his images on very large scale paper. Think Monet’s water lily series at the Orangerie, Paris. So as you approach a work it fills your horizontal field of vision. As well as enveloping you, the technique also has the effect of encouraging you to forget about edges of the picture, to disregard what lies beyond, and to overlook the very deliberate cropping that Gursky undertakes.

Review of “Degas to Picasso: Creating Modernism in France” at the Ashmolean

Modernism has a habit of returning, of seeming pertinent as a bearer of explanations, long after its paradigms have been... View Article

Review of ‘The Human Document: The Photography of Persuasion from 1930s America to Present Day’ at Mead Gallery, Coventry

There are few social-documentary photographs more well known, nor more heavily plundered for significance, than those of rural America from... View Article

Review of Barbara Walker’s ‘Shock and Awe’ at mac Birmingham

In the victory parades in Paris that crowned the end of the Second World War, the Allied Nations agreed that... View Article

Review of ‘Oppenheimer’ by Tom Morton-Smith, RSC, Swan Theatre

How do we depict the past? One way is to travel along the byways of hindsight, to remember with knowing... View Article

Review of ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’ by William Maxwell

In Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves, the wistful Bernard reflects “I have lost friends, some by death […] others... View Article

Review of “BBC Four Goes Abstract: When Art Broke Free”

Does it matter if an abstract painting is hung the wrong way up? This question is not as facetious as... View Article

Review of ‘Candide’ Adapted by Mark Ravehill, RSC, Swan Theatre

Anyone who is familiar with Voltaire’s satirical classic Candide will recall the calamitous, if not frankly pernicious, series of trials... View Article

Review of Marat/Sade at the RSC

In his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double (Le Théâtre et son Double) , French dramatist and actor Antonin... View Article

Review of “False Warnings” by Rita Gabrowska, at Gallery 150

There was a time when abstract painting was all the rage. Perhaps never quite de rigueur, but in a more... View Article

Mischievous Folk: “What the folk say” at Compton Verney

Compton Verney has raided its own collection of folk art in an attempt to open up its collection to new... View Article

Review of public artwork: “Spring” by Oliver Barratt

Oliver Barratt’s sculpture, Spring, is a bright and fulsome tribute to the influence of water. Its signature is the uninterrupted... View Article

Review of ‘Since I fell for you’ by Susan Collis at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

The events that happen inside buildings often leave behind marks, like a little scar on a wall where a ribbon... View Article