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2 weeks ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
Three statues appear at the start of this exhibition, each associated with a different religion from the Indian subcontinent. The one in the middle, a swirl of sandstone depicting a pot-bellied dancing figure with an elephant's head, is easy to identify: he's Ganesha, one of Hinduism's most prominent gods. The serene, enthroned man to his right must be the Buddha. But their smooth-skinned companion, sculpted out of marble?
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3 weeks ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
There's not much greenery in evidence when I arrive outside V&A Dundee: grey skies, a leaden sheen to the River Tay, concrete panels cladding Kengo Kuma's waterfront building, which opened in 2018. Inside, an installation by Dutch design studio DRIFT extends the monochrome theme: 11 mechanised lights, with white shades inspired by flowers that close at night, rise and fall like robotic jellyfish pulsating in an imaginary ocean.
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4 weeks ago | 
yahoo.com | Alastair Sooke
At last! After two years of disruption, with shuttered galleries and dispiriting queues, the National Gallery is reopening in its entirety – with a swanky new lobby – exactly 201 years after it was inaugurated in a nearby townhouse on Pall Mall. For many, including me, its paintings are cherished friends.
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4 weeks ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
The expansive new Sainsbury Wing foyer ushers visitors into the gallery's exhilarating rehangAt last! After two years of disruption, with shuttered galleries and dispiriting queues, the National Gallery is reopening in its entirety - with a swanky new lobby - exactly 201 years after it was inaugurated in a nearby townhouse on Pall Mall. For many, including me, its paintings are cherished friends.
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1 month ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
The picture of the Queen is delightful, but Charles has been painted with a doddery touchThirty-four years after the late Queen Elizabeth II opened the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing, her son, King Charles III has returned to reopen it, with Queen Camilla, following extensive refurbishment. To mark the occasion, their Majesties' recently completed coronation state portraits were unveiled in the gallery's central hall. Spare a thought for Peter Kuhfeld (b.
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1 month ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
Someone at the Barbican has smelled an opportunity. The old brasserie on level two of the Brutalist complex in the City of London is now an art gallery, inaugurated by this "encounter" between Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) and the Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha (b 1962), whose monumental bronze sculptures apparently of two battered ancient deities dominated the roof garden of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018.
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1 month ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
"You are in London, standing on the second floor of Tate Modern," states the introduction to this new survey of the 62-year-old Korean artist Do Ho Suh's career. You don't say! Yet, as you wander among his installations, arranged, like buildings on a street, within a vast, open-plan gallery, this apparently superfluous reminder starts to feel necessary. Are we in London? Or have we been teleported to New York? At points, it seems, we could even be in Seoul.
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1 month ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
The Marquess of Cholmondeley has given contemporary sculptors the run of his 'doll's house on a grand scale' to create great artIn a patch of woodland on his Norfolk estate, the Marquess of Cholmondeley is singing - "La-la-la-la!" - into an enormous stone box. Perhaps the shift in seasons, evident on a mild and sunny day in March, has elated this cheerful aristocrat, dressed in a caramel sweater and olive field jacket.
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1 month ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
A gentle sense of poetry suffuses this new exhibition at the British Museum, the first in this country for more than a quarter of a century to celebrate so extensively the prolific Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). Awash with enchanting images of Japan's awe-inspiring scenery (including Mount Fuji's attractive snow-clad cone), it made me forget, for a wonderful hour or two, about all the turmoil besetting the world.
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1 month ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Alastair Sooke
Could an apathetic public be lured to a former power station on the Thames? Nicholas Serota and others reflect on an unlikely success storyTen days before Tate Modern opened in a disused power station on the south bank of the Thames, a trustee of the gallery expressed concern that nobody would find it. "He was really worried," recalls Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director from 1988 to 2017.
