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1 week ago | 
msn.com | Laura Cumming
Continue reading More for You
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Laura Cumming
A tree towers upwards in Kensington Gardens, slender but unimaginably strong, grey boulders perched like vultures among its branches. Another gestures directly to the sky, twigs spreading in eloquent appeal. A third can be seen at great distance, shattered as if by lightning, its broken glory shining bright cold in the sunshine.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Laura Cumming
A mesmerising film by the British artist Ed Atkins (b.1982) shows a pianist performing – with excruciating difficulty – what seem to be arbitrary chords in some mysterious sequence. Straining and sighing, pausing and deliberating, he appears to be guessing the notes. Yet every strike is right, or so the visible relief running through his face and body appears to confirm. Except that the pianist is not real, and nor are his emotions.
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1 month ago | 
msn.com | Laura Cumming
Continue reading More for You
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Laura Cumming
Star/Steer is a masterpiece from 1968 by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). What you see can be simply described. The word “star” appears a dozen times, screenprinted in silver on deep grey. They graduate down the page in a swaying column. Right at the bottom is a 13th word, “steer”, as if tethering – or guided by – all these descending stars. Each star is like an instance of itself, glimmering out of a fog, and the winding pattern irresistibly evokes starlight on rippling water.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Laura Cumming
In the autumn of 1908, Edvard Munch admitted himself to Dr Daniel Jacobson’s private clinic in Copenhagen to be treated for acute alcohol-induced psychosis. Over the next eight months, Jacobson helped him give up nicotine as well as drink. Of the stream of images Munch painted in the clinic – never paralysed by any setback – one is a towering portrait of the doctor that appears about halfway through this new show. Munch’s 1908 portrait of Dr Daniel Jacobson.
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1 month ago | 
msn.com | Laura Cumming
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Laura Cumming
The picture glows in the dark, small but incandescent. It shows three men by the shore. Two are in a boat, trawling the sea with a net, delicately visible beneath the surface. The other stands on a rock, inviting them to follow him in an atmosphere of glimmering gold air. Fish swim straight at you, head on through translucent green waters, as the boatmen turn in amazement at the speaking gestures of Christ. Everything is fluid, mobile, elemental.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Laura Cumming
Life was a guise to the performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-94). His looks were so outlandish, his costumes so teemingly various, they jam every inch of this huge retrospective. He is a gilded boy-god, a Christmas pudding on legs, a prosthetised Venus of Willendorf. He is a leather-clad dame in a zipped-up mask or a Regency dandy in pistachio pantaloons, their orange polka dots spreading upwards all over his face.
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2 months ago | 
theguardian.com | Laura Cumming
There are not many portraits you wait all your adult life to see, but so it is with A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank, painted by ThéodoreGéricault some time after The Raft of the Medusa in 1819. This shattering image of a man with no name is in Britain for the first time, loaned by a small Swiss museum a dozen miles outside Zurich.
