Chantal Joffe: Beside the Seaside
The costal landscape provides the backdrop to many of Joffe’s portraits. But the horizon line and solid areas of sea, beach and sky trap and imprison rather than allow room to breathe.
Sue Hubbard
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, short-story writer and freelance critic living and working in London.Variously an antique dealer and a small holder she has written about the visual arts for twenty years for such publications as Time Out, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent and The New Statesman. She has published two collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt) and appeared in the Oxford Poets series (Carcarnet). She was the Poetry Society's first ever Public Art Poet, responsible for London's largest public art poem at Waterloo station, and has published a novel, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and a collection of short stories Rothko's Red (Salt). Her selected art writing is to be published next year by Damien Hirst's Other Criteria.Website: http://www.suehubbard.com Email: [email protected]
Drawn by Light: The Royal Photographic Society Collection
Photography is quite, literally, a miracle. In this technological age we forget how much, forget what the world was like before we could capture the fleeting, the momentary and lock it with one single click of the shutter into eternal aspic.
Allen Jones RA: Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London
Until 25th January, 2015 by Sue Hubbard Some years ago I was commissioned by the Royal Academy magazine to write ‘a feminist appraisal' of Allen Jones' work. As an RA, Jones had the privilege of reading the piece before it went to press. Although he's referred to himself as a feminist on a number of…
Tracey Emin: The Last Great Adventure is You
by Sue Hubbard She's come a long way, our Tracey, from the days of teenage sex behind the beach-huts in Margate, the seedy Kent sea-side town where she grew up, famed for its 1960s beach battles between rogue gangs of Mods and Rockers and as JMW Turner's hidey-hole, where he snuggled up to his landlady,…
Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven,” wrote Wordsworth on the eve of the French Revolution. Though his words could equally have been describing a very different time and place and another, later, revolution where to be young was, also, ‘very heaven’.
Malevich at the Tate Modern until 26 Oct 2014
His 1908 Adam and Eve gouache on cardboard might almost have been painted by William Blake. There are Gauguin-inspired peasants and a self-portrait in which he looks like Valentino painted by Matisse.
Two women painters: Jenny Saville at Gagosian and Celia Paul
Two women painters: Jenny Saville at Gagosian and Celia Paul at Victoria Miro. London
Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) 2014, Bill Viola. St. Paul’s Cathedral, London
Fire, Water, Air and Earth have long been used by neo-pagans and occultists to represent the forces of nature and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our relationship to the divine, Tiny Deaths, Tate Modern, Sue Hubbard, Girl in White, Cinnamon Press, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air, Salt Publishing. Elements
The Maestà (1308-1311). Duccio da Buoninsegna. Opera Metropolitana Museum, Siena
Though Duccio flirts with naturalism The Maestà still remains an object of heavenly veneration with its beautiful colours, but one that is capable of showing not only the divine but also human love.
PETER DOIG: Early Works. Michael Werner Gallery, London
It takes a certain chutzpah for an artist to dig out his early student work and put it on display for the world to access, especially in a rarefied Mayfair Gallery hidden away in a gracious Georgian house just yards from Claridges Hotel.
Hannah Höch. Whitechapel Gallery London, 15th Jan-23rd March 14
It’s not surprising looking at her work that this is the period that saw the rise of Freud. For many of Hoch’s images are like the psyche laid shockingly bare.
UPROAR! The First 50 years of The London Group 1913-63. Ben Uri Gallery, London
This is a fascinating exhibition that shows the ferment, the maelstrom of ideas and the rather undervalued richness of British art in the first half of the 20th century
Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See. Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London
The Chapman brothers don’t do ‘meaningful’, though they do do irritating particularly well.
Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists. Tate Britain.
Painting has now been declared dead more times than the proverbial cat with nine lives. Yet it refuses to lie down quietly and expire, unprepared to hand over the aesthetic reins entirely to competing visual art forms. Painting Now at Tate Britain aims to give wider exposure to five-British born artists.
Coronation! Westminster Abbey, London
The Queen’s Coronation in 1953, was one of the coldest and wettest of the year. Perhaps there’s something about the Monarchy that the weather gods don’t favour. The Queen shivered through the recent sodden river pageant for her Diamond Jubilee.
ON THE EDGE: retreat on the west coast of Kerry
I have come about as far west in Europe as I can go without falling into the sea. The next stop is America. It is a different world to the busy life in Islington, north London that I normally lead dominated by deadlines, art openings, friends and family. I am in retreat. I have been coming to this extraordinary place, Cill Rialaig, an abandoned hamlet of stone cottages on the edge of a cliff, 300 feet above the Atlantic in Kerry on the west coast of Ireland for some time now
GENISIS: Sabastião Salgado, National History Museum, London
The Wild contains answers to more questions than we’ve yet learned to ask. There was a time when the wilderness never seemed far away. Life was a battle against its encroachment. It existed on the edge of our consciousness and our safe physical world: a place of danger and a space for the imagination to roam.
Five new poems from ‘Over the Rainbow’, the central section of ‘The Forgetting and Remembering of Air’, (Salt Publishing), due May 2013
by Sue Hubbard EVA “When the Fuehrer has won the war, he has promised me that I can go to Hollywood and play my own part in the film of our life story.” Not long out of the convent, balanced on Herr Hofmann's ladder in search of files I knew, when you entered the studio…
A Terrible Beauty: Mat Collishaw
by Sue Hubbard He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Extract from ‘Easter’, 1916, W B Yeats When we meet to discuss his work we have to decamp from the pub in Camberwell, which is both Mat…
Judy Chicago and Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Tracey Emin: Ben Uri Gallery, London
by Sue Hubbard Until 10th March 2013 I remember seeing Judy’s Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) in a rundown Islington warehouse. It was 1985 and I had just arrived in London; a young single parent mother, newly divorced, and a fledgling art critic. The year before that the work had been shown at the Edinburgh…