RA Magazine Blog Listing

RA Magazine visits Horace Walpole's Gothic fantasy castle on the eve of its public opening after a lengthy rebuilding and restoration project. With video

These days it seems we all need a plan B, and the artist Thomas Scheibitz calls attention to this in the title of his new show, ‘A moving Plan B’, that opened last night at Spruth Magers Gallery, a five-minute walk from the RA.

Howard Hodgkin's new exhibition 'Time and Place' at Modern Art Oxford is something of a stylistic departure. Hodgkin is a reputedly private man. Rarely does anyone see him in the act of making, even his long-term partner Antony Peattie. His work, as a result, emits a kind of intimacy that underscores his bold marks and colours. The 25 paintings on show in Oxford have been made within the last ten...

The London Design Festival is well underway and with more than 250 events and exhibitions taking place across the capital, it can seem somewhat overwhelming. Icon magazine's design trail booklet is a useful guide to the highlights. Unveiled yesterday, the pocket-sized guide lists around 100 recommendations and can be picked up at any of the festival's participating venues.

Suffolk is not known as a contemporary art hot spot. But this year, a new exhibition has been set up in conjunction with the Aldeburgh Music Festival at the Snape Maltings site. Entitled ‘SNAP’, the show includes 12 contemporary artists. but is only on view up to and including this Sunday, 26 June, the end of the second week of the music festival. Luckily though, not all of the art will be disappearing...

Victoria Miro gallery in Hoxton has put on two outstanding shows of women artists, both remarkably different to one another. Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, creates over the top spotty sculptures, which provide an interesting contrast to Alice Neel’s thoughtful portraiture.

Tom Hunter stages photographic scenes in response to both art-historical paintings and the conditions of his home borough of London, Hackney.

Irish artist-filmmaker Gerard Byrne, the subject of a new survey show at the Whitechapel, specialises in historical reenactment, focusing not so much on key events of popular history but lesser-known culture moments.

On Saturday 12 May, in unexpected sunshine, Lismore Castle Arts opened its annual summer international exhibition. Dotted around the beautiful formal gardens and displayed in the galleries, until 30 September, are large-scale sculptures by Swiss sculptor Hans Josephsohn.

Among the big hits at last year’s Venice Biennale was the Polish pavilion, featuring Israeli Yael Bartana’s ambitious film trilogy about the fictional Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, calling for the return of 3.3m Jewish people to their forefathers’ homeland.

Tracey Emin RA’s returns home to Margate from Saturday with a major exhibition at Turner Contemporary.

This summer’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion has been conceived by the celebrated Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei Hon RA, the design team responsible for the iconic ‘Birds Nest’ Beijing National Stadium at the 2008 Olympic Games.

Such is the ubiquity of Henry Moore’s sculpture in parks and other public spaces, and so central to the canon of twentieth-century British art has his work become, that I visited the show of his late, large-scale sculptures at London’s Gagosian Gallery with no expectations of surprise. But the exhibition is surprising...

New York-based artist Jenny Holzer came to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, developing a form of text-based art that emphasised the socio-political status of public communication, in contrast to some of the more impenetrable language-based work of her conceptualist peers. Until the end of July, Sprüth Magers in the West End of London presents a solo exhibition that provides an interesting...

Twenty years since Rachel Whiteread's masterpiece 'House', she has been commissioned to produce a permanent piece - a frieze installed on the façade of London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The work was unveiled last week and characteristically involves casting negative spaces and replicating elements of buildings and objects, using the Whitechapel’s existing turn-of-the-century ornamentation as her inspiration...

'Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings' opened this week at Tate Liverpool. Art Historian and RA Magazine contributor Simon Wilson picks his favourite work by Turner in the show. Posted: 26 June 2012 by Simon Wilson.

The Tokyo-born artist, musician, poet, performer and peace activist Yoko Ono is the subject of the Serpentine Gallery’s summer exhibition. Before she became a household name in the late 1960s for her relationship with John Lennon, Ono established herself as a pioneer of the type of multidisciplinary conceptual practice that was define avant-garde art over the following decades.

American artist Bruce Nauman was mentioned briefly on this blog a few weeks’ back in connection with the screening of his early video and performance art at White Cube Bermondsey. Another strand of the pioneering media artist’s work is on display this week at the ICA in the form of Days (2009), a sound work in the venue’s ground floor gallery.

Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery celebrates the relationship between pop music and Pop art this summer with four related shows. Two are monographic exhibitions, concentrating on Peter Blake RA and Derek Boshier and their close relationships with musical culture. Another display entitled ‘Artist Pop Stars’ showcases the artwork of musician-artists, such as Bryan Ferry and Ian Dury (once a student...

Since 2004 Warwickshire’s Compton Verney – an eighteenth-century Georgian mansion set in stunning Capability Brown-designed grounds – has staged high-quality art exhibitions comprised of loans from national collections. Today it opens what looks to be a fascinating summer show on the subject of flight.

The largest public gallery in London has just got larger. The Photographers’ Gallery opens its doors to the public again this Saturday in its Ramillies Street home – around the corner from Oxford Circus – after a major renovation project by acclaimed Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey that includes a two-storey extension.

‘Bold Tendencies’ is the country’s most unconventional summer sculpture park, an annual exhibition over the top floors of a multi-storey car park in Peckham in South London, a short walk from Peckham Rye train station. Rather than rolling hills or picturesque forests, the works of the participating artists respond each year to a grimy example of Brutalist inner-city architecture. Posted 6 July 2012...

The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s 3000 Old Master Drawings have been famous but out of sight for nearly 300 years within their vast art collection at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire. Now, 12 drawings from their collection - including works by Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck - are on display.

Following their presentation in a grand columned space at St Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, Antony Gormley RA’s series of cast-iron figures ‘Still Standing’ (2010–11) comes to London for an exhibition at White Cube’s Hoxton Square gallery, on view now until the autumn.

The works of Simon Patterson take a wry look at our conventional classification systems and hierarchies. In his new exhibition Patterson has collected photographs of around 30 equestrian statues examining their relationships and status as symbols of national identity. Posted 16 July 2012 by Sam Phillips

The curved walls that spiral inside the Norman Foster RA-designed City Hall on the bank of the Thames form a suitable stage for a photography exhibition that examines the avant-garde architectural environment of Russia.

The first stage of Tate Modern’s long-term expansion project opened to the public on Wednesday in the form of The Tanks: subterranean spaces, formerly vast oil containers for the Bankside power station, which have been reclaimed for the presentation of art.

Keep an eye out for the time on Friday morning. At 8.12am, when you might normally be spreading butter on your toast, waiting for the bus or – in a perfect world – still in blissful sleep, one of the most ambitious performance art works the UK has ever seen will be underway, and you could take part.

I approached the British Museum’s new exhibition about Shakespeare, ‘Shakespeare: Staging the World’ with a touch of trepidation if not downright doubt. How could an array of objects about Shakespeare add anything to his plays? I emerged from the show well and truly put in my place.

Alison Wiliding RA's pieces are always alert to real world associations, through both their shapes and their materials. Her series 'Drone' is currently on view at London's Karsten Schubert gallery.

This Summer Waddesdon Manor – the Rothschild stately home in rural Buckinghamshire – is showing ambitious contemporary art inside and out.

Nowhere Less Now, by British artist Lindsay Seers, is the latest major commission by Artangel, the organisation acclaimed for producing groundbreaking contemporary art projects in unlikely places.

The UK’s most important contemporary art festival kicked off last weekend in Liverpool. Comprised of group exhibitions and specially commissioned site-specific projects across the city, this year’s Liverpool Biennial – now in its seventh edition and led by a new director, Sally Tallant, formerly of London’s Serpentine Gallery – has seen a variety of interesting venues open to the public in the name...

Sam Phillips hails this monumental exhibition of international contemporary art and picks out some highlights of the 100-day event.

Sam Phillips assesses the four nominees for this year's Turner Prize as their work goes on show at Tate Britain.

The Serpentine’s new survey show of the work of German artist Thomas Schütte is subtitled ‘Faces and Figures’, but the torsos and limbs of the human body are rarely present in the exhibition.

Although featuring recognisable forms such as buildings and figures in landscapes, the rich and romantic paintings of the Scottish-born, Trinidad-based artist Peter Doig seem less a record of the world than an attempt to paint memories, or maybe dreams.

Beijing-based painter Zeng Fanzhi – the subject of a solo exhibition at London’s Gagosian Gallery – emerged to acclaim in the mid-1990s. His more recent works have probed the psychological potential of landscape.

New York’s Pace gallery has leased a London outpost in the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington Gardens and has opened with a museum-quality inaugural show: a two-person exhibition that compares and contrasts American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko with the contemporary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

I urge you to visit a magnificent show of large-scale sculptures by the Los Angeles-based British artist Thomas Houseago in the next week, before the exhibition – on view at Savile Row’s Hauser & Wirth – closes on 27 October.

The Whitechapel Gallery has just opened the first major survey show in Britain of Mel Bochner, one of an influential group of New York-based artists who, from the 1960s, pioneered conceptual art.

The Affordable Art Fair (AAF) opens in a temporary structure in Battersea Park tomorrow. The fair has been staged annually every autumn in the South London park since October 1999, but in the past thirteen years the AAF brand has also become a global phenomenon, spreading to cities across the world including Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Seattle, Hong Kong, Singapore, Amsterdam, Brussels, Hamburg...

The continued buoyancy of the global Asian art and antiquities market, and the British capital’s preeminent place within it, is reflected by Asian Art in London, a ten-day festival of sales and events on the subject that now celebrates its fifteenth year.

This Sunday the doors close on an engaging exhibition by Chicagoan artist and designer Theaster Gates, on view at White Cube’s impressive space on Bermondsey Street.

Honorary Royal Academician Renzo Piano, architect of London's Shard, has created the latest addition to Oslo's evolving skyline: a new home for the Astrup Fearnley Museum. Kitty Corbet Milward pays it a visit

Ben Uri Gallery holds approximately 1300 works by artists mainly of Jewish descent – including Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, Sonia Delaunay, Mark Gertler and Sandra Blow RA – making it London’s Jewish Museum of Art.

Tony Cragg RA follows up his treasure hunt of large-scale sculptures around London’s Exhibition Road with an exhibition at the Lisson Gallery until mid-January. But the show’s gallery context does not mean a reduction in ambition; the exhibition is ‘almost boiling over with energy’, presenting highly dynamic works from this year that develop further the types of forms seen in South Kensington.

If you have any plans to wander around and wonder at the autumn leaves in Richmond Park this month, then tie in a trip with a visit to Richmond Hill Gallery, which has a show of works on paper – paintings, monotypes, carborundums and screenprints – by Academician Barbara Rae.

The preeminent French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was scathing about the possibilities of colour photography, claiming in Le Monde that the ‘only good colour photo I have taken’, which appeared on the cover of the celebrated Camera magazine in 1954, was ‘too self-consciously aesthetic’. A fascinating free exhibition at Somerset House takes Cartier-Bresson’s attitudes towards colour as a challenge...

The Royal College of Art’s expansive survey of artworks from past staff and alumni touches upon so many of the key artists, architects and designers this country has produced over the last 175 years that, rather than a focused show on teaching methods and the experiences of students, it presents as a potted but pretty comprehensive history of modern British art.

Marlborough Fine Art on Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly, celebrates the 80th birthday of Quentin Blake this month with an exhibition of works on paper from this year. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t adore Blake’s idiosyncratic illustrations, their affection first blossoming while reading a Roald Dahl book as a child or to a child. But the Marlborough show presents another side of Blake’s output...

Since its foundation in 1993, Michael Hoppen Gallery in Chelsea has collected, presented, promoted, sold and published photography in all its myriad forms, becoming one of London’s most influential advocates for the medium.

“Sound is the opposite of an art which privileges the eye.” Haroon Mirza’s new exhibition of sound-art installations at London’s Lisson Gallery challenges this preconception, with an examination of how audio’s intrinsic qualities ally with our perceptions of space.

Print and printmaking has been as integral to the career of American artist Ed Ruscha as painting; the Los Angeleno and Honorary Royal Academician developed his obsession with the appearance of words while working as a typesetter at an advertising agency in the 1960s, and he has long produced books, book art, screenprints and lithographs alongside canvases.

Bologna-born Giorgio Morandi was arguably the finest painter of still lifes in the twentieth century. He represented arrangements of bottles on a table in simplistic perspective and muted palette, but somehow – without trickery – he always achieved a kind of alchemy, by which such everyday items became endowed with a spiritual aura once on the canvas. Encountering a Morandi painting can be a mesmeric...

Long before Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth settled in St Ives in 1939, encouraging many other liked-minded modernists to the Cornish coast, the town, together with Newlyn, had been a magnet for nineteenth-century British artists, especially painters influenced by the Barbizon and Impressionists schools across the English School.

Could this be the ultimate date exhibition? When I visited ‘Light Show’ at the Hayward on Friday night, there were an inordinate amount of couples ‘ooh’-ing and ‘aah’-ing in front of the awe-inducing light installations scattered around the gallery spaces.

The first exhibition dedicated to the connections between the work of Francis Bacon and Auguste Rodin opens tomorrow at Ordovas on Savile Row. The show, which features three works from each artist, pivots on some research that suggests a series of reclining figures by Bacon were inspired by two of the sculptor’s sculptures: 'Figure volante' and 'Iris, messagère des dieux' (both 1890–91).

In 2013 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, while recognised as a major figure of Spanish Golden Age art, has been eclipsed in the minds of connoisseurs. Now, two new exhibitions at Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Wallace Collection give a rare chance for us to reconsider his worth.

Taryn Simon's exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Mayfair sees her turn towards an existing index: the image archive of the New York Public Library, which contains over 1.2 million printed images.

Kutlug Ataman's latest work in London, an 80-minute double-screen projection at Thomas Dane Gallery, leaves the Turkish metropolis for a remote village in Anatolia. But an even more marked departure is his movement from documentary to fiction.

Since the earliest stages of his career in the 1940s, the paintings of the late Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies Hon RA have comprised of much more than just oil on canvas. Timothy Taylor Gallery’s presentation of ten works from Tàpies’ last two decades reminds us of the artistic gold this Barcelona-born alchemist was able to refine from the most unrefined materials.

The National Gallery’s exhibition of sixteenth-century Italian painter Federico Barocci is the first major monographic show on the artist. It affords an opportunity for many to discover an artist who, in his own time, enjoyed great popularity but has since had his star eclipsed by others.

Where does one travel when one listens to music? And can any sonic journey – an expedition into what Schopenhauer called “the inexpressible depth of music” – ever find representation in one’s physical disorientation within space?

Looking at a catalogue for the Ashmolean’s new exhibition of their world-class collection of drawings, the pieces of paper appear like a level playing field: from Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo to Rubens, Watteau and Gainsborough, all the artists – in a sense – have the same limited tools.

Los Angeles-based Sterling Ruby salvages materials for his multidisciplinary and mixed-media works not from rubbish dumps but from his own studio. In the artist’s new series ‘Basin Theology’, on display as part of his solo show this month at Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row space, shallow and scorched circular vessels are fused with the broken fragments of previous aborted pottery pieces.

The Brazilian-born photographer Sebastião Salgado has gained both popular and critical acclaim in the Western world for his hauntingly beautiful black-and-white prints that document people living and working on the edge in less developed nations. His new photographic series, ‘Genesis’, premiered at London’s Natural History Museum last week.

Beginning his artistic career as a children's book illustrator, Russian artist Ilya Kabakov is no stranger to the powerful yet poignant force of illusion. In their artistic partnership, he and his wife Emilia Kabakov move fluidly between visual art, history and philosophy as they create what they call ‘total installations’, atmospheric environments designed to immerse the visitor.

If painter Paul Klee 'took a line for a walk’, then sculptor Alexander Calder took a line for a dance. His signature mobile sculptures – the highlights of an exhibition of the American artist at Pace London – move musically in all directions, their multiple metal lines curving with the energy and grace of a ballerina, their biomorphic shapes suggesting the expressive flourishes of a jazz dancer...

Charles Saatchi’s new exhibition at his Chelsea gallery follows the advertising mogul’s previous attempts to define the nation’s art scene, in shows such as ‘Newspeak: British Art Now’ (2010 and 2011) and, of course, ‘Sensation’, which was held at the Royal Academy in 1997.

New York-based painter Julie Mehretu has emerged over the last decade as a significant figure in the US contemporary art scene, and her large-scale abstract works were the subject of an exhibition in 2010 at the city’s Guggenheim Museum. So it is something of a surprise to learn that White Cube Bermondsey’s current show is her first major presentation in the British capital.

This weekend Brighton Museum and Art Gallery opened a stellar survey of Koons’s works from the collection of gallerist Anthony d'Offay, acquired for the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland as part of the Artist Rooms programme. D'Offay collected pieces from across Koons’ oeuvre, making the exhibition a fine overview of the artist’s practice.

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was an artist ahead of her time, whose spiritual practice took her art into new territory as one of the earliest abstract painters. This year a touring exhibition and a presence at the Venice Biennale have cast fresh light on this enigmatic figure, as Gill Crabbe finds.

About Chillida it’s been said that his works are not in space but that they are space,' wrote the late Carlos Fuentes. It is hard to disagree after an encounter with Chillida’s alabaster works on view at Ordovas, which presents the first London gallery exhibition of the Basque sculptor for almost two decades.

‘It's time for another generation to enjoy Chagall,’ explains curator Simonetta Fraquelli, at the new retrospective of the painter held at Tate Liverpool. Indeed, it is much hoped that Liverpool's electic, vibrant mix of young people will take Marc Chagall to their hearts.

In American artist Bill Viola's nine-channel installation Chapel of Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures (2013), on view at Blain Southern’s show of his latest works, nine episodes unfold in simply sketched-out, quotidian environments. Viola moves from the general towards the particular, with everyday actions as his subject - such as the digging of a hole, or the pouring of water in a bowl.

Just like tea, which happens to be a fundamental part of Jeremy Deller’s installation It’s a kind of English Magic for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, the British Council’s exhibition is intrinsically English. The show extracts the essence of the one in Venice, before it tours the UK in 2014.

From Proust to recent Man Booker winner Julian Barnes, memory is a juicy topic, ironically so given its insubstantiality. Now author Hari Kunzru questions what happens when we're denied this most intimate of our possessions. At the V&A, Kunzru's teamed up with 20 international artists and graphic novelists to turn his specially commissioned novella on the subject into a 3-D immersive graphic novel...

While rarely disappointing as an exhibition, the BP Portrait Award occasionally causes frustration in its choice of winners. Not that the chosen aren't worthy of their positions, but yearly four or five others call for recognition of their artistic excellence. And therein lies the award's allure.

Since his first installations in the late 1960s, Californian artist Robert Irwin has taken the perceptual experience of the viewer as his subject, and the art object as something that, in his terminology, is 'conditional' – intrinsically connected to the changeable conditions of its environment.

The commissions for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square have had a habit of stimulating lively debate on the role of art and this year’s project promises to be no exception.

When painter Laura Knight became a Royal Academician in 1936 she was the first female to be elected with full membership status since 1768. A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery explores the unsentimentalised emotional presence and visual strength of her portraiture.

It is fair to say that Ellen Gallagher is a strong woman producing strong art. The Tate Modern's large rooms feel appropriately airy for this, Gallagher's first major retrospective in the UK.

A large dark spherical vessel, blackened in firing and encrusted in parts on its surface, shines almost pale with reflected light in an illuminating exhibition of Moon Jars at the Korean Cultural Centre, London.

The National Maritime Museum walls have been painted black and atmospheric music is being piped through hidden speakers. As an extra sensory layer, the hushed crackle of gallery attendants’ walkie-talkies sound eerily similar to those of an astronaut’s. But don't be fooled. There's nothing gimicky about the epicly titled Visions of the Universe.

Three different yet linked exhibitions are showing at The Photographers' Gallery, their mutual concerns offering insight about how photographic images can represent social change.

This week: an exhibition of recent work by Eileen Cooper RA opens at Art First, Alan Cristea shows prints by Richard Serra, James Welling is at Maureen Paley, an exhibition of works by Jonathan Yeo opens at the National Portrait Gallery and Sotheby's present a selection of sculpture at Chatsworth