Category Archives: art

Postwar Modern. Barbican Gallery – Londen, Engeland

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A revelatory new take on art in Britain after the Second World War, a period when artists had to make sense of an entirely altered world.

Postwar Modern explores the art produced in Britain in the wake of a cataclysmic war. Certainty was gone, and the aftershocks continued, but there was also hope for a better tomorrow. These conditions gave rise to an incredible richness of imagery, forms and materials in the years that followed.

Focusing on ‘the new’, Postwar Modern features 48 artists and around 200 works of painting, sculpture, photography, collage and installation. It explores the subjects that most preoccupied artists, among them the body, the post-atomic condition, the Blitzed streetscape, private relationships and imagined future horizons. As well as reconsidering well-known figures, the exhibition foregrounds artists who came to Britain as refugees from Nazism or as migrants from a crumbling empire, in addition to female artists who have tended to be overlooked.

A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020 – Whitechapel Gallery. Londen

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The Whitechapel Gallery presents a 100-year survey of the studio through the work of artists and image-makers from around the world. 

Whether it be an abandoned factory, an attic or a kitchen table, it is the artist’s studio where the great art of our time is conceived and created. In this multi-media exhibition, the wide-ranging possibilities and significance of these crucibles of creativity take centre stage and new art histories around the modern studio emerge through striking juxtapositions of under-recognised artists with celebrated figures in Western art history.

The exhibition brings together more than 100 works by over 80 artists and collectives from Africa, Australasia, South Asia, China, Europe, Japan, the Middle East, North and South America. They range from modern icons such as Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele and Andy Warhol, to contemporary figures such as Walead Beshty, Lisa Brice and Kerry James Marshall.

The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, installations and films depicting the studio as work of art and presents documentation of artists’ studios by world-renowned photographers and film-makers. A series of ‘studio corners’ also recreate the actual environments where great art has been produced.

Louise Bourgeois. The Woven Child – Hayward Gallery, Londen

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In the last two decades of her career, Bourgeois began to incorporate clothes from all stages of her life into her art.

This developed into a varied body of work – from monumental installations, to figurative sculptures and abstract collages – incorporating textiles such as bed linen, handkerchiefs, tapestry, and needlepoint.

Bourgeois’s fabric works mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation that are central to her long and storied career.

‘I have always had a fascination with the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness.’

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child sums up this wonderfully inventive and compelling final chapter in this extraordinary artist’s work.

Icons of Colour. Portraits of Brent’s Change Makers – Brent Museum and Archives, Londen, Engeland

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Het is een kleine en wat teleurstellende expositie, Icons of Colour in het Brent Museum and Archives. In een expositieruimte in de openbare bibliotheek in een buitenwijk van Londen worden portretten getoond van lokale mensen van kleur die het ‘gemaakt’ hebben. Voor mij was feitelijk alleen het portret van Zadie Smith door Nigeriaanse kunstenaar Toyin Ojih Odutola interessant. En ach, ik ben weer eens in een week van Londen geweest waar je normaal gesproken niet snel komt.