Details:
- The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, WC2N 5DN
- Open daily 10am-6pm.
- Friday until 9pm.
- Free admission for members.
- Standard admission: From £24 Monday-Friday. From £26 Saturday and Sunday.
- www.nationalgallery.org.uk
The EY Exhibition: Cezanne — until March 12 2023
Another case of seeing is believing is offered in this extensive tribute to the prescient work of a painter who contributed to the huge jump in evolution of the medium from late 19th century impressionism to 20th century modernist-obsessed cubism.
A multifaceted influence on everyone from Picasso to Hemingway, Cezanne’s patient but quiet upending of everything that was thought to be known about painting until he arrived is everywhere on evidence in this impressive and enlightening show.
To jaded digital-era eyes, his revolutionary approach to the painting of objects, landscapes and people may at first appear old-fashioned and unimpressive, but as the exhibition shows with its deep dive into the patient development of his style through the repeated but always different capturing of similar places, things and people, they were unlike anything that had preceded them and would shape much of what came after them for the next century.
To understand how great the move from the industrialised world of his era to the light-speed technological developments of the next century would be, while never living to see them, was a preternatural feat, and no artist demonstrated this understanding better than Cezanne.
No-one also better understood the idea that painting is not about the capturing of reality but rather about painting as medium, as art form and as a sometimes frustrating but endlessly rewarding means of giving us a sense of how the world not only looks but feels.
London art guide
If you’re planning a December visit to London, here are seven art exhibitions you won't want to miss
Image: Supplied
If you’re planning a December visit to London then - as ever - when it comes to art, there are too many gob-smacking options and never enough time.
Tymon Smith recently spent most of his time while visiting The Smoke catching up with the heart of the Western world’s art offerings to help you make the best choices of what to look out for in the months to come.
William Kentridge — until December 11
This epic retrospective show, which opened in September has been years in the planning and signals an opening salvo in what has become a bumper year for the Johannesburg artist who has scaled his way to the top of the international contemporary art scene since he made waves in SA in the 1990s. As it comes to a close, Kentridge has just opened another retrospective exhibition at The Broad Gallery in Los Angeles, setting his sights on new adventures in artworld conquest across the pond.
Though local devotees may feel that there might not be much they haven’t already seen in other retrospectives, they’d be wrong because as always with Kentridge retrospectives, this one has been tailored for a new audience and a new space and offers plenty of new ways to think about the artist’s prolific output over the last four decades. Kentridge is as curious about new ways of looking and thinking about his work as we are asked to be and so it never feels that this is a by-the-numbers repackaging of the work.
Kentridge delivers madcap spin on Shostakovich in Jozi
The Soho films are presented together on large-screens that offer a new consideration of their universal themes beyond the more intimately South African historical context out of which they arose. A separate room space for the screening of the darkly absurd examination of the heartbreakingly violent brutality of the dark days portrayed in the animation for Ubu and the Truth Commission, hits harder than ever.
The new and old flower collages are breathtaking in their monumental scale. The intricate mechanised model theatre and haunting musical score of 2005’s Black Box/Chamber Noire, which responds to the tragedy of the German massacre of the Herero people in Namibia still captivates and proves one of the highlights of the show — though it’s only shown hourly at 20 minutes past the hour so be sure to time your visit accordingly.
The giant tapestries made by longtime collaborators at the Stephens Tapestry Studios continue to impress with their carefully crafted detail and their obvious suitability as a further medium for the interpretation of Kentridge’s distinctive drawing style. Finally there are the presentations of operatic works including the delightfully anarchic Notes Towards a Model Opera and the recent Waiting for the Sibyl.
The incessant crowd of visitors, the ecstatic reviews and the rate at which the increasing catalogue of Kentridge museum-shop memorabilia — including a £300 Kentridge Perfume — are flying off the shelves prove once again that there’s no stopping one of contemporary art’s most prolific and intellectually engaging juggernauts.
Image: © William Kentridge
Details:
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives — until January 22, 2023
One of Britain’s and modern art’s most revered painters, the celebrated Lucian Freud receives a suitably monumental and wide-ranging new evaluation in this exhibition of more than 60 paintings spanning his life and practice from the delicate first steps taken in his early twenties to the assured work left unfinished at his death in 2011.
A global celebrity whose oft-reported gruff personality sometimes got in the way of appreciation of his artistic gifts, Freud remains a painter emulated but never surpassed. To see these works in the flesh and organised to provide a concrete demonstration of the evolution of his work over seven decades is to comprehend that fact in a way that can never be garnered from the many books in which they appear.
Standing under the imposing gaze of their subjects and examining the often flabbergasting technique of their creator you realise what a supreme innovator of painting in the 20th century Freud was.
Image: The Lucian Freud Archive: 2022/Bridgeman Images
Details:
The EY Exhibition: Cezanne — until March 12 2023
Another case of seeing is believing is offered in this extensive tribute to the prescient work of a painter who contributed to the huge jump in evolution of the medium from late 19th century impressionism to 20th century modernist-obsessed cubism.
A multifaceted influence on everyone from Picasso to Hemingway, Cezanne’s patient but quiet upending of everything that was thought to be known about painting until he arrived is everywhere on evidence in this impressive and enlightening show.
To jaded digital-era eyes, his revolutionary approach to the painting of objects, landscapes and people may at first appear old-fashioned and unimpressive, but as the exhibition shows with its deep dive into the patient development of his style through the repeated but always different capturing of similar places, things and people, they were unlike anything that had preceded them and would shape much of what came after them for the next century.
To understand how great the move from the industrialised world of his era to the light-speed technological developments of the next century would be, while never living to see them, was a preternatural feat, and no artist demonstrated this understanding better than Cezanne.
No-one also better understood the idea that painting is not about the capturing of reality but rather about painting as medium, as art form and as a sometimes frustrating but endlessly rewarding means of giving us a sense of how the world not only looks but feels.
Image: Supplied
Details:
Dor Guez: Knowing the Land — until January 14 2023
Half-Palestinian, half-North African Jewish artist Dor Guez continues to mine his own identity and communal history for rich material that complicates the burning questions of belonging, ownership, religious entitlement and single-sided narratives that have beset his homeland for centuries.
Comprising a video installation, photographic series, sculptures and prints the exhibition takes as its starting point a phrase coined in 1895 by Joseph Schwarz one of the first colonial geologically of Palestine to interrogate whether anyone can ever truly know, own or lay complete claim to that land and the diverse experiences of its many varied inhabitants.
Image: Supplied
Details:
Lynette Yiadom-Bodakye: Fly in League with the Night — until February 26, 2023
British born to Ghanaian immigrant parents oil-portrait painter Lynette Yiadom-Bodakye has emphatically and brilliantly returned black people to the forefront of a medium traditionally associated with stale, dour, beatified white subjects. Her exhibition at Tate Britain, brought back after been initially cut short by pandemic restrictions in 2020, is a moving and elegantly crafted tribute to the heroic everyday lived experience of black people, and breathes new life into the hallowed old-masters halls of its venue.
Though they appear as if they’re portraits painted from life or photographs, Yiadom-Bodakye’s ingenious trick is that her subjects are completely invented and result from the meeting of her fertile imagination with her vast knowledge and appreciation of the centuries old traditions of oil-painting portraiture.
Her distinctive muted palette and brave workings of faces in darkness help to give the work an emotional impact that’s aided by their impressive scale and overall the experience is a satisfyingly complex, moving and daring assault on the hallowed European canon that succeeds.
Details:
Amy Sherald: The World We Make — until December 23
American portrait painter Amy Sherald has blazed a fiery trail through the international art scene since she rose to global prominence with her 2018 portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama.
This show of giant-scale portraits of black Americans continues to demonstrate the distinctive aspects of Sherald’s instantly recognisable and sought-after style: stark, black central figures dressed in bold bright clothes against background planes of flat, popping colour.
Her finely detailed photorealism fits within her broader project of returning the overlooked experiences of black and marginalised Americans to the spotlight. A portrait of two black male sailors kissing offers a suitably conscious update to the iconic 1945 V-Day photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt while portraits of black dirt bike riders midair and a black farmer sitting on a John Deer tractor serve a similar function.
Their technical expertise may sometimes be in danger of smothering an emotional response, but there’s no denying the impressiveness of their scale, detail of their execution and the still radical act of reclaiming the traditionally white, hopefully idealistic iconography of the American dream for those who have so often been excluded from it.
Image: Supplied
Details:
African Fashion — until 16 April 2023
I arrived to see this exhibition just as King Charles III’s burgundy Royals Royce was leaving it and narrowly avoided running me over. Turned out the new king and Queen Consort Camilla had closed off the show to have a private tour and were suitably impressed, if you care about that kind of nonsense.
Perhaps in the wake of the antiroyal backlash that arose in many former British colonies after his mother’s death, the king was hoping to score brownie points by publicly demonstrating his interest in the V&A’s handsome tribute to the ingenuity and dazzling brilliance of six decades of fashion from across the continent.
In videos of the king’s visit he seems to be making an effort to be interested and it’s hard not to be because this celebration of the distinctive work of African fashion designers is a feast for the eyes and the mind.
There’s also a refreshingly keen awareness of the relationship between high fashion and ordinary people and the ways in which tradition and everyday African style fuels the imaginations of both those who wear clothes and those who make them.
Image: Supplied
Details:
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