Reviews

'Embrace the Base’: 30,000 women link hands, completely surrounding the nine mile perimeter fence at RAF/USAF Greenham Common, Berkshire (1982), Edward Barber.

Edward Barber’s preventative photography

Edward Barber’s photographic record of 1980s anti-nuclear demonstrators goes on display at the Imperial War Museum

3 Jun 2016

Cavorting amid the ruins with Hubert Robert

The French artist’s obsessive portrayal of antiquity reveals his endless variety

2 Jun 2016
Portrait of a Woman (c. 1640), Anthony van Dyck.

Van Dyck would have relished seeing his work on show at the Frick

The ambitious portraitist was the subject of a major retrospective at the Frick Collection earlier this year

1 Jun 2016

The musical forms of Fausto Melotti

Fausto Melotti’s sculptures ingeniously blur the line between figurative and abstract forms and his work deserves to be better known

28 May 2016
Stereocard depicting Balmoral Castle from the north-west (1863), George Washington Wilson (1823–90) & Co., Aberdeen. © National Museums Scotland

Why the history of photography starts north of the border

Photography flourished in Scotland during its early development in the mid 19th century

26 May 2016
Totality, 2016, Katie Paterson

Fitting the entire universe into an art gallery

Katie Paterson once beamed Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back. At the Lowry, she continues to explore the vastness of space

26 May 2016
The Rude Screen (2015–16), George Shaw

George Shaw finds the otherworldly in trees, porn magazines and plastic sheets

As associate artist at the National Gallery, Shaw focuses on the nondescript woodland where many of art history’s most sordid stories play out

24 May 2016

Don Quixote of the drawing board: the visionary schemes of the Earl of Mar

The Earl of Mar has long been seen as a failed rebel and harmless utopian architect, but it’s time to take him seriously as an Enlightenment thinker

24 May 2016

Going it alone in the modern city

Olivia Laing’s book on the art of loneliness has some excellent insights, but who is it meant for?

23 May 2016

Porn and paranoia on Tyneside

Omer Fast puts contemporary fears and fictions on display at the BALTIC Centre

19 May 2016
Giacometti Self-Portrait

Giacometti’s art channels the nervousness of an entire era

The Sainsbury Centre’s exhibition reveals an artist grappling with a sense of human frailty

18 May 2016

From Turkey to China, the legacy of the Seljuq empire should be better known

There are many treasures in the Met’s new exhibition, but the most poignant are the metalwork pieces from Mosul, given the turmoil in the region today

17 May 2016
Jamie Fitzpatrick, Catlin Art Prize

Art history creeps into the XL Catlin Art Prize

Figurative art is making a comeback, if this year’s shortlist of promising early-career artists is anything to go by

16 May 2016
Pavel Tretyakov (1901), Ilia Repin. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The Russian portraits at the NPG are a revelation

Russia’s 19th-century portraitists were more than a match for the exceptional writers and composers they painted. So why is their work so neglected?

13 May 2016
Flowers in a Glass Vase (1614), Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder.

Say it with flowers – and butterflies, ladybirds, cockroaches…

Two exhibitions in London celebrate the beautiful, subtle botanical paintings of 17th-century Holland

11 May 2016
Marker Cones

Selfies, sexuality and self-parody: when artists perform for the camera

Artists recognised the power of the staged image long before Instagram came along

11 May 2016
Love Song (2015), Howard Hodgkin.

Howard Hodgkin’s paintings get better and better

How strange that this great British painter claims to ‘hate painting’ when he is so good at it

9 May 2016

Women printmakers make a good impression in New York

Was there a distinctly ‘female’ printmaking in this period? Not really – but that’s what’s so interesting

7 May 2016

‘It is what it is.’ Dan Flavin’s iconic light fittings in the Ikon Gallery

Flavin’s fluorescent light pieces continue to transform the spaces in which they are installed. But time is changing how we see the pieces, too

6 May 2016

Manuele Cerutti and the fine art of balancing

The everyday objects in Cerutti’s Turin studio are transformed in his paintings: poised, precarious, and forever in suspense

5 May 2016
Perspective of the Palace Complex in its Landscape Setting, Viewed from Inland

Visionary palaces in a gallery’s empty basement

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s palace designs came to ‘nothing more than a beautiful dream’ – and, thankfully, a fascinating set of prints

2 May 2016

Berlin’s wartime bunkers are becoming unlikely havens for art

Désiré Feuerle is the latest person to move his art collection underground

28 Apr 2016
Untitled (2002), Page from Art & Beauty Magazine, #2 (2003), R. Crumb.

Crumbs! Here’s a gallery full of somebody else’s seedy secrets

‘I began wasting my god-given talent drawing pictures of sexy women the way I liked ‘em’. An exhibition of R. Crumb’s work invites us all to become voyeurs

19 Apr 2016