Places

Go down the stairs at Amar Gallery in Islington to encounter a gem of a show about the female Abstract Impressionist artists working at the same time as those male painters we’re already so familiar with: Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning, Newman etc. It was a very macho movement with the women producing work of equal power and […]

Another piece from the Blue Room was this glorious hanging by El Anatsui, aptly named Change in Fortune, made from his traditional bottle tops stitched together. The whole piece is a beautiful shimmering sweeping stroke on a grand scale. This geometric hand folded polyester film by Tony Blackmore impressed me with its delicacy and complexity. A […]

The Phyllida Barlow room was, as you can see, pretty busy when I visited (and no, I don’t know the smiley woman in front of Tony Cragg’s Lost in Thoughts sculptures in this shot) The beautifully smooth laminated wood invited touch which practically everyone seemed to do. David Nash showed Red Holed Column, this wooden trunk […]

As the years go on I seem to know and recognise the work of an increasing number of artists exhibiting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, several of whom have featured in previous blog posts. Kate MccGwire is one such and I was delighted to see that she had won the Jack Goldhill Award for sculpture […]

A recent study of oil painting techniques led me to visit Tate Britain for this exhibition of figure painting. I enjoyed the standard greats including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud but was more interested in examining the less-famous artists in the last room of the show; these painters were really exciting for their handling of materials. […]