Our pick of this week’s art events: 2 - 8 May
Our pick of this week’s art events: 2 - 8 May
RA Recommends
By Sam Phillips
Published 2 May 2014
From the latest Artangel commission to the history of British comics.
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Saskia Olde Wolbers: Yes, These Eyes are the Windows
Artangel, 3 May – 22 June
Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, known primarily for her video works, stages a site-specific art project from this weekend at a fascinating location: 87 Hackford Road in Brixton, a terrace that for a year was the home of her most famous artistic compatriot, Vincent Van Gogh. Not much has been revealed about what visitors can expect, but it has been commissioned by Artangel, which means it is likely to be great – nearly all the organisation’s projects in unlikely off-site places have been memorable moments in contemporary art.
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Lynn Chadwick RA
Blain Southern, 1 May–28 June 2014
As four of Lynn Chadwick’s stainless-steel sentinels flex their sinews in the Academy’s Annenberg Courtyard, the sculptor is the subject of a survey at Blain Southern in nearby Hanover Square. The Academician’s angular animal and human forms helped define the ‘Geometry of Fear’ group of 1950s British artists, who, in the words of Herbert Read, developed an “iconography of despair, or of defiance” in the aftermath of the war.
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Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting
National Gallery, until 21 September 2014
The representation of space was key to the development of Italian Renaissance art, as painters from Giotto and Duccio onwards began to explore how objects could be rendered realistically in linear perspective. A show at the National Gallery focuses on the inventive ways imagined buildings came alive on panel and canvas, becoming ever more important to artist’s compositions.
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Nolde and Beck
Connaught Brown, until 24 May 2014 German Expressionism fans should try and catch the three-week, two-person show of Emil Nolde and his protégé Herbert Beck at London’s Connaught Brown. Is there anything more lovely than one of Nolde’s watercolours of flowers? Clearly the older man’s work guided Beck, whose landscapes are aflame with similarly expressive colours.
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Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK
British Library, until 19 August 2014 Comics have gone from being a guilty pleasure to mainstream source material for blockbuster movies, and now, at the British Library, a subject for a major institution’s exhibition. The sheer variety of illustration and storytelling showcased will be one of the major draws for anyone with a passing interest in this most democratic of art forms.
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Sam Phillips is Editor of RA Magazine.