Our pick of this week’s art events: 6 – 12 February
Our pick of this week’s art events: 6 – 12 February
RA Recommends
By Sam Phillips
Published 6 February 2015
From Peruvian Huacos and Japanese netsuke to the portraits of Marlene Dumas.
-
Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden
Tate Modern, London, until 10 May
You may have been reading the rave reviews about the big opening this week – a survey show of Marlene Dumas Hon RA at the Tate. Before it came to the Tate, RA Magazine’s columnist Simon Wilson went to see the show in Amsterdam, and wrote a piece that is well worth reading that puts the expressionist painter in art-historical context.
-
Cotton to Gold: Extraordinary Collections of the Industrial North
Two Temple Place, until 19 April
If you haven’t yet visited Two Temple Place, a no-expense-spared Late Victorian mansion on London’s Embankment, then its new exhibition drawn from three Lancashire collections is a nice opportunity, with an idiosyncratic range of work that includes icon paintings, Peruvian Huacos, Japanese woodblocks and watercolours by J.M.W. Turner RA.
-
Giacometti – Smith
Ordovas, until 11 April
The malleability of metal is the subject of Ordavas’ latest two-hander: a comparison between Alberto Giacometti and David Smith. They were the preeminent sculptors on either side of Atlantic in the years after the Second World War, although Giacometti’s roughly hewn, vertically enhanced figures and David Smith’s welded iron and steel abstracts are, at first glance, visually very different.
-
William Gear RA
Fosse Gallery, Stow on the Wold, until 21 February
Although the avant-garde group COBRA is closely associated with the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam (whose first letters make up its acronym), it is interesting to learn that William Gear, a British artist and a Royal Academician to boot, was also a member. To celebrate a centenary since Gear’s birth, Fosse Gallery focuses on the Fife-born artist’s free and colourful works on paper.
-
John Gerrard: Farm
Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 7 February – 21 March
And I’m looking forward to visiting Thomas Dane this weekend to see a solo show by John Gerrard, an Irish artist who creates virtual worlds rendered in computer game-style graphics. He tends to choose remote industrial landscapes as subjects, and this shows includes simulations of the Oklahoma outhouses that store Google’s servers and a Nevadan solar power plant.
-
Sam Phillips (@SamP_London) is Editor of RA Magazine.