Category: Exhibitions and visits

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Antony Gormley – Royal Academy

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The Antony Gormley retrospective at the Royal Academy features a collection of works from Gormley covering a period of around forty years. As well as his signature figurative pieces, the exhibition also contains drawings and more abstract works such as Clearing Vii 2019, Matrix III 2019 and Cave 2019. As the exhibition is in effect the ‘greatest hits’ of his career the work is not challenging, as so much of it has been exhibited before, but is engaging which probably explains why the exhibition was so busy. The show highlights the two main themes of Gormley’s work, a focus on … Continue reading Antony Gormley – Royal Academy

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Cindy Sherman – National Portrait Gallery

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Cindy Sherman is one of the photographers I wrote about while researching part three – Putting yourself in the picture, which can be found here; so I was looking forward to visiting this exhibition to see if viewing her photographs at close quarters, rather than on a screen, would result in me changing my opinion of her work. The exhibition contains around 150 works from the mid-1970s to the present day including an extensive sample of images from her series Untitled Film Stills as well as her larger scale colour work from the 1980s onward. Unlike most of the reviews … Continue reading Cindy Sherman – National Portrait Gallery

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Pierre Bonnard – The Colour of Memory – Tate Modern

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Before reading about this exhibition I was unaware of Pierre Bonnard, the French Post-Impressionist painter and member of Les Nablis, the group of French avante-garde painters active at the end of the nineteenth century (1888-1900). The exhibition covers the period after Les Nablis showing works from around 1900 until Bonnard’s death in 1947. Bonnard is known for the vibrant colours he used, his intimate domestic scenes and his nudes, all of which were well represented in the exhibition. The exhibition also explained that Bonnard usually painted from memory and that as well as drawing sketches, he used photographs as inspiration … Continue reading Pierre Bonnard – The Colour of Memory – Tate Modern

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Nan Goldin – The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – Tate Modern

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I was aware of Nan Goldin and has seen some of her images in various books that I have read during my studies, however, my knowledge of her work was very limited. Whilst visiting Tate Modern to see an exhibition of Pierre Bonnard’s work I saw that there was an exhibition of Nan Goldin’s The Balad of Sexual Dependency and I was keen to see it thinking it would be an display of prints of her work. The exhibition did feature some of her prints including Nan one month after being battered, but the main element of the exhibition was … Continue reading Nan Goldin – The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – Tate Modern

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Dave Heath – The Photographer’s Gallery

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Dave Heath was an American/Canadian photographer who died in 2016. Dialogues with Solitudes is based on his 1965 publication A Dialogue with Solitude, a work that examined isolation and alienation in post-war North American society, and is the first major UK exhibition of Heath’s work. Heath had first hand experience of isoation and vulnerability having been abandoned by his parents when he was four he was brought up in orphanages and foster care. As a teenager he became interested in photography and he was fascinated by the picture stories on Life magazine with one in particular, Bad Boy’s Story by … Continue reading Dave Heath – The Photographer’s Gallery

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Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2019 – Photographer’s Gallery

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This annual award was established by the Photographer’s Gallery in 1996 and features the work of four photographers who are deemed to have made a significant contribution to photography in Europe over the last 12 months. The four artists shortlisted this year are Laia Abril, Susan Meiselas, Arwed Messmer and Mark Ruwedel. On Abortion by Spanish photographer Laia Abril was a powerful and haunting piece of work looking at the methods used to terminate unwanted pregnancies and the impact on women of countries where abortion is illegal. Several of the images were black and white portraits with accompanying text which … Continue reading Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2019 – Photographer’s Gallery

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Diane Arbus – in the beginning – Hayward Gallery

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In the beginning explores the work produced by Diane Arbus during the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962, when she was primarily shooting using 35mm cameras before moving to the larger 2 1/4 inch Rolleiflex. The exhibition features around 90 original prints, many of which have not been exhibited before, and the ten larger images that featured in her portfolio A box of ten photographs. The exhibition was originally staged in at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016. The photographs were presented on individual panels or columns, with images mounted on the … Continue reading Diane Arbus – in the beginning – Hayward Gallery

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Don McCullin – Tate Britain

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This is a huge retrospective of McCullin’s work covering a period of 50 years from his picture ‘The Gu’vnors’ published by the Observer in 1959 to photographs of war torn Homs taken last year in Syria. This is the first time the Tate has exhibited a retrospective of a living photographer. The exhibition is full on, featuring 250 black & white images printed by McCullin himself and a projection room featuring colour work that he did for magazines including The Sunday Times and the Observer amongst others. The exhibition features images from the many conflicts McCullin covered and at times … Continue reading Don McCullin – Tate Britain