Preview of Dorothea Tanning at Tate Modern

25/03/19

Published in the spring 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Marino Marini: Visual Passions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

05/04/18

Marino Marini: Visual Passions

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

27 January – 1 May 2018

Marino Marini (1901-80) is largely synonymous with equestrian sculpture, his depictions of horse and rider having developed, from their first appearance in 1936, to reflect the artist’s changing sociopolitical and philosophical views, as well as his existential anxieties, and epitomised by The Angel of the City (1948), standing proud, horse’s neck and rider’s limbs (all five of them) erect, outside the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on Venice’s Grand Canal. However, as shown by this touring retrospective, which opened last autumn at the Palazzo Fabroni in Pistoia (the Tuscan city where Marini was born) before moving, appropriately to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni), his legacy is far greater than just this. With more than 50 of his works on display, the exhibition has been cleverly and informatively curated so as to place Marini’s work within the wider art-historical context, ranging from early Etruscan sculpture, through 15th-century Florentine works, to Auguste Rodin and even Henry Moore. Each room juxtaposes works by Marini with works by his contemporaries, or those who influenced him, highlighting the development of his thought and practice.

Read the full review here

Review of Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter at RWA, Bristol

18/01/17

Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter

RWA, Bristol
10 December 2016 – 19 March 2017

One of the somewhat contrary signs of success for an author is when her works are well known by the general public, even if they have not been quite so widely read as to match this awareness. Such seems to be the case for Angela Carter (1940-92), whose vivid and enduring imagery and fantastic metaphor have influenced generations of readers and visual artists – many through the active enjoyment of her written word, which paints its own pictures using syntax and vocabulary as its paintbrush and palette; others through a form of collective osmosis. To mark the 25th anniversary of Carter’s untimely death – at the age of 51, from lung cancer – and the publication of a new biography, the RWA in Bristol (the city where Carter studied and wrote five of her nine novels) is hosting a fabulous exhibition, comprising artworks that inspired Carter and contemporary works influenced – directly or indirectly – by her writings.

Read the review here

Review of Francesca Woodman: On Being An Angel at Foam, Amsterdam

07/01/16

Francesca Woodman: On Being An Angel

Foam, Amsterdam

18 December 2015 – 9 March 2016

The sad thing about Francesca Woodman’s work is that it cannot be reviewed without hindsight and reference to the photographer’s premature death at the age of 22, when she jumped from a building in East Side, New York. As with her contemporary, Ana Mendieta (1948-85), who died falling from a 34th floor apartment in Greenwich Village, critics and academics have sought to see her work as a premonition of what was to come, with the female subject – commonly Woodman herself – melting into the background, becoming indistinguishable from the wallpaper or crumbling stone of the derelict building, “anticipating her own disappearance”.¹ Woodman’s photographs, like Mendieta’s, often depict a silhouette or trace, a blurred impression, a delicate and ghostly absence of the subject, suggesting a sense of has-been or might-have-been. Did the teenage girl foresee her untimely end?

Read the full review here