The trompe l’œil has an image problem. The genre – in its narrowest sense a group of works that create an optical illusion, typically tricking the viewer into mistaking the representation of an object for the object itself – has long been relegated to the ranks of ‘low art’.
Exhibition
Arte povera and its afterlife strike me as exemplary of the fate of counter-current movements, that so quickly lose their revolutionary value and are subsumed into the institutions they originally set out to critique.
As the opening day of Billie Zangewa’s show drew to a close, few would have anticipated the circumstances that would soon engulf it, nor the new resonances her work would find in light of them.
The Palais de Tokyo’s collaboration with the Qatari museum Mathaf, “Our World is Burning” offers an ambitious survey of contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa.
A new exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath explores the British artist’s early works.
Discussing the show with French friends, I’ve quickly learnt that a Brit should tread carefully before daring to critique such an undisputed national treasure.
In his seminal 1980 work “Camera Lucida,” the philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that “every photograph is a certificate of presence.” The French artist Christian Boltanski has spent the last 60 years probing the limits of such an idea.
Huysmans bemoaned the academic mediocrity of the Salons’ most celebrated regulars; never one to mince his words, he wrote that Pierre Lecontre Du Noüy “made the wrong choice of career,” that Henri Gervex “no longer knows how to paint,” and that William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s “The Birth of Venus” is “so bad that there isn’t even a word for it.”
In his depictions of clutter-less rooms and streets emptied of people, the hustle and bustle of daily life is swept aside and time appears suspended. This timeless quality might help explain his enduring appeal today, but the enigma surrounding Hammershøi, his life and his work, no doubt plays an equally important role.
While her belief in the triumphant power of art anchors Hepworth in an ideology that, for some, fell out of fashion or became untenable after the atrocities of World War II, Hepworth maintained a lifelong optimism about what sculpture could do.
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