Category: Visual Art

Ties which bind us all

PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION REVIEW: IKHAYA LIKAYMOYA. A WOMAN’S FACE is drenched with baptismal fluid. Her expression is serene. Her eyes closed. Another woman holds her peer from behind, a call of fierceness on her lips, fervency in her posture. A child peeks solemnly through the fabric and drapery surrounding […]

What history has dished up for me

ART REVIEW: LOVE IS A DANGEROUS DRUG HOW DO YOU tell the story of a complicated life in a way that visitors to an exhibition can access, empathise with and take something away from, without detracting from your story? You have their attention for a fleeting 30 minutes, […]

Lucian, lionised

FILM REVIEW: LUCIAN FREUD – A SELF PORTRAIT THE CHANCE TO be able to get so close to the work of arguably the 20th century’s most important painter, Lucian Freud, that you can see the shadow between brushmarks, is phenomenal. Exhibition on Screen: Lucian Freud – A Self […]

Saving face

VISUAL ART HAS primeval, ritualistic roots; amid the moneyed operations of galleries and the cloying notion of commercially accessible easy art, sometimes those old levels of cruelty and wisdom poke through. When you encounter the current body of self-portraits by Steven Cohen, collectively entitled There’s glitter in my soup!, […]

Purple songs to heal

IT TAKES A special kind of boldness and confidence to fill a traditional gallery space in a way that pushes its capacity and radically shifts its limits. This was something you may have seen in Igshaan Adams’s exhibition last September, as it is something you will experience with […]

The elegance of the humble peg

IT’S EASY TO take a broom, a peg or an iron for granted in the daily conflagration of things that constitutes life itself. It’s about the daily grind of keeping dirt at bay as much as it is about presenting yourself in public, to say nothing of domesticity […]

Praise song to my mother’s skirts

THERE IS ALWAYS something completely seductive about the appearance of a queue of people. One after the other, each with their idiosyncrasies: it’s an understanding of humanity that honours their uniqueness but empathises with their common plight. And the logic and structure of a line of people is […]