Instantloveland was greatly saddened to learn of the death of painter John McLean on 12th June. Fittingly, Tate Britain have chosen to commemorate him with a simple plaque and a single canvas, ‘Opening’ of 1987. It’s...
Wallace Stevens, the poet laureate of Abstract Expressionism, had this to say about the creative act: ‘It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure.’ Full marks for Frank Bowling, then, by that reckoning: the half-dozen...
As far as Instantloveland is concerned, if you’re going to host a show of prints by Cy Twombly, an artist famously obsessed with classical antiquity, then ideally you’ll have the same handle as a hero of the Trojan War; and in this...
Could it be that abstraction has finally fallen in step with the zeitgeist? No longer a martyr laid to rest in the boneyard of rarefied aesthetic ideals, it has risen again as both observer and critic of the rise of the ‘mega city’ and...
Franz West was a child of post-war Vienna. Like so many Austrian artists of his generation, his thought and his art were shaped by the sense of living in the aftermath of unspeakable atrocities, and by the suspicion that the society...
Tate Liverpool’s major show of Fernand Léger- his first in Britain for 30 years- hosts the great Cubist innovator’s murals alongside 30-plus canvasses, not to mention publications, photographs, and experimental films. It’s clear from...
Tate Modern is really pulling in the crowds with its new show, ‘Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory’: it’s looking as if they may well have another monster Hockney-sized hit on their hands. Instantloveland braved the...
Riding in on the slipstream of its current show, ‘Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism’, RWA Bristol’s ‘Abstract Painting Now’, co-hosted by the University of Gloucestershire, is a one-day symposium focusing on ‘the current status...
Palimpsest, eh? Hard to spell; even harder to say, after the fourth visit to the punch bowl on New Year’s Eve; but very easy to love, as the countless Instagram snaps of peeling plaster and paint will testify: we’re all in...
