‘Alan Gouk at 80’, at the Hampstead School of Art, is a modest show with immodest ambitions. Five paintings- four of them mural-sized- hang in the ground floor exhibition space, with a batch of works on paper in a room beyond. These...
It’s the early 1970s in America. You’re contemplating launching yourself as a painter on the New York art scene. And for you, life is far from easy; there’s never been a less propitious time for practising your chosen art form. Caught...
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...
