Tenuous Thematic

Head down to Piccadilly and the Royal Academy for the first big blockbuster exhibition of the New Year and I’m pleased to be able to report that the show is a good one. Picasso and Paper fills the dozen or so galleries of the main exhibition space with a cascade of works – drawings, cut-outs, … Continued

Blind Tasting

After the last couple of New Year blogs that have almost exclusively featured the work of women artists, normal service is now being resumed with a quick dash around half a dozen private galleries all of which are exclusively now showing sculptures, paintings and prints by men. Clearly, it’s a situation that reflects the wider … Continued

Felicitous Phrasing

In the Review section of last week’s Observer Sunday paper – along with all the usual bland reports from the in-house critics, plus the mini-interviews with semi-celebrities that I’ve never heard of and the sudoku puzzles that I can never quite be bothered to finish off – there was a whole great cut-out-and-keep supplement devoted … Continued

Meaty Spectrum

Getting on the tube heading off to Tottenham Court Road, I pick up one of those free Metro papers that are scattered around the capital every morning in order to try to tempt commuters to forgo their daily digital routines of swiping through video clips, updating profiles and deciphering emojistic pictograms, and switch instead to … Continued

Orpheus or Edith

Having ended last year’s final blog by exiting the Royal Academy under the steely gaze of Lucian Freud‘s penetrating vision, I thought I’d risk turning round and, just like Orpheus or Edith, take a metaphorical look back and try to hack together a sort of review of the last year’s fifty or so trips into … Continued