Head down to Temple tube station and emerge into a grey grizzly gloom that I suspect may be a presaging augury signalling the end of a short sunshiney autumn and the start of a long cold winter. And as I trudge my way up the slightly forlorn backstreets that lead into the bustling thoroughfare of … Continued
Head down to Piccadilly and then stroll along to Burlington House only to discover the erection of an unhappy interloper sited awkwardly within the central space of its beautifully proportioned car park piazza. Yes, once again, the Royal Academy’s decorators have come up with another entertaining way to clutter up the courtyard entrance to their … Continued
Down to Oxford Circus tube station for another morning orienteering my way around some of the smarter commercial galleries in the Bond Street quarter of the capital’s cultural Monopoly Board of artworld entertainment. First off is a ride up the small mirrored elevator that deposits me outside the heavy white doors of the fourth floor … Continued
Head down to Pimlico en route to get to Tate Britain but decide to make an unscheduled stop off at the Chelsea Space gallery. It’s only a relatively small display space here but the exhibitions, which tend to be centered around archives and ephemera rather than straightforward arrangements of paintings and sculptures, can usually be … Continued
Wake up today with an unhappy dyspeptic rumbling in the lower gastric regions and an unpleasant rhythmic thumping in the upper cranial compartments and, gazing upward, I find that the damp patch, that usually hangs like a soggy Damocletian sword on the ceiling directly above my recumbent self, is nowhere to be seen. Either I’ve … Continued
Hard to believe, but the Unvarnished blogsite has now been up and running for three long years which, I guess, means your humble scribe must have tapped out somewhere approaching a quarter of a million elegantly crafted words and posted around a thousand slightly blurry images. So, how is this landmark occasion to be … Continued
Go down to Tottenham Court Road tube station and then start heading in the direction of the British Museum before turning off at a right angle to get to the Paul Stolper gallery where there’s a succinct but rather neatly crafted exhibition by Gavin Turk. Entitled White Van Man, the display consists of a thematic … Continued
Head down to Waterloo and then stroll along to the Hayward Gallery where, following on from a couple of fairly disappointing one-person exhibitions – Andreas Gursky’s giant photographs and Lee Bul’s sculptures and installations – now comes a thematic group show which, sad to report, seems to me to offer yet again a rather depressing … Continued
After the last couple of blogging weeks spent on tourist trails searching out the highlights of Liverpudlian and Mancunion cultural life, it definitely feels like time to flee South and return home. And so after boarding a mainline train at Manchester’s Piccadilly terminal I’m pleased to be able to indulge in the kind of Modernistic … Continued
Following on from last week’s Liverpool blog, I’ve now travelled the thirty-odd miles in an easterly direction to arrive at one of the other great potential powerhouse cities of the North. Although the fact that the train journey took me almost an hour to get to Manchester is perhaps an indication of just how much … Continued