Summer competitions 2023!

Shortlisted 2022 – Lotte Mocatta, age 12 Here are details of a dazzling number of art competitions for your children to enter over the summer – Competitions are a great way to encourage art at home and many of them allow you to look at previous years’ winners which is very inspiring.  Please check the […]

Alice : Curiouser and Curiouser V&A

Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865 by Charles Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Caroll, a story of a young girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of strange creatures and topsy-turvy adventures – Alice has been translated into 170 languages, sold millions of copies, inspired films, art, pop and […]

“Gauguin Portraits” at The National Gallery until 26 January 2020

Paul Gauguin, ‘Christ in the Garden of Olives’, 1889 Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903)  Father of Modern Art, with hyper-real colours, exaggerated body proportions, strong contrasts and mystical symbols.  A banker turned artist, he abandoned his middle-class life and family and sailed to Tahiti  seeking primitive beauty.  He dreamed of pursuing art in paradise.  French born, […]

Edvard Munch – “Love and Angst” at the British Museum: 11 April – 21 July 2019

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child 1, 1896 (detail) Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) is Norway’s most famous artist and father of Expressionism, his iconic Scream is a symbol of modern day anxiety and rivals Mona Lisa in “recognisability” even having its own emoji. Born in Kristiania (modern day Oslo), Munch – pronounced “Munc” – rejected his […]

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up – at the V&A from Saturday, 16 June 2018

Frida Kahlo, communist revolutionary and feminist icon, was born in Mexico in 1907 and is one of the most recognised artists of the 20th century.  As a young child she contracted polio so her right leg was thinner and shorter than the left which she tried to conceal with large-skirted dresses.  Tragically, as a teenager, […]

Rachel Whiteread – newly opened Retrospective at Tate Britain until 21 January 2018

Chicken Shed  (2017), inspired by a chicken shed in Norfolk. Photo: Rachel Whiteread/Tate Whiteread is a contemporary English artist who creates mainly sculptures, usually casts of the inside of objects – negative space – which bear the marks of every day human use – eg “One Hundred Spaces” (pictured), an installation of 100 jewel-like resin […]

Grayson Perry at the Serpentine until 10 September 2017 – ‘The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!’

Perry’s pots – Brexiteers and Remainers Grayson Perry’s new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery provocatively – as ever the master of iconoclasm – titled The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! centres round 2 large pots which record the Nation’s feelings about Brexit: one pot representing the Brexiteers and the other the Remainers. The pots are sized […]

Alberto Giacometti – UK’s first major retrospective at Tate Modern until 10 September 2017

Alberto Giacometti with his plaster sculptures at the Venice Biennale, 1956. Photograph: Alinari/Roger-Viollet Alberto Giacometti was born in the Swiss Alps in 1901, eldest son of a well-known Impressionist painter.  He is famous for his tall, thin, bleak figures – humans honed almost to knife sharpness. He began his artistic career as a Surrealist but […]

Turner Prize – Demystified

Hurvin Anderson, Is it OK to be black?  2016.  (Detail) The Turner Prize was set up in 1984 to encourage wider appreciation of contemporary art and has become one of the best known visual art prizes in the world.  Each year 4 artists are short-listed. They must be “British” which means either working mainly in […]

America After the Fall – at The Royal Academy until 4th June 2017

Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940. Oil on canvas. 66.7 x 102.2 cm. Collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1943 Photo © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence The Fall  was the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 which triggered the greatest economic depression in US history. […]