Arts news

• NGV Triennial: astounding blockbuster grips the heart ... and repels the nostrils | Brigid Delaney

  17-12-2017 18:00
  At first blush the Triennial is playful – but it is also an unflinching exploration of the modern worldThe Triennial, the most ambitious event mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria and one of the most exciting exhibitions ever mounted in Australia, is a serious, intelligent exhibition that assumes globalisation as fact, and examines its consequences. Many pieces are focused on the movement of people, particularly refugees; still more deal with technology, wealth, inequality and the r
  
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• NGV Triennial: astounding blockbuster grips the heart ... and repels the nostrils

  17-12-2017 18:00
  At first blush the Triennial is playful – but it is also an unflinching exploration of the modern worldIt sounds boring to say that visiting one of the most exciting exhibitions ever mounted in Australia is like reading the Economist, but that’s what Triennial feels like. Except as well engaging the head, it grips at the heart.The most ambitious event mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria is a serious, intelligent exhibition that assumes globalisation as fact, and examines its
  
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• Our modern designs for life are no oil painting | David Mitchell

  17-12-2017 10:59
  The dominance of modern art in galleries is reflected in minimal, ‘designed’ style in the home – but why should we clear our comfy clutter and gilt frames?My parents are the owners of what I’m pretty sure is a bad painting of Neath Abbey. I can’t be completely certain because I know nothing about painting and I’ve never seen Neath Abbey. But it doesn’t look much like anything I have seen, so I’m willing to believe it looks like Neath Abbey. Th
  
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• Howard Hodgkin remembered by Alan Hollinghurst

  17-12-2017 09:00
  6 August 1932 – 9 March 2017
  The novelist recalls how he became great friends with Hodgkin after the artist offered to design his new book jacket• Peter Hall remembered by David HareI first saw paintings by Howard Hodgkin at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, when I was a graduate student. They were vivid, complex and highly individual, shimmering seductively between public and private – you glimpsed intimacies veiled in the very moment of being declared. Howard himself
  
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• Azzedine Alaïa remembered by Julian Schnabel

  17-12-2017 09:00
  26 February 1935 – 18 November 2017
  The painter and film-maker remembers the French-Tunisian fashion designer, his best friend of 35 years• Ugo Ehiogu remembered by Gareth SouthgateThere is supposed to be a permanence about death. Not sure what that means. Azzedine left home, left his atelier a lot of times without his cellphone. It was a way not to be bothered, to be free during the day, and we all understood and waited for Mr Alaïa to appear. Everyone waited and knew he would b
  
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• From Life review – lacking a vital spark

  17-12-2017 08:59
  Royal Academy, London
  A confused survey of life drawing offers little in the way of fresh observation, or hope for the future of a dying artYou cannot draw, and yet you are an artist. Might this be a contradiction in terms? It would have been, a century ago. Even comparatively recently, art students were required to study anatomy, sketch classical casts in the sculpture court and stand for hours drawing professional models as twilight fell in the studio. To draw was to see, to understand, t
  
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• Spare us the moral hysteria that threatens a new age of censorship | Rachel Cooke

  17-12-2017 01:05
  The muddle over sexual behaviour is already proving dangerous for free expression in the artsTo the casual eye, George Devine made for an unlikely-seeming revolutionary. In Howard Coster’s 1934 photograph, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, he looks like nothing so much as a master at Greyfriars School, his spectacles horn-rimmed, his hair neatly oiled. Only the flamboyant angle of the hand that holds his cigarette suggests the reality: this was the actor who, as the direc
  
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