Portfolios of photographs, art and design

Production Gallery: Russell Maliphant's AfterLight

Charlotte MacMillan's atmospheric photographs of a magical new dancework inspired by Nijinsky

New photographs by Charlotte MacMillan of Russell Maliphant's expanded Afterlight, a mesmerising new dancework premiered at Sadler's Wells this week. The portfolio adds stills from the substantial new sections to ones she took a year ago of the opening solo created for a Diaghilev tribute programme.

Art Gallery: Pordenone Montanari, An Italian Discovery

A reclusive painter comes out into the light. Is he a lost genius?

Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.

The Art of Conducting 2010

TAD AT 5 AT THE PROMS: THE ART OF CONDUCTING 2010 First of resident photographer Chris Christodoulou's galleries capturing stick-wavers in full flight

Maestros in full flight are unwittingly entertaining, as Chris Christodoulou's photos show

Chris Christodoulou has been honing his focus on conductors in past Proms seasons to wonderful effect, but this year has produced a galaxy of master portraits that outdoes even the immortal cartoons of Gerard Hoffnung in entertainment value. We’ve featured many of them throughout our reviews of two months of Proms. Here Chris makes his selection of favourites. Click on a picture to enter the slideshow. All pictures © Chris Christodoulou. 

Art Gallery: Fourth Plinth Commission

A playfully subversive mood dominates this strong shortlist

A playful, subversive mood dominates the shortlist for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Most of the six proposals, in what is a very strong shortlist, play on notions of British identity, probing themes of heroism, heritage and conquest. The models, which include a cock (the winged variety), a cake and a kid on a rocking horse, were unveiled yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson. Two winners will be selected next spring, with the first appearing on the Plinth at the end of next year. The six are:

Photo Gallery: A Century Apart, James Ravilious & John Wheeley Gutch

Cameras change, centuries pass, but photographers stay the same

Life changes at such speed in cities that it seems as if all the world must move at the same pace. Photographs prove otherwise. Looking at the two portfolios of West Country photographs below, you could surely not readily believe that more than a century separates them. James Ravilious's Devonian sheepfarmers and John Wheeley Gutch's Cornish fishermen have worked natural resources for centuries - the fact that the images lie 130 years apart are purely an indication that while technique changes, human interest does not.

 

James Ravilious

 

Photo Gallery: Bolshoi Ballet class by Charlotte MacMillan

Principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev remembers his own schooling at the Kirov

Charlotte MacMillan took these exclusive pictures last week of the Bolshoi corps de ballet in class. The pictures brought back memories of his training to English National Ballet's Kirov-trained principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev, as he prepares to perform Michael Corder's Cinderella at the Coliseum next month. A regular coach for younger dancers after 17 years in the company, he has a keen eye for the training differences between his native land and his adopted country.

Art Gallery: Terry Setch - Lavernock

Sumptuous paintings of the post-industrial Welsh coastline from an underrated master

Terry Setch can lay claim to being the most underrated artist in Britain. Not that the Cardiff-based Londoner has been entirely neglected: acclaimed as one of Britain’s most powerful painters by his contemporary John Hoyland, he’s been garlanded with awards, granted a retrospective at The Serpentine and was recently made an RA. Yet Setch (born 1936) has still had nothing like the recognition he deserves as one of Britain’s most intelligent and inventive painters. And the crime for which he’s been sentenced to this relative obscurity: simply, not being based in London, but in Wales.

Art Gallery: Howard Hodgkin - Time and Place

Enter the colour-saturated world of an artist often compared to Matisse

Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the paintings more as objects than as two-dimensional surfaces. Tate Britain’s major 2006 retrospective surveyed his work over six decades, but a new exhibition, at Modern Art Oxford, is a tightly focused affair: paintings executed by the 77-year-old artist over the last decade, including a body of new work. They offer a window on to a brilliant, colour-saturated world.

Art Gallery: Ray Lowry - London Calling

A new exhibition pays tribute to one of the great sleeve designs

It’s hard to believe that it’s 30 years since the release of The Clash's London Calling, an album that sounds as vital, immediate and relevant today as it did then. Yet there are probably people who remain more familiar with London Calling’s iconic cover than the music contained on the two discs of shiny black vinyl that came with it. Perhaps that’s one reason a new exhibition inspired by London Calling is about the cartoonist and illustrator Ray Lowry, rather than The Clash or the album itself.

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