The thin line between Art and Craft gets slimmer as artists like Carlos Zuniga ignore the borders and delve into hands-on production processes. This Chilean photographer, architect and graphic designer works compulsively on large, imposing portraits and landscapes using intensely obsessive techniques.
“Hot sweaty tight jammed in can’t breathe heart pumping centre of the universe Monday night action in town. Racing down to Bar Rumba at midnight through the blaring siren wailing darkness of south London to the tinsel town wet streeted fakeness of the West End and the That’s How it Is sessions, Gilles Peterson, James Lavelle, UFO, Patrick Forge, Roni Size spin…” [sic] Peter Williams, London, 1994.
The winner of the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Prize was announced yesterday, and as with most prizes you know there must be an element of compromise when it comes to selecting the shortlist. David Chancellor’s winning portrait of a 14-year-old game hunter from Alabama, mounted on a horse with a dead buck draped across its neck (2), is certainly striking. So too, are the second and third prize-winners - the second, Portrait of My British Wife by Panayiotis Lamprou (9), doubly so, since it reveals more than one might expect to see in the context of this annual award.
The National Portrait Gallery was early in picking up on the momentum gathering around photography in 2003, and committed itself then to an annual prize for portraiture. Today it’s one of the most anticipated competition exhibitions in the UK, and always exciting, fascinating and memorable. For many of the 60 exhibited photographers, it is often life-changing. This year’s submission exceeded 6,000 entries, all physical prints as the gallery still fends off digital domination. Part of the fun of the show is spotting any new trends in style, technique or subjects.
Cider, bulls and a beautifully restored cathedral which hosts the annual Three Choirs Festival are probably the key elements used to brand Hereford. But for 20 years, the city has also been home to the UK’s first photography festival. This month, its anniversary is being celebrated in several venues with the focus on Twenty, an exhibition at the charmingly old-fashioned Museum and Gallery where 20 significant photographers share wall space with a gigantic stuffed pike.
Nottingham always had an eye for beauty. When I was growing up near there, the boast was that its women were the most beautiful in England. Today, it could and should be boasting about Caruso St John’s magnificent concrete landmark adorned with green and gold, the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery and the seventh British Art Show. The Contemporary is linked (magically for London Tube riders) by trams to the two other venues, the film-based New Art Exchange and Nottingham Castle's Museum and Art Gallery where the legendary Sheriff’s Long Hall is now a series of glass-ceilinged galleries, and walls once hung with tapestries are adorned with canvases.
Mick Rock (b 1948) captured some of rock's most provocative and memorable images: David Bowie at the height of his Ziggy Stardust androgyny; Debbie Harry looking every inch the Marilyn Monroe of punk; Lou Reed sweating beneath his Kabuki make-up - indeed, The Faces of Rock'n'Roll, as a new book surveying four decades of his photographs is titled.
The lens loved Mick. Those child-bearing lips, to use Joan Rivers’s ripe phrase, always came up a treat in photographs. Did it ever love Keith quite so much? Ever since he started creosoting himself in eyeliner and crumbling like an oxidising mummy before our very eyes, he has been the incarnation of the photogenic rock wreck. Once upon a time, though, when The Rolling Stones were at their creative zenith, the Human Riff presented a young and even ingenuous mug to the camera.
Those who want a taste of the way the West End used to be - that's to say, bustling star vehicles where the furniture isn't the only amply upholstered aspect of the evening - will relish When We Are Married, the 1938 J B Priestley comedy that tends to hove into view every 10 or 15 years, or thereabouts. But I wonder whether theatrical pleasure-seekers will be prepared for the tetchiness and rancour that have come to the fore of this once time-honoured comic warhorse. Indeed, take away the rather hurriedly upbeat finish and you could be mistaken for thinking that Strindberg had suddenly relocated to Yorkshire.
The Celtic Tiger ran rampant through Ireland during the boom years of 1995-2007 when national institutions expanded their collections, galleries popped up and collectors, buyers and artists had a rare time. With literature, the new young Chick Lit writers made their mark, sometimes even outselling the serious contemporaries, and Seamus Heaney rightly got a Nobel Prize. With the crash, prices in Dublin’s major art auction houses fell by 50 per cent as the blinged-up property developers froze; if they did buy, they shifted from contemporary to reassuringly Irish "genre paintings" of peasants in rural landscapes and thatched cottages by the sea.