Reviews

Big ideas: Egg Grows No 4 (1984)

Nam June Paik, Tate and FACT, Liverpool

Two shows spell out the brilliance of a pioneer who saw that cleverness was not enough

Inside Reviews

Fiona Banner: The Naked Ear, Frith Street Gallery, London (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 17 December 2010

Fiona Banner's current installation in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, Harrier and Jaguar (2010), sees two fighter planes dominating one of the grand spaces of the museum. It's an uncomfortable triple sublime: force x power x impressive aesthetics, but oddly underwhelming as art. Elsewhere in London, at Frith Street Gallery, is a literal echo of that installation. An enormous bell greets you at the gallery, hung low from supports in the ceiling. The sculpture is ominously named Tornado (2010) has been cast from the melted-down fuselage of a Tornado jet fighter – a deadly efficient machine of war. For whom does this bell toll? The idea of a deep, sonorous bell ring rings with signification: the passing of time, births, deaths and marriages. A large single bell like this, however, given its name and its history, is more likely to bring to mind mourning, warning and doom. The death-knell. How many times did this particular plane bring about death and destruction? Nearby is a stack of every copy of Jane's All the World's Aircraft, from 1909-2010. A heap of language that describes only destructive capability and armature, freed from the bloodshed, the conflict and the history of the wars for which such impressive machines are made.

Mondrian / De Stijl, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Sunday, 12 December 2010

This fascinating show charts Mondrian's journey from Dutch landscapes to abstract grids, and his obsession with geometry – and the colour green

Exhibition #3, curated by Sir Peter Blake, The Museum of Everything, London (Rated 4/ 5 )

Friday, 10 December 2010

There are surreal pleasures to be found all over Britain. Old amusement arcades in seaside towns, cranky ghost trains at funfairs and stuffy, outdated museums can appear wild in their sideways creativity. It is these objects – spooky, hilarious and made outside the formal world of art – that are explored in the Museum of Everything, a pop-up exhibit drawn from the collection of James Brett, a collector of outsider art, that opened in Primrose Hill last October. This week it was announced that the museum will stage its inaugural run in Russia, at Dasha Zhukova's Garage in Moscow, next year.

GSK Contemporary: Aware – Art Fashion Identity, Royal Academy, London

Sunday, 5 December 2010

Curators may suggest that artists and designers are of the same stock, but, while there are some lovely things here, art is art – and a frock is a frock.

The Slice: Cutting to See Architectural Association Gallery, London

Sunday, 5 December 2010

Beauty is in the beholding of the eye – whichever way you slice it.

The Tiger in Asian Art, Asia House, London (Rated 4/ 5 )

Friday, 3 December 2010

Treasures of a different stripe

Philippe Parreno, Serpentine Gallery, London

Sunday, 28 November 2010

Film, installations and surprises blend in Parreno's typically off-beat show

Leon Kossoff, Annely Juda Fine Art, London (Rated 4/ 5 )

Friday, 26 November 2010

The painter Leon Kossoff, who is currently working with some vigour through the particular challenges of his ninth decade, has never been an artist who has readily engaged with nature. What do we know him for then? Portraits filled with existential anguish, often of a sitter (or sitters – he often paints pairs) that he has known for decades; railway junctions, chock-full of the fever of their characteristic comings and goings; building sites; street scenes; the occasional wild patternings of a teeming public swimming pool. And, a far graver and more sober theme altogether, the teetering, vertiginous grandeur of Christ Church, Spitalfields, which he has painted over and over again. Where has nature been in all of this? Little present is the answer.