Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PH
There’s a frustrating quote from Jeff Koons in the catalogue accompaniment to a new exhibition of his artwork at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. “I’ve tried to make work,” it says, “that any viewer, no matter where they came from […] would have to say that on some level “Yes, I like it.” If they couldn’t do that, it would only be because they had been told they were not supposed to.” Review by Rowland Bagnall
Further reading +Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke St, Oxford OX1 1BP
Six years before her death in 1970, Ryggen became the first female artist to represent Norway at the Venice Biennale, and, in more recent years, has been the subject of several important retrospectives. As the relationship between politics and the public continues to find its twenty-first century feet, the uncompromising boldness of Ryggen’s tapestries, seen in her current exhibition, Woven Histories, at Modern Art Oxford, and their gentle interrogation of questions concerning nationality, identity, inequality and storytelling seem all too strangely close to home. Review by Rowland Bagnall
Further reading +Imperial War Museum London, Lambeth Rd, London SE1 6HZ
The compulsion of artists to respond to certain events as they unfold, as exemplified by artists in Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11 at the Imperial War Museum, London, raises unavoidable questions concerning the relationship between aesthetics and morality. Review by Rowland Bagnall
Further reading +The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, London WC2N 5DN
Since the lockdown announcement on the 23rd March, galleries and museums across the UK have been emphasising the scope and availability of their digital collections, encouraging the public to engage with high-resolution reproductions of their artefacts online. Considering the work of art in the age of digital reproduction may not be a new phenomenon. And yet, the enthusiasm with which many institutions have been vocalising the accessibility of their archives on the Internet raises the volume on several important questions regarding the significance, if any, of the artwork as a physical, encounterable object, and the responsibility of museums to ensure that their collections are available online. Review by Rowland Bagnall
Further reading +Online
The Plicnik Space Initiative, a new artistic venture founded by Amelie Mckee and Melle Nieling, hosts its inaugural exhibition aboard the D02.2, a fictional spacecraft of massive proportions, with a mission to explore the boundary between physical and virtual space. As museums and galleries across the globe face uncertain futures in the wake of the pandemic, the show interrogates the parameters of digital curation, inviting imaginative responses to a range of pressing questions concerning art and the environment, technology, and commerce. Review by Rowland Bagnall
Further reading +Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Rd, London SE21 7AD
For many decades after its initial rise, the Abstract Expressionist movement remained synonymous with a distinctive iconography: cue the paint-splattered male, a tragic hero sprawled across the canvas. Although its cast is variously misleading...
Further reading +Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford, England
Above all, in America’s Cool Modernism at the Ashmolean Museum, the absence of human presence in the artworks betrays an anxiety towards the place of people in an increasingly mechanised world. I found myself thinking about the photographs of Detroit that surfaced several years ago, showing the derelict buildings and factories that remain in the wake of the city’s bankruptcy. Review by Rowland Bagnall
Further reading +National Portrait Gallery, St. Martin's Pl, London WC2H 0HE
The religious aspects of the exhibition are divided. Some works stand as testament to Jackson’s enigmatic international appeal. One room contains footage from the 1992 Dangerous world tour, revealing delirious crowds, a mass euphoria even outstripping Beatlemania: while the Fab Four played to 55,000 people at Shea Stadium in 1965, Jackson’s concert in Bucharest is estimated to have been attended by nearly 100,000. And the numbers don’t stop there: more than 1,000,000 fans are said to have congregated outside Jackson’s memorial service at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, while the televised spectacle itself is said to have been watched by more than 1,000,000,000 people worldwide. “We’re more popular than Jesus,” said Lennon of the Beatles in 1966. One wonders where this places Jackson. Review by Rowland Bagnall
Further reading +National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
Looking at some of Cole’s earliest American landscape paintings, made after his move to New York from Philadelphia in 1825, the contrast is arresting. The Edenic quality of his scenery is hard to miss. There’s a quiet stillness to paintings like ‘View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains’ (1827), in which the landscapes seem both fresh and undisturbed; not only are they new to Cole – and “new to Art”, as he writes in his journal – but they seem somehow newly created, as if the painting’s mists were rising from a just-finished topography. Review by Rowland Bagnall
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