Giovanni Battista Moroni - Royal Academy of Arts

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Young Lady, c1560-65

Giovanni Battista Moroni is at the Royal Academy of Arts until 25 January 2015.
This is a thrilling opportunity to see a comprehensive display of Moroni's exquisite portraits. Moroni (1520/4 - 1579) lived and worked in, and around, Bergamo in northern Italy painting the local nobility and other residents. While this is certainly the first major survey of his work to be seen in this country, Moroni is not quite the undiscovered master that some press reports seem to suggest - a fine collection of his work will be familiar to visitors to the National Gallery where they have been on show since their purchase in the 1860s and 70s.
Read reviews by Laura Cumming, Richard Dorment, Waldemar Januszczak, Jonathan Jones, Charles Hope and a 'preview' by Claudia Pritchard.
Click on images to enlarge.

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Lady ('La Dama in Rosso'), c1556-60

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Isotta Brembati, c1555

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Gian Girolamo Albani, c1570

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Gian Gerolamo Grumelli, c1560

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Prospero Alessandri, c1560

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Don Gabriel de la Cueva, Count of Albuquerque, 1560

René Burri, 1933 - 2014

René Burri, Self-Portrait, Coronado, New Mexico, 1973/83

René Burri, photographer, died on 20 October, 2014.
René Burri, a longstanding member of Magnum, was perhaps the archetypal photojournalist in the heyday of that profession: he travelled the world filing work for Life, Paris-Match, Stern, Du, The Sunday Times and many others. He covered the Vietnam War, the Suez crisis, made work with Picasso, Le Corbusier and Che Guevara. In her obituary notice Amanda Hopkinson says he "combined an ability to get along with people with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s knack for disappearing into a crowd."
Read obituaries in The Guardian, The New York Times and at Phaidon; read a short interview with Burri on his 'best shot'; watch a short video in which Burri talks about the making of six of his most iconic photographs; watch a video of Burri talking about colour photography.

René Burri, Che Guevara, 1963

René Burri, Picasso, 1957

René Burri, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 1960

René Burri, Former Summer Palace. Dead lotus flowers on the Kunming Lake, Beijing, 1964

René Burri, San Cristobal, Mexico City, 1976

René Burri, Moscow, 1988

René Burri,Warsaw, 1989

René Burri, Beirut, Lebanon, 1991

René Burri, Havanna, Cuba, 1993

Ray K. Metzker, 1931 - 2014

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, photographer, died on 9 October 2014.
Ray Metzker was an original and stylish Modernist photographer. He was trained at the Institute of Design, Chicago  - originally founded as the New Bauhaus - where he studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He consistently experimented with the formal possibilities of black and white photography in single images as well as 'composites' of multiple exposures. His pictures are bold, dramatic, high contrast images pushed to the edge of, and into, abstraction. He seems to have had a bit of a thing about cars - and, since I do too, my selection of his work here is exclusively from those featuring cars. This may not be fully representative of the breadth of his work - but they are all great images!
Read an obituary in The New York Times; see more images at Laurence Miller Gallery.
Click on images to enlarge.

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Spain, 1960

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1964

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1980

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Marseille, 1961

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1964

Ray K. Metzker, Washington DC, 1964

Anselm Kiefer - RA: Annenberg Courtyard: Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War. Time, Dimension of the World, Battles at Sea Occur Every 317 Years or Multiples Thereof, Namely 317 x 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . . . . . ., 2011-14

Selected images of Anselm Kiefer's installation - Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War. Time, Dimension of the World, Battles at Sea Occur Every 317 Years or Multiples Thereof, Namely 317 x 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . . . . . ., 2011-1 - in the Annenberg Courtyard in front of the RA; the installation is part of Anselm Kiefer, a wonderful exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts until 14 December 2014 - see also blog entry below. (Click on images to enlarge.)
The work  is described, by the RA, as follows:

Anselm Kiefer often dedicates his works to intriguing figures of the past, be they poets or philosophers. This piece is one of a number of works emerging from Kiefer’s ongoing exploration of the Russian Futurist avant-garde writer, theorist and absurdist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922).

After years of study, Khlebnikov concluded that a major sea battle took place every 317 years, or multiples thereof. Kiefer celebrates this heroic and ludicrous activity with a work that is both monument and anti-monument. Measuring almost 17 metres in total and consisting of two large glass vitrines, Kiefer creates a transparent, reflective sea-scape in three dimensions that calls to mind the Romantic sublime of painters from JMW Turner to Caspar David Friedrich. Kiefer uses the frames of the vitrines to stage a mysterious drama, in which viewers, seeing each other and their own reflections, become participants.

Sigmar Polke - Tate Modern

Sigmar Polke, Girlfriends, 1965/6

Whenever I read a positive article about Sigmar Polke I am filled with enthusiasm. I love the idea of an artist who makes work about sausages and socks; I am highly sympathetic to the ethos which is typically ascribed to his work: curator Mark Godfrey described him as an alchemist in reverse, "Gold seems to be turned into shit… We see [his work] more in terms of contamination and poison. It’s not really about transformation to raise things up – almost everything becomes toxic." His work is messy and confusing: "Polke’s paintings could be cantankerous and awkward and weirdly ugly, and could also leave you standing on the brink of beauty, wallowing in gorgeous colour." (Adrian Searle.) I like its roots in 'Capitalist Realism', his and Richter's sceptical response to Pop; I love the idea of its bloody-minded resistance to easy consumption. Which is also, unfortunately, just my problem - when I have actually seen his work I am often left feeling I don't quite 'get' it and frustrated. However, I will go to this retrospective (enthusiastically reviewed by Adrian Searle and Richard Dorment) and try again.

Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Waldemar Januszczak, Richard Dorment and a preview by Holly Williams. 

Sigmar Polke, The Sausage Eater, 1963

Sigmar Polke, Alice in Wonderland, 1971

Sigmar Polke, Heron Painting II, 1968

Sigmar Polke, Polke as Astronaut, 1968

Sigmar Polke, Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, 1963

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan), 1974-8

Richard Serra - Gagosian

Richard Serra, Dead Load, 2014, forged steel

Richard Serra is at Gagosian, London until 28 February 2015.
Four tremendous steel sculptures by Richard Serra are on show at Gagosian's Britannia Street gallery and a five metre 'drawing' is on display at their Davies Street gallery until 22 November. I haven't seen the latter but can vouch for the power of the sculptures. As the artist explained in an exchange with Adrian Searle the selected works offer "different ways to approach a field or a space or a context". Dead Load presents the literal embodiment of massive, dead weight; Backdoor Pipeline is a huge, curved, elliptical tunnel through which the viewer can walk to experience the interplay of convex and concave and the changing play of light and dark; Ramble is a room full of 24 upright slabs of steel of varying dimensions between which one has to navigate a route; finally, London Cross is perhaps the 'classic' Serra in which one threateningly enormous wall of steel is balanced, above head height, diagonally across another. Thrilling stuff.
Read Adrian Searle's review. Watch a video tour of the installation. (All photographs by Mike Bruce / Gagosian.)

Richard Serra, Backdoor Pipeline, 2010

Richard Serra, Ramble, 2014

Richard Serra, London Cross, 2014

Richard Serra, Double Rift #2, 2011 (Painstick on handmade paper - at Davies Street gallery)