Hung floor to ceiling: the salon wall returns
A wall crammed frame-to-frame, top to cornice, on deep red damask. The salon hang is making a comeback, and with it an older, busier way of looking.
Art · 5 min
On Looking
The Gallery
Rooms I've stood in for too long — paintings, sculpture, and the occasional wall hung floor to ceiling. Notes from the galleries, old and new.
Inside the white cube, where nothing is allowed to distract
The modern gallery is engineered to disappear: white walls, grey floor, light from nowhere. It's the most ideological neutral room ever built.
Art · 4 min
The weight of bronze, and the bodies inside it
A bronze figure folds in on itself, dark and burnished. Sculpture is the one art form you can't take in from a single spot — you have to walk around it.
Art · 4 min
El Greco's impossible greens
El Greco painted bodies that stretch toward heaven and skies the colour of a bruise. The Old Masters were stranger, and more modern, than the textbooks let on.
Art · 5 min
Colour as feeling, and the painting that won't sit still
Strip away the subject and what's left? In the best abstraction, colour stops describing the world and starts behaving like a mood you've walked into.
Art · 4 min