MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
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Exhibition round-up
Picasso, Bruce Nauman, Barnett Freedman and more
Picasso and Paper, at the Royal Academy
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
This strange year began and ended with survey exhibitions of two influential giants of 20th-century art.
Picasso and Paper filled the Royal Academy’s large exhibition rooms from January to August, while Bruce Nauman’s ongoing exhibition at Tate Modern opened in October. Their subjects and materials may differ but by cracking open the sacred aesthetic canons of their respective eras, both artists dramatically widened the forms of expression for future generations.
Curated in a refreshingly straightforward way, the Picasso exhibition provided a chronological survey of his work. His decisiveness and powers of concentration and observation shone out from his childhood drawing of a dog through to the confident sweep of brush and ink of his large, late drawings.
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CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s
CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany
CHRISTINE LINDEY salutes an outstanding exhibition imbued with a sense of national guilt
CHRISTINE LINDEY surveys the cosmopolitan, enigmatic compositions of an idiosyncratic artist whose work speaks of mystery and exile
