In the gallery’s imposing rotunda, where Damien Hirst’s pickled shark and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed once epitomised the in-your-face aesthetic of Young British Art, a series of large, garish paintings now holds sway. Of these, the most challenging is a self-portrait by Martin Kippenberger, a painting which confirms that men with giant beer bellies probably should not pose in their underwear.
“The Beach at Walberswick”
by Philip Wilson Steer
A Picture of Britain, which begins in the summer, will describe how the British landscape has been represented by artists from the 18th century to the present day, and how their vision has informed our perception of the countryside.
This exhibition explores the art and culture of the Turks from Inner Asia to the Bosphorus over a thousand year period between 600 and 1600 AD. Their journey incorporated many different centres of power and artistic traditions. The story begins with the Uighurs, a nomadic people of Central Asia and China, and ends with the Ottoman Empire from the reign of Mehmet II to Suleyman the Magnificent including the fall of Byzantium and the spread of Ottoman rule to include Mecca and Medina.
‘Saint Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre’
by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (1480-1548)
Several years ago, artist David Hockney published a controversial book claiming that some famed Renaissance painters may have used optical projection systems to achieve the amazing realism achieved on their canvases. Stanford university physicist and art historian David Stork disagrees with Hockney’s theory.
The left photograph was taken after the Cleveland Museum of Art staff used acetone and methylene chloride to clean and restore the painting. The right half was taken after Glenn researchers used the atomic oxygen technique to clean the painting.
He was the quintessential Edwardian painter. His canvases are coloured by the glamour of the age - and its tensions. His personality was the product of its impulses. William Orpen came from Stillorgan in county Dublin to London’s Slade School of Fine Art in 1897, as the most talented of an earlier Britart generation produced by distinguished teachers, Fred Brown, Philip Wilson Steer and Henry Tonks.
To the dustmen of Frankfurt, they were a mess that needed to be cleared from the streets of their spotless city. The yellow plastic sheets were swiftly scooped up, crushed and burned.
But the diligence of the rubbish collectors was little consolation to the city’s prestigious art academy, which is now ruing the loss of an important work.
Unknown to the binmen, the sheets were part of a city-wide exhibition of modern sculpture by Michael Beutler, a graduate of Frankfurt’s Städel art school.
The Northern Ireland Visual Arts Forum will be holding the first of it’s Annual Lectures in the Ulster Museum on Friday 18th February at 7.00pm.
The lecture which is in association with the Ulster Museum and the Ormeau Baths Gallery will be given by Sir Christopher Frayling, Vice Provost of the Royal College of Art and Chair of the Arts Council of England, who will speak on the subject of The New Bauhaus (New Art and Design in the 21st Century)
Tickets for the event are available from the Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Stranmillis, Belfast. (tel. 028 9038 3000) or the Ormeau Baths Gallery, 18a Ormeau Avenue, Belfast (Tel. 028 9032 1402), priced £5.00 (NIVAF Members £3.00). NIVAF members should apply through the NIVAF Office on 028 90 926062.
The workshop where Leonardo da Vinci first met and may have begun painting the woman he immortalised as the Mona Lisa has been discovered in a military college.
