Galleries - March 2013

tribute to the painters of the past whom she admires. Her classically oriented sensibility seems to give her a particular affinity for Renaissance art and, in a work like Reclining Nude , for Titian and his Venus of Urbino. A love of Oriental painting is apparent too ( Golden Evening ) while, common to all her work, is an intense dreaminess, stillness and a wonderfully playful imagination. ( Jenny Blyth in association with Art Jericho, Oxford) Going Public After the post-Christmas/New Year changeover lull, some excellent new shows have opened in London’s public spaces. First up is the Royal Academy ’s blockbuster ‘Manet’ which, despite rather luke-warm reactions in some quarters (because it hasn’t got all the most famous examples of his work), is still an absolute joy. Manet hardly knows how to make a dull mark or a dull image – distinctly odd sometimes perhaps, but always startlingly arresting as in The Railway where no train is visible and one of the two figures has her back firmly turned to the viewer . . . Any show that has at least three of my favourite contemporary artists in it has to be a ‘must see’ but, James Turrell, Anthony McCall and Dan Flavin aside, there is a plethora of visual stunners in the Hayward ‘s latest exhibition, ‘The Light Show’, to draw attention to the extraordinary significance that pure light has had for contemporary practice over the last half-century. This is one of the most beautiful shows you are likely to see this year – thought- provoking, disorienting, disturbing and witty too. There couldn’t be more contrast between this and ‘Giorgio Morandi: Lines of Poetry‘ at the Estorick Collection. One of three shows there celebrating the gallery’s 15th birthday, this quietly undemonstrative and contemplative exhibition focuses exclusively on Morandi’s works on paper, the etchings and altogether less familiar watercolours. The same limited range of subject matter – still-life and landscape – as the painting still applies, while the different media serve to highlight Morandi’s often radical technical experimentation in ways not always apparent in the painted work. And whilst there don’t miss Nino Migliori’s delicate Polaroid re-visitations of Morandi’s landscape haunts neart Bologna or, for that matter, Alberto Fabio’s vibrant installation examining the connections between the cosmic and biological worlds and those of fine art . . . Meanwhile in Europe UK galleries meanwhile go to fairs all over the world now almost as a matter of course, a trend first set by the granddaddy of them all, TEFAF (15to 24 March) in Maastricht, which now shows some 260 galleries across a wide range of fields – Jewellery, Manuscripts, Classical Antiquities and Design as well as all the more ‘usual suspects’. Celebrating its 25th birthday in its present form last year and beginning in rather more modest circumstances 13 years before that, this is a fair that has benefited above all from its geography, situated on the Meuse and at the meeting point of three countries – Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands – and, as far as British dealers are concerned at least, from the advent of Eurostar also. Now a barely more arduous journey than say Leeds or Manchester (and a lot prettier it has to be said!) plenty of them are off there again this year, Marlborough, Waterhouse & Dodd, Osborne Samuel, Richard Nagy, Martyn Gregory, Mayor, Connaught Brown and Richard Green among them. And, being part of Europe still, doesn’t hurt business, here as in other fields. Fifty Up Patricia O’Brien has been a painter for 50 years and during that journey she has been paying 9. GALLERIES MARCH 13 S tanhope Forbes ‘A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach’ 1885, oil on canvas (detail), City Art Gallery, Plymouth, at Two Temple Place Patricia O’Brien ‘Reclining Nude’, Jenny Blyth at Art Jericho