Art & Photography /
AnOther Thing I Wanted to Tell You

Alasdair Gray on the Horse's Mouth

Alasdair Gray has described himself as “an increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”, a tag that somewhat downplays the author and artist’s reputation as one of the most radical and significant creative minds to come out of Scotland in the last century.

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Matt Johnson’s Odalisque

Matt Johnson’s Odalisque looks like it’s just been pinched into life from a bit of modelling clay. The head of this reclining figure is a blob that might have been rolled between finger and thumb while the feet and hands look like putty flippers. In

Art & Photography /
Culture Talks

Inside Frieze

n spite of a somewhat cooler market, this year’s Frieze Art Fair is as eye-popping a jamboree as ever. Just beyond Elmgreen and Dragset’s (replica) Asian boy suspended on a high diving board at the fair’s entrance, take a turn down a pristine narrow

Art & Photography /
In Pictures

Frieze highlights

This Wednesday the Frieze Art Fair opens for five glorious days of high art and people watching. Over 170 international galleries are attending London’s art Mecca, and this year’s specially commissioned projects to earmark in advance include Cartier

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Pablo Bronstein’s Walker

In a ruched ivory mini dress, white stilettos and a statement necklace of big glossy pearls, the woman in Pablo Bronstein’s latest video, Walker, is the embodiment of 1980s chic-turned-cheap. Everything about this elegant blonde says new money

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Elina Brotherus

For her latest film, The Black Bay Sequence, Finnish artist Elina Brotherus walks nude into what must be the bracingly icy waters of an Arctic lake. Her movements are calm and purposeful as she makes her way into the vast landscape of sky and water,

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Big Lobster Supper by Artist Jess Flood-Paddock

The truck-size lobster is breaking through the end of the world. His claws, with pincers already trussed for the cooking pot, are ripping through a banner of summery cloud-flecked sky. He wants out...

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Sally Mann's Swamp Bones, 1996

The black roots in Sally Mann’s Swamp Bones certainly seem more carcass than tree. But a cadaver, with its mass of rotting flesh flopped belly down like the ones Mann’s photographed elsewhere, seems a far too physical comparison. Surrounded by

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Jim Hodges’ A Diary of Flowers

The pages of Jim Hodges’ A Diary of Flowers are but flimsy tissue, smudged with inky images of petals in ballpoint black and Biro blue. Comprising a total of 565 finely wrought doodles on cheap restaurant napkin...

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Sculpture by Jim Lambie at the Hayward Gallery

Jim Lambie’s sculpture Bed Head looks all dolled-up and ready to rock. Featuring thousands of plastic buttons hand-stitched on a mattress, at first sight its cheap and cheerful materials appear to be a glittering jewel-like encrustation.

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Japanese art: Yudangami by Tabaimo

Tabaimo’s animations are spooky and spectacular. For the Japanese art star’s latest installation, Yudangami (or Careless Hair), a circular room hung with black drapes plunges you into near total darkness. It’s like being in a cave, or inside

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

The Blaschka’s Sea Creatures

Apparently, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do the bottom of the ocean. The pickled menagerie currently on show at London’s Natural History Museum, certainly confirms that there’s far more going on beneath the waves than most of

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

A Wedgwood Dress Sword

There are two tiny Wedgwood cameos embedded in the hilt of this sword. In ivory against a washed-out blue, they depict a weapon-wielding duo. The first is the Archangel Michael holding his spear aloft, with his vast wings outstretched; the second

Fashion & Beauty /
Exhibit A

Class Reunion by Nairy Baghramian

Class Reunion is a gathering of sleek, slinky sculptures by the Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian. Playing around with old modernist ideas about abstraction and artistic purity, she’s given these gangly bits of painted metal and coloured rubber