Art

Ofili is back at the National Gallery with this totally tropical, sumptuous and absolutely gorgeous tapestry. What a return.

Vanessa Bell spent her life surrounded by famous people, and has come to be remembered primarily as Virginia Woolf’s sister. But she was one of the most interesting characters of her day and – from the look of this exhibition – one of its finest artists too. 

Although Howard Hodgkin had been creating portraits since the age of 16, this is the first time they’ve been brought together for a solo show. But he never got to see the final result: the 84-year-old British artist died just two weeks before the opening of this exhibition. News of his passing came as the first painting was hung. With this in mind, it’s a challenge to not view the work through a tinted posthumous lens. However, ‘Absent Friends’ more than delivers. It’s a sonorous, lovingly curated moment that reminds us just how few artists can touch Hodgkin on use of colour. With the exception of his early figure paintings (just skip past those), these are ‘portraits’ in the most tentative sense. They are a tug-of-war between abstraction and representation, where thick licks of paint are stacked like slabs of cake to describe his subjects. See the ’60s and ’70s double portraits of Hodgkin’s ‘art scene’ friends that take up an entire room. In some, stray limbs flail and faces stare out from the canvas, dotted with red splodges for eyes. In the same breath, as with ‘Mr and Mrs E.J.P.’ (1969-73), he’d use garish masses of pox dots and lines of primary colours to conjure their memory. His work is about capturing a ‘feeling’ on canvas; he frequently gobbled up the frame with paint, as though his exuberance couldn’t be contained. At times, it’s all so loud it can leave you with visual tinnitus, unable to take it in. He had a sense of humour too. A room of his best works fr

Jordan Wolfson raises a baseball bat over his head and smashes it down into another man’s face. He stamps on his head, over and over, squelchy belches singing out with every impact. Then back to the baseball bat – bang, bang, bang – the body’s convulsing, its face a mush. In the background, a cantor sings a Jewish prayer. Then you take the virtual reality goggles off and you’re back in the real world, you feel shaky and disoriented, palms sweaty, arms heavy. ‘Real Violence’ by this young American artist is stomach-turning, shocking and horrifying, but it’s also one of the most important works of art you will see this year. This two-space show is made up of a massive video installation at Kingly Street and two sculptures and the VR work at Davies Street. The sculptures are a wood cabin with a contorted witch’s face for a roof and a massive articulated doll of a boy, all in black, lying prostrate in chains, its face an evil grimace. They’re childhood fairytales with the sugar taken out, leaving behind pure horror. Wolfson has covered the bigger gallery with purple carpet and a collection of flat screen TVs showing ‘Riverboat Song’, a short animated movie centred on an adorable little animated boy, cherubic and mischievous. It lacks the aggression of ‘Real Violence’ but more than makes up for it in nasty intent. We all grew up watching the Roadrunner condemning Wile E Coyote to a million humiliating deaths, and Jerry torturing Tom in countless unimaginable ways – cartoons a

You get the feeling that Bucharest-based Geta Brătescu is taken very seriously in the Romanian art world. On the eve of her 91st birthday, she has been chosen to represent her home country at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and has also been the longstanding artistic director of art and literature magazine Secolul 21. Over the past few years there has been an uptick of interest in her work outside of Romania, and even the title of this retrospective exhibition has a sober tinge to it. But there’s more to Brătescu than the thoughtful reception of her impressive output suggests, another layer to be found in her idiosyncratic way of expression – in a body of work encompassing photos, drawings, films, sculptures and textiles. Put simply, this nonagenarian multimedia artist has one finely tuned sense of humour. In a short film, ‘The Hands. For the eye, the hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait’ (1977) (admittedly not the most hilarious title ever), we see the artist’s hands as they pick up and consider various items lying around her studio. These include a rolled cigarette, some paint sticks – which she uses to draw lines on her hands – and some strings, which get her into a solo game of cat’s cradle. This film, appearing early on in the exhibition, sets an agenda of creative spontaneity and the liberating nature of play. Another silent film, ‘The Studio’ (1978), starts with a door opening into the artist’s home studio (a regularly occurring location in her work), and she shows us