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Conscious – Unconscious and the Oxford Community Data Stream Modern Art Oxford

10:59am Thursday 23rd May 2013

Contemporary artist Stephen Willats’ connection with Modern Art Oxford (MAO) began in 1967 and this, his fourth MAO exhibition externalises the idea of networks of people. Stephen says his fundamental aims involve exploring relationships between people and his idea that connections are fundamental to civilisation.

Looking back on the highlights of Artweeks

12:00am Thursday 23rd May 2013

When reflecting on Oxfordshire Artweeks, which finishes this Sunday, each of us will have own highlights. Here I reflect on mine.

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Artweeks' eclectic mix of art is worth travelling for

4:37pm Thursday 16th May 2013

The phenomenal three weeks that comprise Oxfordshire’s Artweeks finishes with a final triumphant flourish of creativity in North Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds. Here as everywhere else in the county there is a huge range of work on show, all created by committed artists: some professional, some talented amateurs, and others, college or school students and community groups who are showing what they can do.

• Profile: Lucy Askew - Creating something special
• Seth Lakeman tells all about his storytelling style

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Oxfordshire Artweeks previewed

12:00am Thursday 2nd May 2013

As it enters its fourth decade this year Artweeks is even bigger and busier than ever. With more than 500 exhibitions and 1,000 artists and craftspeople taking part, this is both an event that one could not miss and indeed one should not miss. And it is an event that The Oxford Times is proud to sponsor.

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Ceramicist Dylan Bowen on his new exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery

12:00am Thursday 25th April 2013

It’s a huge accolade to be invited to exhibit at COLLECT in London’s Saatchi Gallery, but Dylan Bowen’s name has long been on the rise. The Oxford ceramicist, who is the first to admit that he floundered under the glare of his own father’s fame, has finally emerged from Clive Bowen’s shadow to make a name for himself with his large sculptural pieces, a lifetime away from the functional domesticware he grew up with.

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New exhibitions at Christ Church Picture Gallery

10:50am Thursday 18th April 2013

Prophecies, Histories, Legends and Law in drawings by Old Masters & Two Landscapes Revisited Until June 9 and Until May 27 respectively

Bellini, Botticelli, Titian... 500 Years of Italian art: Compton Verney

2:40pm Thursday 11th April 2013

Bellini, Botticelli, Titian… 500 years of Italian Art runs the title of Compton Verney’s first exhibition this year. “All you ever wanted to know about Italian art and were afraid to ask,” quips Steven Parissien, the Warwickshire gallery’s director — and he’s not far off the mark for this is a well thought-out exhibition of more than 40 paintings from the Glasgow Museums’ collection of Italian paintings that guides the visitor through the changes in Italian art from roughly 1400 to 1900, offering just enough detail to interest, entertain and inform.

Craft Guild exhibition: SOTA, Witney

11:40am Thursday 4th April 2013

SOTA – State of the Art – gallery opened some four months ago in the heart of Witney, just off Market Square behind Langdale Hall.

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Hans Josephsohn and Simon Starling, Modern Art Oxford

11:24am Thursday 21st March 2013

Hans Josephsohn and Simon Starling, Modern Art Oxford

Chasing Beauty, Patricia O'Brien, Art Jericho

12:41pm Wednesday 6th March 2013

FOUR STARS

Xu Bing: Ashmolean Museum

12:37pm Wednesday 6th March 2013

Visit The Ashmolean and see the museum’s first major exhibition of contemporary art. Contemporary too is the smartphone technology available to enhance your experience of this outstanding exhibition. Some readers may be surprised that a Chinese artist, Xu Bing, has been chosen for this landmark event. Director Christopher Brown says that “The Ashmolean has possibly the best collection of post-war Chinese art outside of mainland China” acquired with the help of the Sullivan Fund.

Preview of the Ashmolean Museum's 2013 programme

1:30pm Wednesday 20th February 2013

‘The year 2012 was a very busy and exciting one for the Ashmolean,” said the museum’s director, Professor Christopher Brown. The museum had almost 90,000visitors, half of them schoolchildren on school visits – and to put those figures into perspective, Oxford city itself has just under 165,000 inhabitants. Oxford’s university museum, the oldest public museum in the UK, has become a magnet for visitors, as much for its temporary exhibitions, latterly the hugely popular Edward Lear and Japanese Meiji textiles, as for the breadth and depth of its permanent collections. Add in headline-making acquisitions such as Manet’s portrait of Fanny Claus saved from export last year by a £7.83m appeal, including a “remarkable” public response — and it is clear the Ashmolean has made for itself a hard act to follow.

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Agim Sulaj: The North Wall

1:22pm Wednesday 20th February 2013

With the ability to penetrate imaginations, renowned Albanian artist Agim Sulaj employs a visual narrative that transcends language. He has spent more than 20 years acquiring endless prizes and awards across the length and breadth of the globe from the traditional yearly competition of satire and humor organised by Albanian magazine Hosteni — Satire and Humor, to a prize awarded at the first European Union International Biennale held at the European Cartoon Centre in Belgium.

Manet the master of portrait painting

2:37pm Wednesday 13th February 2013

If you missed seeing Éduoard Manet’s portrait of Fanny Claus at the Ashmolean Museum during the public appeal that saved it from export last year, you can see it now at the Royal Academy.

Bury Knowle Art Group: Wolfson College

1:46pm Wednesday 6th February 2013

FOUR STARS The Bury Knowle Art Group was founded in 1948, and each year it holds a winter exhibition. In 2013 this is at Wolfson College where the panoramic views across the River Cherwell and the water meadows provide a splendid context for the work on show.

Peter Blake: A Celebration, Bohun Gallery, Henley

1:43pm Wednesday 6th February 2013

Peter Blake’s forename is strikingly well-suited to him; he is the Peter Pan of British art, the boy who never grew up. And what a good thing it is for us that he didn’t. Blake’s works fizz with a shy, childlike adoration of the things people actually like looking at — Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe, California, Venice — all observed by Blake with a sympathetic yet scientific gaze. In his current exhibition Peter Blake: A Celebration at Henley-on-Thames’s Bohun Gallery, a celebration of the gallery’s 40th birthday, a selection of the artist’s silkscreen prints spanning the period from 1991 to the present is on display. Surely one of the greatest living printmakers, the works carry with them the rhythm of an unorthodox, idiosyncratic logic that makes all of Blake’s creations so beguiling.

Blenheim Palace film history a giant attraction

2:55pm Wednesday 30th January 2013

What an apt title! Lights, Camera, Action! Blenheim’s special exhibition starts on February 9 when the palace reopens as the star of TV and film. The palace has become part of cinematic history as a jewel location for many films and TV dramas. One of the aims of this exhibition is to point visitors to the scene locations. Some are easy to recognise and others more surprising. For some scenes in The Young Victoria (2008), Blenheim doubled for Buckingham Palace while, in the same film, it became the Laeken Palace where King Leopold holds conversations with Prince Albert about the young Victoria played by Emily Blunt. Rupert Friend, who played Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, is now famous across the Atlantic for his role in series two of Homeland. Comments by him and some of the costumes from The Young Victoria are on display in the Long Library.

Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape: The Royal Academy

2:50pm Wednesday 16th January 2013

Landscape painting is so popular a subject for art these days we forget it was not always so. History painting used to be number one in the hierarchy of art, painted in the grand manner awash with rhetoric and high ideals. Portraiture came next, making good money for the artist in the 18th century, the greatest age for the genre in Britain. Then came landscape, of much lower status, at least until the later 18th century.

Romantics reveal their true glories

12:00am Thursday 10th January 2013

Romance is in the air: romance with a capital R, with religion, poetry, and medievalism thrown in. Tate Britain’s enormous show, which ends very soon, on January 13, has 180 works on view from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the group of young artists who rebelled against the art establishment in Victorian London. Over-familiarity is one of the group’s bugbears nowadays; being held as painters of pretty pictures another. This is why seeing their works in a new context is good — and not just paintings, but sculpture, photography and applied arts as well — and even if, for some, the show’s premise that it shows the Pre-Raphaelites as proto-modernists may be hard to take. Tate shows the group, formed in 1848, as radical, as Britain’s first modern art movement, in an era of political and social discontent. For example, their painting en plein air more than a decade before the Impressionists, and works are juxtaposed to show the Pre-Raphaelite’s influence on the developing Arts and Crafts movement.