Kirjahaku

Cv/VAR series 104 Reviews 'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture', exhibited at the Royal Academy from January to April 2012. The project of creating monumental landscape paintings was based on a small area near the artist's home at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. Works developed with time-framed films, photographs, iPad studies, drawings, sketchbooks, oils and watercolours; recording particular motifs and places in the changing seasons. Studies were enlarged on joined canvases in compositions up to 30' wide, designed to immerse the viewer in an intense experience of the landscape.

"Cv/VAR 147" publishes an essay by Marina Vaizey which explores the work of artist Tracey Emin, exhibited at the Turner Contemporary Gallery Margate, from May to September 2012. She considers her drawings, embroidery, prints and neons, manifesting the intricate correspondence of her art and life.

Considers an exhibition at Tate Modern, June to October, of the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), exploring his paintings and graphic work, with their relation to examples of his photography. Munch is distinguished by a highly original sensibility, characterised in nerve-edged works that probe the undercurrents of intimacy, sickness, isolation, loss and death; identifying themes that preoccupied the central European movement of Expressionism through the Great War into the 1930s. Munch can now be seen as a primary source of a profound psychodrama, played out through the 20th century and beyond.

London has been having symbolically enough in 2014 a sustained examination of not only art historically northern Europe in general with the National Gallery having looked at the northern renaissance but perhaps far more pertinently contemporary German art of the post war period, enhanced by an original examination of German history at the British Museum. The medium of painting is the prism, with significant showings of Anselm Kiefer, a West German b 1945, and Gerhard Richter b 1932, and Sigmar Polke, 1941-2010, both originally East Germans, who once showed together, and with others invented in the 1960s a brief anarchic movement called capitalist realism. They both studied too at the legendary Dusseldorf Kunstakademie. All of these three titans, their work now in the commercial stratosphere, have engaged profoundly with Germany's past, but Janus like in order to look forward also to a future. Marina Vaizey