British art – Art Spiel

July 14, 2026July 13, 2026, by Selin Tamtekin

Cecily Brown at the Serpentine: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Entering the first room of the gallery, one is instantly struck by the richness of movement in Cecily Brown’s paintings. Several recent works, drawn from nature walks, centre on the motif of a log laid across a blue stream. This fairy-tale imagery, bordering on kitsch, was borrowed from a jigsaw puzzle Brown was completing at the time. Yet the jagged shrubbery and turbulence surrounding these scenes point towards something darker.

May 27, 2024May 6, 2024, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

**Some Thoughts About Portrait Artist of the Year, a British TV Show**

*Portrait Artist of the Year* 2019 Season 5, Episode 8, Sky Arts; Artist: Rebecca Train, Sitter: Daniel Lismore

One of my guilty pleasures is binge-watching creativity reality shows, especially from the UK. We’ve got the Great Pottery Throw Down, where the judge, a great hulking potter in overalls with a Wallace and Gromit face, bursts into tears every time he sees a beautifully made ceramic. There’s Blown Away, a glass-blowing show with lots of macho folk blowing glass sweatily. And there’s Landscape Artist of the Year. But my all-time favorite is Sky Art’s Portrait Artist of the Year.

July 28, 2022December 30, 2022, by Melissa Stern

Hew Locke: The Procession at the Tate Britain

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Each year The Tate Britain commissions a large-scale art installation for the iconic Duveen Galleries at the museum. This is a vast space, an art-filled hall, more than a typical gallery that winds its way down the center of the museum on the first floor. This year they tapped the Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke whose visual musings on migration, history, national identity and ritual are well known in the British art world. Locke has long worked these themes, but never on such a scale. It is a wildly ambitious vision that embraces his interests and presents a fully developed Universe.

June 30, 2021July 22, 2021, by Emily Blundell Owers

History’s Shadow Marks the Beginning at Grove Collective

Installation view featuring Mitch Vowles, *Earnie*, 2021, Fruit Machine, Photographs, Water, 175 x 70 x 65cm courtesy of Grove Collective, photographed by Ollo Weguelian

Dibnah in Lights is hard to miss. The name of that legendary Yorkshire steeplejack flashing in red, white, and blue bulbs against the green felt backdrop of a repurposed snooker table is the first piece that greets you as you walk through Grove Collective’s doors. This piece by Mitch Vowles, a sculptor who works with found objects to draw out their cultural and personal contexts, nestles easily amongst Connor Murgatroyd’s pastel-hued still life paintings of anthuriums, signet rings, Sinatra albums and a scaffolders A-Z, and film photographer Alfie White’s hand-printed images of boys at Brixton bus stops, on Tottenham blocks, and playing in Burgess Park.