Gavin Lenaghan, artist and writer

I was in Paris for the first time in early October 2009 and of my three days there, spent the majority of one of them in here.

We turned up at the Pyramide entrance at about 9:30am, when none of the anticipated monstrously sized queues actually arose, so despite arriving without a ticket, I found myself walking around the museum pretty quickly. From here, there are easily spotted entrances to each of the Louvre’s three wings. I think I’d read somewhere beforehand that it would take two weeks of… Continue

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

11 December 2009 – 21 February 2010

Life has kept changing at mima since I last wrote here about the paintings of Gerhard Richter, and one reminder comes from Director Kate Brindley. Still an unfamiliar face to many of us, having only took up her post in mid-July after her only predecessor Godfrey Worsdale’s defection to the BALTIC in Gateshead, she notions to a fellow newcomer to this locale, the ‘Boro Eye’ in her Private View introduction to the latest s… Continue

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England. 28 August – 15 November 2009.

Eagerly awaited, this latest offering from Middlesbrough’s “small but ambitious” flagship art gallery is the next fruit of a series of seemingly ongoing loan collaborations with the Tate. You may recall, as I do, at least one previous example, the Naked and the Nude show which despatched such household-name pieces as Lucian Freud’s Girl with a White Dog and a clutch of Euan Uglows, beneath the jagged mima roof. Here,… Continue

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England. 28 November 2008 - 15 February 2009.

Along the wall level with the door through which you enter, 2006's Facing Francesca and two paintings further along, paired together, Captain Beaky and his Band I & II (both typically abstrusely named), put one in mind almost of the kind of regal, or quasi-regal, 17th and 18th century portraiture as crafted by Messrs Van Dyck, Kneller or Lely; expand the imagination a little further and one pictures Jean-Ho… Continue

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England. 23 November 2007 - 17 February 2008.

So, is Middlesbrough's only art gallery's latest exhibition, themed around the German Bauhaus, the one that clinches for it the title of a 'world class' museum? Well, objection one, there is not just the one exhibition but three, running concurrently with each other. And secondly, far be it from me to be alone in detracting from a show afforded glowing repute, as exhibited on the mima website, by the Guardian G… Continue