There's no denying it: Bridget Riley's art has a physical effect on you. So much so that gallery attendants at Turner Contemporary in Margate for Bridget Riley: Learning to See have been advised to avert their eyes from the paintings regularly. Stand in front of those curves and waves, or the precise narrow brightly coloured vertical stripes that fill some works, and you may feel you are swaying. You become slightly dizzy or a little queasy, even perhaps a bit seasick; well, it can get pretty choppy out there on the North Sea, just beyond the gallery walls. Nothing too alarming or extreme, though; it's just a perception. When we went to see this Bridget Riley show w e knew what to expect, having been in July 2019 to the blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh that brought together half a century of pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of Op Art abstraction. It moved to the Hayward Gallery in...
Some of Britain's most prestigious museums and art galleries will be open again within weeks, although the visitor experience looks set to be very different. In London, the National Gallery and the Tate have just announced their plans, and it's the National Gallery that will be back in action first, on July 8. There will be timed tickets, limited visitor numbers, initially shorter opening hours, specific routes through the galleries, more efficient air-conditioning, and they'd like you to wear a face covering. Titian: Love, Desire, Death , the show of the reunited Titian series depicting classical myths that was open for just three days before lockdown, is now back on, extended until January 17. And continuing until September 20 is the free show about Rembrandt's pupil Nicolaes Maes , the painter whose most memorable contribution to the Dutch Golden Age is the witty sub-genre depicting mistresses eavesdropping on their servants. We saw it last year in The Hague. ...