An excoriating review. Moore’s fascination with armour led to a decades-long series of modernist heads. “The Helmet Heads are Moore’s answer to Bacon’s screaming popes. The trouble is, they have none of Bacon’s cruel genius. [They have] neither the immediacy of a photograph nor the imaginative impact of truly original art. Moore is always a few miles from life.”
Matthew Barney gets high praise – among “the greatest [artists] of the last 50 years”. His work – video, “wonderous” sculpture, drawings – is undoubtedly influential. Skeptics persist, though, seeing his work as less than the sum of its parts. One reviewer thinks his current show a “visual dreamscape, both on the movie screen and in the gallery space [but] without legible intent.”
Barlow’s sculptures are without aspiration to beauty. Tilting timber objects, ungainly slabs of building materials, draped fabrics, they all manipulate the space around them in a humorous, gentle way. “My work has always been an enjoyment of the absurdity of the made object that isn’t going to have any useful function in the world other than for itself.” A good bio piece is here.