To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Once upon a time in Engelstadt
ANDREW HEDGECOCK relishes visual storytelling with no respect for genres, movements or styles
[Illustration by Andrzej Klimowski]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Edifice
By Andrzej Klimowski
SelfMadeHero, Paperback, £16.99
DEMONIC eyes staring from the window of a bookshop in Ealing: this was my first encounter with the work of Andrzej Klimowski. His cover for the Picador edition of Peter Carey’s Bliss was a grotesque and baffling image realised through rotation, shade, juxtaposition and the use of sombre colour. Deceptively simple, disquieting and powerful.
Klimowski – who had already produced striking and enigmatic posters for cinema and theatre – went on to create covers for books by Harold Pinter, Milan Kundura and Dennis Potter. In the 1990s, he branched into graphic storytelling with his dark and dreamlike novels without words (The Secret and The Depository) and his graphic adaptations of stories by Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Later, there was Horace Dorlan, a mixed-modality narrative in which text-only chapters are followed by sequences of wordless graphics. It’s a bravura fantasia involving an academic’s attempts to meld art and science while his sense of reality is under threat.
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