JAMES LINGWOOD
The co-founder of Artangel chooses Mike Kelley in Munster, Mark Wallinger in England, Roni Horn at Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland.
BETTINA VON HASE an independent consultant and writer on art and culture.
My favourite show by far was 'Sternenfall' at the Grand Palais, Paris, by Anselm Kiefer. It was a tour de force by the German master, in the first of an annual series at the Beaux Arts space, devoted to Monumental Sculpture. Kiefer created several pavilions within the space to reflect on man's position within the cosmos, and the power of art to transform our reality.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine. She also contributes to Style.com, Grazia, Tank, Sleek and Harper's Bazaar.
'Seduced' at London's Barbican was this year's most remarkable and rewarding show for me. It billed itself as a survey show of "art and sex from antiquity to now," but is really something far more shocking. It was an evocative, intelligent, sensitive and mature overview of sex. The curators Marina Wallace, Joanne Bernstein and Martin Kemp culled a collection of history's greatest artists showing sex in all its guises: as poignant and puerile, feverish and aesthetic, joyful and alienating, titillating and technical. Devoid of sappy sentiment or masturbatory misanthropy, the emotional spectrum ranged from 1950's clinical images of genitals to depictions by Rembrandt, Fragonard and Boucher of Zeus's various conquests; Hans Bellmer's, Robert Mapplethorpe's and Francis Bacon's odes to Sade; and Heartbeat, the poignant slideshow of 44 images that Nan Goldin took of gay and straight friends, all evidently and contagiously in love with their partners.
JAMES BIRCH curator and former gallerist
I thought the best show I saw was 'Pop Art Is' at Gagosian in September. It had fantastic artists both young and old, both witty and sexy, gimmicky and mass produced! It was Pop and Post- Pop and everything seemed to work in its context.
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