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Five of the Best...Exhibitions
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  2. William Eggleston: 21st century
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Critics' Choice

Film

Andrew O'Hagan

quotePrecious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressingquote

Andrew O'Hagan Precious Theatre

Henry Hitchings

quoteIan McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignantquote

Henry Hitchings Waiting for Godot Theatre

Fiona Mountford

quoteSlight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding highquote

Fiona Mountford Enron

Reader reviews

Film

Simon, London

quoteUtterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treatquote

A Prophet Theatre

Ella, London

quoteThough 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hourquote

Trilogy Restaurants

Dave A, London

quoteWe went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiancequote

Mansons

Arts and Exhibition reviews London,

Root Ginger: A Study of Red Hair

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Idea Generation Gallery
Chance Street, E2 7JB

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Phone: 0207749 6850
Website: www.ideageneration.co.uk
Email: katie.reynolds@ideageneration.co.uk

Trains: Tube: Old Street Overground network

 
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Red-heads are leagues apart in Root Ginger

By Sue Steward, Evening Standard  17.02.09
 
Root Ginger

Other-worldly but beautiful: Alice & Lily by Jenny Wicks

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Jenny Wicks’s fascination with the unexpected appearance of two ginger-nuts in her brother’s family led to this magnetic, sometimes eerie collection of portraits of babies, children and adults possessing the mysterious ginger gene.

There is something other-worldly about red-headed children with staring blue eyes but also something irresistibly beautiful. This collection of portraits represents both, and also stretches to those strange mongrel beards adorning brown-headed men.

Ginger-haired young women have long been chosen subjects in art history, none more passionately than those hand-picked by the Pre-Raphaelites. Their combination of orange hair and porcelain white skin, epitomised today by Lily Cole, appears throughout the show, and Wicks exaggerates it in the plain white backgrounds.

Making a mockery of the term “redhead”, the palette forms a glorious autumnal swatch, while the distribution of pigment is fascinating: sometimes, a single tone appears to have leached from hair into skin and gathered in small puddles as freckles.

Walking among these portraits has the air of a scientific sampling, like a Victorian survey. And in some ways it is; Wicks’s fascination is as much with the journey of the ginger gene as with photography as art — and that element is just as striking as the show’s value as an exquisite portrait collection.
Until 8 March. Information: 020 7749 6853,
www.ideageneration.co.uk.

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Reader reviews (1)

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love the idea of the exhibition; find the term'ginger nuts' offensive

- Julie Thorpe, middlesbrough


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