The self-styled Panamarenko, the "visionary" artist who for 30 years has been making ungainly yet mesmerically engrossing devices, cuts a peculiar figure. At the Hayward Gallery opening of his first (eponymous) solo show in this country, he appeared looking like a reporter for Rolling Stone, circa 1979, his comfy zip-up jumper suggesting a secret penchant for ram-raiding thrift stores. "He's the original inventor," someone whispered as, together with Panamarenko, we [...]

Rosie Snell is an artist in a genuinely enviable position. Her huge, stunning works of robustly realist art are in such demand that she has serious difficulty in amassing enough of them at her London studio actually to mount any exhibitions. They sell as she produces them, which creates another difficulty; they enter private collections and she often has only transparencies to remind her of how her singular oeuvre is [...]

Evidently we are not supposed to piece together the true story behind the eight-year trail of tragedy that was the career and adult life of Francesca Woodman, a photographer from Denver, Colorado, who started taking pictures at the age of 13, pictures which are almost exclusively of herself and which frequently show her apparently evaporating on celluloid before our very eyes. Yet, as courageously as the curators of her first [...]

When the British fought the four bloody and back-breaking Mysore wars in central southern India in the 18th century, a disproportionate number of Scotsmen took active, often leading, roles. I say "disproportionate" because, after the failed Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the first kilted regiment to be ordered abroad by London simply mutinied. Evidently they shunned fighting the battles of the English crown in faraway lands, seeing scant reward [...]

Few exhibitions can have had their origins in quite so squalid a legal imbroglio as that by the outsider artist Mary Tall, which has just opened at the St Brannocks Gallery, at Mundesley, on the north coast of Norfolk. The curator, Jonathan Plumb, was obliged to collect her stunning, other-worldly works from a police compound in Norwich, where they had been stored during an unholy row - first in the [...]

Back in 1941, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a major exhibition called "Indian Art in the United States", a seminal show which demonstrated that scholars and curators had recognised the unstoppable force of a key area of aesthetics and felt obliged to say: "Yes, we recognise this art, these artefacts, for the divinely inspired wonders which they often are." One man who summed up what the [...]

It would be gratifying to be able to state that the Museum of Women's Art project, founded nearly ten years ago by a group of passionately committed individuals, is thriving and achieving all its hopes and dreams. But, sadly, it is not. If anything, through no fault of any of those involved, the MWA is at a low point at present.

One might have thought that its stated aims - [...]

Hilda Carline, the first wife of Stanley Spencer, was a consummate artist in her own right, but has been overlooked almost entirely except as a sad footnote. Almost any lengthy reference to her husband as a great painter will mention his squalid and self-destructive sexual adventures. For too long Carline has been merely the principal addendum to Spencer's essentially degenerate subject.

A fine new show, organised by the Usher Gallery [...]

Britain does very badly when it comes to exhibitions of Caribbean art. If we average one show every other year from a region which is a fulcrum of aesthetic activity, we are doing extremely well. This makes "The Elders", which brings to this country Brother Everald Brown and Stanley Greaves, two of the biggest names in an area full of first-rate artists, all the more important. If this show goes [...]

There seem to be innumerable gifted women artists who are all but unknown today for a range of squalid reasons: how the role of their gender is perceived in society, blatant male exploitation, or the twisted conviction of people around them - including, sadly, other women - that they should be doing the housework rather than playing with paints and easels. The surrealist Linda Carmen is a classic example.

Carmen [...]