ART PODCASTS
In so many aspects of our culture – fashion, film, all forms of art in fact – the human body, particularly the female form, has become sexualised. To many feminists, the idea of the male gaze, for example, where men gain pleasure from looking upon a passive female subject, is symptomatic of male oppression and female objectification.
Continue reading “We Sing the Body Electric – Gallery 46”
Female photographers, particularly those concerned with landscape, get very little gallery time compared to their male counterparts. So it’s refreshing to see Flowers Gallery inviting nine women to exhibit their work together, using examples from larger series. It’s above all a very thoughtful exhibition that works on many levels.
Continue reading “Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape”
Shen Wei is a New York-based Chinese artist with a solid reputation. His images can be seen in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions including The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the John Paul Getty Museum to name but a few. Now he has his first major solo exhibition in the UK.
Continue reading “Shen Wei – Flowers Gallery”
Esther Teichmann’s world is a mystical one of caves, swamps and underground lakes that exist somewhere between the real and the imagined, between autobiography and fiction. They are fragments of memory informed by the landscape of the Rhine Valley and the valleys of the Black Forest where she grew up and reimagined as mysterious, womb-like spaces where women sometimes sleep and dream.
Continue reading “Esther Teichmann – On Sleeping and Drowning”
Sculptor, painter, ceramicist, performance artist, filmmaker, Bruce McLean’s career flits about in a variety of genres. He’s regarded as having led the development of British conceptual art in the 1960s. Not that he would necessarily have it that way. He regards himself solely as a sculptor. His work subtly and playfully makes fun of the pomposity and established forms of the art world.
Continue reading “Bruce McLean – Five Decades of Sculpture, Part One 1967-1994”
The portrait above, haunting yet dignified, is of a farmer’s wife called Rasathi from Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state that is facing its worse drought in 140 years. It was taken by Italian photographer Federico Borella, winner of this year’s Photographer of the Year at the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards and featured in this year’s exhibition at London’s Somerset House. The woman’s husband committed suicide by hanging himself in his own field.
Continue reading “Sony World Photography Awards”
The portrait above suggests how the aristocracy and the English landscape are as harmonious and natural as the sun that shines down on the rolling hills of the estate over which its subject, Mr Plampin, lauds.
It was around the time that Gainsborough painted the picture that landed estates, sculpted by landscape artists such as Capability Brown, were opened up to the public as places of leisure and which came to influence the British obsession with parks and gardens. The first to do so was Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire and part of the theme of Lie of the Land is to trace a line between Stowe and the urban experiment that is Milton Keynes only 15 miles away and which forms the inaugural exhibition in the city’s sparkingly refurbished Milton Keynes Gallery.
Continue reading “Various Artists – The Lie of the Land”
The moon is deeply embedded in our artistic culture – we sing about it, write about it, make films about it and in return it affects our very being through its lunar cycles. It’s been 50 years since man took his first steps on our nearest planetary neighbour. Since then only 12 astronauts have done so. Now, we too can get a taste of what it’s like to walk on the moon thanks to a virtual reality experience designed by the esteemed sculptor Antony Gormley.
Continue reading “Antony Gormley – Lunatick”
Multimedia contemporary artist Samantha Louise Emery has created a series of 10 portraits celebrating the women who have inspired her throughout her life. Entitled IKONA Mirrored Interior, they are currently on show (and on sale) at London’s Mediaworks.
Continue reading “Samantha Louise Emery – IKONA Mirrored Interior”
As part of a double-header, The Flowers Gallery in Hoxton is staging in its upper space Tom Lovelace’s first solo exhibition here for four years. While the Ken Currie show downstairs comprises straightforward narrative paintings with albeit dark subtexts, Lovelace’s work could not be more different.
Continue reading “Tom Lovelace – Interval”
Considering Art 