ART REVIEWS
The story of Icarus, the boy who ignored his father’s advice and flew too close to the sun, so melting the wax on his wings and causing his literal downfall, is the allegory at the centre of London-born artist Davina Jackson’s new solo exhibition, Close to the Sun.
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“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, says artist William Monk recalling the words of John Lennon from the 1960s. The line serves almost as a piece of advice heralding his new exhibition, A Fool Through the Cloud, at London’s Pace Gallery.
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Rebecca Appleby is more than a ceramicist. She is an all-round artist who uses ceramics as her canvas. Her abstract pieces are sculptures informed by art, architecture and industrial archaeology. Her work over the past two decades has centred on an exploration of the contemporary urban landscape and its relationship with nature. Now she has a mostly new body of work, Inner Order, just opened at London’s Contemporary Ceramics Centre.
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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.
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The woman arches her back in a perfectly-balanced athletic pose, her body graceful and lithe. Her hair falls free and touches the ground, rooted to the earth like the tree that brings equilibrium to the picture. There’s another balance too. The flecks on the body, remnants of residue of the lino-block from which the image was taken, gives it a strength echoed by the tree’s trunk. And all within the brightly coloured and collaged setting of a fable where reality and imagination meld together.
Continue reading “Eileen Cooper – Short Stories”
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”
Ken Currie is renowned for his disturbing pictures of human figures around which violence of a sort looms. He first came to prominence as one of the New Glasgow Boys of the 1980s and is well known for his public murals commissioned for the People’s Palace in Glasgow as well as his Three Oncologists artwork in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection.
Continue reading “Ken Currie – Red Ground”
On your left as you go down the stairs of the Bernard Jacobson Gallery are a series of miniature prints whose makers are a roll-call of some of the greatest talents of the British art scene of the 1960s and beyond – Richard Hamilton, Patrick Caulfield, Ivor Abrahams, William Tillyer, Peter Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi, David Hockney, Robyn Denny, Richard Smith as well as the American Ed Ruscha. And you haven’t yet reached the more than 100 works in the main gallery!
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Some years ago, a friend of John Kirby developed a brain tumour which made him both depressed for his friend and depressed for himself. It was around Christmas time and the pair pulled a cracker which contained the regulation paper hat. “I looked totally miserable wearing this pink or yellow hat. It’s a kind of move towards enjoyment without getting anywhere near it,” he tells me.
Continue reading “John Kirby – All Passion Spent”