ART REVIEWS
Every picture tells a story goes the saying. For Georgian artist Toma Stenko, narrative abounds in her paintings, driven by colour and figurative symbols. Her first London solo exhibition, as the title says, is about love in all its guises, seen from a female perspective. It’s not all sweetness and light since her works are intensely autobiographical, reflecting a fascinating but troubled childhood.
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There’s an underlying sense of sadness in this new exhibition by British portrait artist Ishbel Myerscough. Half way through preparing for the show, her mother died suddenly without warning. This followed the death two months earlier of her father-in-law.
There’s nothing like the death of a close parent to remind one of one’s own mortality but also to cherish what one has and holds. Grief, Longing and Love provides a series of intimate portraits of family and friends that captures stages in life’s journey from the innocence of youth through the experiences of motherhood to family bereavement.
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The stark and arresting picture of the skull towards the left of the top picture is entitled Vessel. It forms the centrepiece of this new exhibition and faces you as you enter the Unit London gallery. It’s typical of what Tom French has earned a reputation for – monochrome works featuring an illusory quality. Recent circumstances have given such works an extra poignancy.
Continue reading “Tom French – Transcend”
Overlooking the 126 galleries exhibiting at this year’s London Art Fair is Photo50, the fair’s annual guest-curated show devoted to the most distinctive elements of current photographic practice. This year, the curator is writer and gallerist Laura Noble who has assembled 10 esteemed female photographers all over the age of 50.
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Jeff Lowe has been up there with the leading lights of British sculpture for decades. He secured his first solo exhibition in Cork Street while he was still a student at Central Saint Martins in the 1970s and has represented Britain at the Paris Biennale among many other achievements. His new exhibition at London’s Pangolin Gallery shows that his passion to innovate and test himself with new approaches and materials is as strong as ever.
Continue reading “Jeff Lowe – In the Close Distance”
“I’ve been trying to get a bright pink for 20 years and haven’t managed it yet,” declares ceramicist Sophie Cook, famous for her elegantly sculpted bottle, pod and teardrop forms. Yet there are plenty of other rich and vibrant colours to behold in her new exhibition entitled Multiplicity at London’s Contemporary Ceramics Centre.
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“I’m a total believer in absolute nonsense. The absurdity of life is my single goal.” So says artist Glen Baxter whose latest exhibition has just opened at London’s Flowers Gallery in Cork Street. Its very title is appropriately absurd. Gamboge is a yellow pigment that Buddhist monks use to dye their robes. Put it next to the wonderful word “unflinchingly” and you get what he calls “a little explosion”.
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With a background in illustration, Gill Button has established a reputation for taking as inspiration images of models and figures from the pages of fashion websites and magazines and re-versioning them into intimate portraits. With a deft touch of the paintbrush, she succeeds in investing each one with human emotion, feelings such as vulnerability, assertiveness, defiance or just plain cool. Her new solo exhibition, Traces of You, sees her take this practice a step further and extending her repertoire.
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It’s a common theme in history that reactionary groups look back to a so-called golden age, believing that society’s ills will be cured if one returned to the values of the good old days. It’s never that simple of course and the idea of a false collective memory looking at the past through a rose-tinted filter is the theme of Henrik Uldalen’s new solo exhibition, Lethe, at JD Malat Gallery.
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