ART PODCASTS
A group of female runners complete with all the typical paraphernalia – caps, earphones, water bottle, Nike swooshes on their trainers – are caught in mid-flight and their features reduced down to cartoon-like images and colour. It’s classic Julian Opie. Running Women represents an everyday occurrence, distilled down and given a new dynamic by becoming an amalgamation of different moving figures. Continue reading “Julian Opie”
If you like Banksy, then you will love Nancy Fouts. The two artists share that same subversive humour, cleverness and imagination. With Fouts, however, you get a new dimension, literally, as she expresses herself through a variety of styles of sculpture as well as painting.
In particular, she loves to juxtapose seemingly disconnected objects in order to subvert their function in a playful way. As she puts it, “the real and the surreal go together”. So, a gun is covered in rose thorns to make it impossible to use without hurting oneself, a hummingbird’s long bill acts as a stylus on a record turntable, a rabbit is wearing curlers, a peacock’s fan becomes an Indian chief’s headdress, a lovebird plays with the ring pull of a grenade, a crow wears a ponytail and so on and so forth. As Sir Peter Blake once said, “she makes everyday objects extraordinary”. Continue reading “Nancy Fouts, Down the Rabbit Hole”
That guru of computer art, Miguel Chevalier, is back in the UK with his first solo show. Those who visited Lumière London back in January will have seen his spectacular Origin of the World Bubble 2018 suspended above Oxford Circus. Its globe pulsated with psychedelic colours and patterns that responded to the movement of the pedestrians below. Continue reading “Miguel Chevalier – Ubiquity 1 and 2”
The photo of Sarah Lucas eating a banana from 1990, above, typifies a certain self-confidence, defiance and brashness about the work of the so-called Young Brit Artists of the age which caught the art world’s imagination and made Britannia cool for a while.
Lucas is one of 25 UK-based artists featured in the Arts Council Collection show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s spacious Longside Gallery at the start of a nationwide tour. It’s entitled In My Shoes – Art and the Self since the 1990s and showcases how the age-old idea of self-portraiture has been developed and adapted in recent years. Many of these artists included themselves in their work not only through portraits in various styles but also in performative ways through film and photography. Continue reading “In My Shoes – Art and the Self since the 1990s”
When Chiharu Shiota was nine years old, she was awoken by the sound of her neighbour’s house on fire. In the wreckage the following day, she saw their burnt out piano, a sight which both frightened and fascinated her. The silence it instilled remains with her to this day.
“The piano had lost its function but it was even more beautiful than before”, she told Helen Pheby, curator of Shiota’s magical new installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP). “A piano that cannot make a sound still carries the memory of the sound. I believe silence is often stronger and more beautiful than any sound can be. The absence of something makes it stronger. Things are most beautiful when they are gone.”
In 2015 the young artist Gabriella Boyd was commissioned by the Folio Society to illustrate a new edition of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It’s not hard to see why. Boyd’s paintings depict the kind of logic only dreams can follow – jumbled up scraps of memory, distortions, misunderstandings, miscommunications, loves, fears, all woven together in a dreamlike narrative.
The title of her new exhibition at Blain/Southern, Help Yourself, is typically ambiguous, for Boyd playfully constructs domestic scenes with warm, positive colours but adds something rather discomforting to them. Continue reading “Gabriella Boyd – Help Yourself”
A generation ago, the word “potter” had something of the pejorative about it – a person who churned out functional ware for the table and so forth. Times have changed as potters, or ceramicists if you prefer, are creating works that are as deserving of the label “art” as anything else in the contemporary field. Ask Grayson Perry who still calls himself a potter. Continue reading “Ceramic Art, London 2018”
Lunar Voyage, British painter and printmaker Tom Hammick’s series of 17 woodcuts shown in its entirety for the first time, is a thoughtful and thought-provoking journey into space offering a metaphor for the artist’s own odyssey. He has poured into his work references from that era when space travel to the moon caught the imagination of a child growing up in the 1970s and influenced a generation of film makers, authors, architects and creative thinkers generally. Continue reading “Tom Hammick – Lunar Voyage”
Over the course of a weekend, Tanya Ling donned paint kettle and paint brush and set about creating 20 large works consisting solely of lines. These Line Paintings comprise her first solo show at London’s Mayor Gallery. Her designs dive and swoop, twist and turn and form abstract, elegant and delicate abstract shapes created entirely by the use of the line.
Porcelain is that most tough and translucent ceramic that yet seems most delicate and fragile. The Contemporary Ceramics Centre’s new exhibition Porcelain3 brings together the work of three relatively young ceramicists who are creating new perceptions of porcelain in their own special ways.
Continue reading “Porcelain3 – Contemporary Ceramics Centre”
Considering Art 