ART PODCASTS
This new exhibition by Patrick Altes, a leading light in the emerging French-Algerian art movement, is something of a ‘cri de coeur’. As the title spells out, each work, be it digital print, painting, sculpture or installation, engenders a plea for understanding in a world beset by seemingly insoluble problems and dissension.
Continue reading “Patrick Altes – Tolerance”
In her new solo exhibition, Three, British artist WK Lyhne (a Danish surname pronounced Luna) presents three paintings, each of a nude figure captured at a moment of unguarded intimacy, lying in bed among rumpled sheets and blankets.
These oil paintings, done from life, mark a significant departure from the artist’s previous works. These would often comprise provocative images of slaughtered animals dripping blood or large-scale defiant figures in sexually charged explicit poses. They might not have appealed to the prudish or those with a weak stomach, but they took a hefty swipe at female objectification.
Continue reading “WK Lyhne – Three”
Last summer, as a result of the UK’s prolonged heatwave, ancient archaeological features began mysteriously appearing in our countryside visible from the air, only to vanish again when the rains came. For a short time, you could detect the outlines of ancient farms, burial mounds and neolithic settlements. I was reminded of this when viewing Naomi Frears work in her new exhibition at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery.
Continue reading “Naomi Frears – Beaux Arts”
In his last email to Derek Boshier before he died, David Bowie complimented the artist saying that his work “cascades down the decades”. Boshier had drawn the covers for Bowie’s Lodger and Let’s Dance covers. For Boshier’s career began as a pioneer of British pop art back in the 1960s. Now 82, he’s as active as ever, as his new show Night and Snow/Fragments: Contemporary Still Life amply demonstrates.
Continue reading “Derek Boshier – Might and Snow/Fragments: Contemporary Still Life”
For her new exhibition entitled Precious Mettle at London’s Fiumano Clase Gallery, British artist Nicole Wassall has created a series of works that serve both as aesthetic pieces in their own right and as metaphors for underlying themes prevalent in our society today. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Wassall has managed to pull off the trick of using highly complex processes to create artworks that appear simple yet are anything but simplistic.
Continue reading “Nicole Wassall – Precious Mettle”
Symbols of war and oppression together with unsettling images of Victorian medical procedures are among the curious mixes that the young South African artist Peter Mammes has peppered his paintings and drawings in his first UK solo exhibition, Presumed Alive.
Continue reading “Peter Mammes – Presumed Alive”
The world of Suzanne Moxhay is one of decrepit interiors where plants seem to grow out of the floorboards, where ceilings have collapsed, fireplaces cracked, walls broken and where the wallpaper dissolves into fading images of old romantic landscapes.
Continue reading “Suzanne Moxhay – Conservatory”
“I like the clay to speak for itself”, says ceramicist Margaret Curtis, speaking to me at the launch of her new exhibition, Surface, at the Contemporary Ceramics Centre in London. Her pieces, whether they be large vases and cylinders or small bottles and cups, have one thing in common – their imperfection. “I make them in the round, sort of precise, then I start pushing them and poking them and distorting them and let the movement of the clay give a lot of feeling.”
Continue reading “Margaret Curtis – Surface”
From a distance, Matteo Massagrande’s works could be photographs. The rendering of the tiles, the wooden frames of the windows and doors and the exterior seascape and foliage have an extraordinary precision and detail to them. Yet this Italian artist from Padua is anything but a hyper-realist figurative painter. There’s something not quite right about his paintings.
Continue reading “Matteo Massagrande – A Grand Tour”
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”
Considering Art 