Tag: Bob Chaundy

Bruce McLean – Five Decades of Sculpture, Part One 1967-1994

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” →
0

Zhuang Hong Yi – Earth

Exhibitions at Unit London are always glitzy affairs. Videos of the featured artists playing at the entrance, thumping music, a slick social media and strong digital presence make for what the commercially savvy owners, Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt term “an immersive experience”. They’ve reached out to a younger crowd who queue around the block in their hundreds for opening nights. 

Continue reading “Zhuang Hong Yi – Earth” →
0

Sony World Photography Awards

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” →
0

Various Artists – The Lie of the Land

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” →
0

Antony Gormley – Lunatick

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” →
0

Johan van Mullem – Reverence

When I look at Johan van Mullem’s paintings, I’m reminded of that Bob Dylan phrase “smoke rings of my mind”. For the Belgian artist’s instantly recognisable works are ethereal evocations of his subconscious, dreamily configured as abstracts within a barely recognisable face. The artist pours his emotions on to the canvas, almost peering inside his head, and using expressive brushstrokes to create something striking, haunting and mysterious.

Continue reading “Johan van Mullem – Reverence” →
1

Andrew McIntosh – I Saw This Coming

This new exhibition by Scottish artist Andrew McIntosh features eight new oil paintings of largely run-down buildings, most of them in south-east London where he lives. It’s appropriate, therefore, that they should be on display at the Bo.Lee gallery in Peckham. 

They’re rendered in extraordinary detail and texture, almost like a photograph, with deft mark making rendering every fine detail of decay and decrepitude. The closer you look the more surreal and multi-themed the buildings become.

Continue reading “Andrew McIntosh – I Saw This Coming” →
0

Rebecca Appleby – Inner Order

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. 

Continue reading “Rebecca Appleby – Inner Order” →
0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑