Mark Thompson – The World Distilled

British artist Mark Thompson has acquired international acclaim for his bleak, barren landscapes, with their empty buildings, cavernous hallways and panoramic snowscapes. Created painstakingly with layer upon layer of oil paint and glaze on wood, they create a hint of a scene or place, charged with memory that is hazy and imprecise. Based in Sweden, Thompson brings to fine art that Nordic-noir aesthetic that we see so often these days on our TVs. His new solo exhibition at Proud Central in London comes 20 years after he first showed there. I spoke to him at the gallery and asked him first to explain the exhibition’s title, The World Distilled.

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January 21, 2019 0

Peter Gronquist – Shape Shifter

American artist Peter Gronquist draws on a wide range of media for his works – fabric, metal, ceramics, frosted glass, mirrors, even taxidermy. Working from his barn by a lake near Portland, Oregon, his oeuvre is multi-disciplinary – sculpture, painting and installation.

In whatever medium, his themes have revolved chiefly around American obsessions with material wealth, consumerism, guns, and religion. He once said, “Our culture puts money and violence on way too high a pedestal. I think these days people no longer see the line between entertainment and reality.”

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January 15, 2019 1

Robert Fraser’s Groovy Arts Club Band

Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser was a charismatic gallery owner and art dealer who, in many ways, embodied the spirit of the so-called Swinging Sixties. He was the handsome, dedicated follower of fashion in the clothes sense, but a leader of fashion in the artistic sense by embracing the British pop art movement and championing many of its artists. He was the King of Cool, the archetypal party-goer who befriended many of the top musicians of the day including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, members of whom who would mingle together with artists at his Duke Street Gallery or his Mount Street flat. That marriage of pop and pop art seemed one made in heaven, or at least in Mayfair.

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January 12, 2019 1

Recycle Group – Nature of Non-Existence

As the latest in a series of artists who use Virtual and Augmented Reality as part of their working practice, the Gazelli Art House, London features a new exhibition by Russian duo, The Recycle Group, named because they use both recycled imagery and materials. The pair have won awards for their pioneering use of technologies and the way they bridge incompatible subjects such as the classic and the contemporary. They represented Russia at the 57th Venice biennale. Now they examine the relationship between man and machine.

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December 4, 2018 1

Richard Long – The Tide is High

It’s more than half a century ago that Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking established the idea that art could be a journey, that flattening a piece of grass by walking on it could make concepts like time, space and distance into subjects for art. Art, it implied, need not be permanent and could be expressing not just something physical. Continue reading “Richard Long – The Tide is High” →

November 21, 2018 1

Peter Howson – Acta Est Fabula

As in the top picture, Pergamum, Peter Howson’s world is a dark, apocalyptic one populated with grotesque low-lifes, disfigured and violent, decadent and despairing. Dominating are colossus-like males, with over-sized muscles and bulging eyes, machismo in the extreme. They exist beneath crumbling buildings in a nightmare vision recalling the works of Hogarth, Bosch, Dürer, Breughel the Elder, Dix, Beckmann and Goya. Continue reading “Peter Howson – Acta Est Fabula” →

November 17, 2018 0

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