ART REVIEWS
In this podcast, eminent UK sculptor and drawer Nicola Hicks talks about the privilege of having both parents as artists, her difficulties fitting in at school, the problems of early success, her raw sculpting style, the darkness of her subject matter, and how working on her latest exhibition, Dump Circus, helped her through the anxiety she felt during lockdown.
Continue reading “Considering Art Podcast – Nicola Hicks, sculptor”
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.
Continue reading “Ishbel Myerscough – Grief, Longing and Love”
“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”.
Continue reading “Glen Baxter – Unflinchingly Gamboge”
Many will know Tai Shan Schierenberg as one of the judges in the Sky Arts series Portrait Artist of the Year and Landscape Artist of the Year. He specialises in both art forms and is a former winner of the National Portrait Gallery’s John Player Portrait Award. Lesser known is his love of football. Last year, he travelled up from his London home to the West Midlands every weekend to follow the fortunes of West Bromwich Albion Football Club for a Channel 4 Artist in Residence series.
Continue reading “Tai Shan Schierenberg – Men Without Women”
Female photographers, particularly those concerned with landscape, get very little gallery time compared to their male counterparts. So it’s refreshing to see Flowers Gallery inviting nine women to exhibit their work together, using examples from larger series. It’s above all a very thoughtful exhibition that works on many levels.
Continue reading “Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape”
Shen Wei is a New York-based Chinese artist with a solid reputation. His images can be seen in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions including The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the John Paul Getty Museum to name but a few. Now he has his first major solo exhibition in the UK.
Continue reading “Shen Wei – Flowers Gallery”
Esther Teichmann’s world is a mystical one of caves, swamps and underground lakes that exist somewhere between the real and the imagined, between autobiography and fiction. They are fragments of memory informed by the landscape of the Rhine Valley and the valleys of the Black Forest where she grew up and reimagined as mysterious, womb-like spaces where women sometimes sleep and dream.
Continue reading “Esther Teichmann – On Sleeping and Drowning”
As part of a double-header, The Flowers Gallery in Hoxton is staging in its upper space Tom Lovelace’s first solo exhibition here for four years. While the Ken Currie show downstairs comprises straightforward narrative paintings with albeit dark subtexts, Lovelace’s work could not be more different.
Continue reading “Tom Lovelace – Interval”
Ken Currie is renowned for his disturbing pictures of human figures around which violence of a sort looms. He first came to prominence as one of the New Glasgow Boys of the 1980s and is well known for his public murals commissioned for the People’s Palace in Glasgow as well as his Three Oncologists artwork in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection.
Continue reading “Ken Currie – Red Ground”
Some years ago, a friend of John Kirby developed a brain tumour which made him both depressed for his friend and depressed for himself. It was around Christmas time and the pair pulled a cracker which contained the regulation paper hat. “I looked totally miserable wearing this pink or yellow hat. It’s a kind of move towards enjoyment without getting anywhere near it,” he tells me.
Continue reading “John Kirby – All Passion Spent”