Tai Shan Schierenberg – Men Without Women

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.

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Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape

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.

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July 13, 2019 0

Shen Wei – Flowers Gallery

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.

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May 9, 2019 0

Esther Teichmann – On Sleeping and Drowning

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.

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May 4, 2019 0

Tom Lovelace – Interval

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.

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February 25, 2019 0

Ken Currie – Red Ground

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.

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February 22, 2019 0

John Kirby – All Passion Spent

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.

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February 13, 2019 0

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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