art blog since 2009
Thanks to the igneous stone scattered across the fourth floor of MNAC, as you explore this show you find yourself on uneven, uncertain ground which crunches under boot or shoe. Monitors, here and there, are like puddles of intrigue; some are suspended on near-invisible wire; and all screens feature looped black and white films of …
November 19, 2024
An artist and I stand on the summit of Whitehawk Hill, atop the hidden remains of a neolithic encampment. He is dressed in black, and smokes actual cigarettes, as I might have expected. Beyond that I’ve little idea how this meeting, with one of Folklore Twitter’s dark luminaries is about to play out. The setting, …
May 16, 2024
Piss is having a comeback in art, though some will argue that it never went away. As far as my generation is concerned this bodily fluid burst onto the scene when American artist Andre Serrano sank a crucifix into a case of his own urine and photographed the result. Piss Christ had such a cultural …
April 9, 2024
Three good souls are performing, and improvising, their way through a weekday afternoon; large paintings are taking shape in the barn where they congregate. The trio combine music, movement and the slow application of bright acrylic paint. They address the canvas with gestural emphasis, and respond to one another with alacrity. For most of the …
February 8, 2024
The first review of this show is scratched into the dirt on the side of a car parked outside: “This is cool”, it appears to relate to the car. I say ‘parked’. In fact the vehicle is dumped on its roof. It’s just a silver Toyota but, inverted, it’s become a focal point for local …
September 18, 2022
Sidney Nolan Trust is a bucolic arts centre, which nestles in a valley carved out by a glacier. Along with acres of green land, the late Australian artist’s Herefordshire estate comprises a calmly ramshackle residential home, a preserved studio overstocked with spray paint, and an outlying barn which has become a gallery to show, largely, …
September 29, 2021
Before I heard about this exhibition and community-based artwork, Moulescoombe was just a destination on the front of the 49 bus, a neighbourhood so different from the middle-class bubbles in which I’ve lived, I had never gone there. And yet go there, properly, we did, myself and co-writer/co-photographer, 9-year-old Aysha, who enjoyed spotting the newly …
September 3, 2020
When it comes to the world of contemporary art, it can be difficult for a journalist to paint the people and the parties in their true colours. So perhaps it is unsurprising, given the suspension of disbelief required by the market and the legal protection afforded by fiction, that the most convincing picture of the …
June 7, 2017
The time tested way of introducing a story (“Once upon a time…â€) is little help when writing a blog about art. And so faced with the most narrative-driven work in this year’s Liverpool Biennial, I don’t know where to begin. HFT The Gardener is a multi-faceted piece display which comprises of some 174 works on paper and a …
September 26, 2016
The artist appears to have a simple and urgent proposition: to render the past absurd is to neutralise the rhetoric of the political right. Without a golden age to hark about, no one can promise to make America, the UK, or India ‘great again’. And we can instead progress to a state of internationalism, equal …
July 30, 2016