art blog since 2009
Is the title of this Sean Scully work an imperative? I only ask because gallery visitors can do little else when confronted with this three-panelled masterpiece from the 1980s. So we stare . . . but whatever we seek, paint is all we might find. Bands of off-white and off-black, inspired by bleached bone and …
November 20, 2013
Seven more days slip by with but a handful of stories to cling to. Click on: There’s now a Kafka angle to the Munich art hoard story (interivew with Cornelius Gurlitt) Here’s another good Nazi art theft yarn. What became of the Mona Lisa? Museum-show of the season is not in a museum at all. …
November 18, 2013
While there may be plenty of government departments in castles all around the world, we are lucky in Britain to broadly avoid that particular Kafkaesque motif. And yet the darkness of a homegrown bouncy castle made of leather, with its many turrets, and its relentless air pump, is every bit as oppressive as the Czech …
November 14, 2013
Your usual mix of the good, the bad and the trivial (art stories from around the web): Look on the bright side of any imminent apocalypse. Colleen Fitzgibbon interviews filmmaker Ben Rivers for BOMB Magazine Found poetry of Google autocomplete demonstrates that the hivemind sure has an active muse. Read about it on Hyperallergic Here’s …
November 11, 2013
It is all very well writing with a skull on your desk (I don’t). But you might still wonder how much thought the saints of old gave to the more practical aspects of death. Now, however, American artist Baseman brings you right into that seldom-explored margin between death and burial/cremation, via an interview with funeral …
October 30, 2013
Patti Smith, writing in her memoir Just Kids, says that by walking a city you can come to own the very streets. She and lover Robert Mapplethorpe attempted and achieved as much in New York City. But that was Manhattan and, to point out by way of a cliché, nobody sane walks anywhere in urban …
October 25, 2013
In terms of medium, Steve McQueen is in unusual territory with his celebrated philatelical artwork Queen and Country. Just don’t expect to see any of this piece come through your letterbox. 179 sheets of stamps now occupy a large filing cabinet at Imperial War Museum North. Visitors can pull out trays and encounter, one by …
October 21, 2013
This sculpture makes a meal of a piece of gum. It may be marble, but it was once a remnant piece of a habit-forming chew. And now it is the size of a torso. Visitors may be struck at the muscularity, which marble will always suggest. There is a body trapped in here, perhaps a …
October 2, 2013
Neo-expressionist painting, if that’s what this be, often has literal depth. Layers of paint come between viewer and canvas. And layers don’t get much thicker than those of this Mexican artist. When you square up to it, there is a material heaviness. And this translates (in our primitive minds) to a metaphorical heaviness: in other …
September 26, 2013
Japan has multiple ways to say “Iâ€. Artist and multiple-self David Blandy tells us this half way through his new film Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark, a film itself part autobiography. The Japanses have a dynamic way of speaking in first person, which relates to the present company; and what artist keeps such interesting company as …
September 13, 2013