art blog since 2009
Exhibition: Susan Collis – Since I Fell For You, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, until May 16 2010 There are 25 pieces in this show by Susan Collis, but if it wasn’t for a gallery handout and some helpful attendants, you could easily miss the lot of them. The walls do not look ready for art. Nails …
April 1, 2010
Exhibition: Laura Taylor – Speedboat Matchsticks, Surface Gallery, Nottingham, March 27 – April 8 2010 In a gallery, it may be impossible for an object to become completely useless. Laura Taylor will strip away the functionality from her ready-made sculptures, only to find new purposes for each assemblage. Her raw materials are oddments of motorised …
March 29, 2010
Exhibition: Lu Chunsheng and Jia Aili – Counterpoints, Rivington Place, London, March 31 – May 15 2010 With the commission of work by Ai Weiwei for the turbine hall of Tate Modern later this year, contemporary art from China is very much on the capital’s cultural agenda. So this new exhibition at Rivington Place can …
March 26, 2010
Exhibition: Artes Mundi 4: Wales International Visual Art Exhibition and Prize, National Museum Cardiff, until June 6 2010 Olga Chernysheva’s photos of a natural history museum in Moscow can now, by a strange quirk of fate, be seen in a natural history museum in Wales. But the scenes captured by the Russian artist are a …
March 19, 2010
Exhibition: Jenny Holzer, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, until May 16 2010 After more than 30 years making art from text, Jenny Holzer’s most recent work concerns censorship and the deletion of politically sensitive words and phrases. US Government documents relating to the Middle East comprise the source material for her new Redaction Paintings, …
March 19, 2010
The UK’s biggest art prize, Artes Mundi, is vying to become the most talked about. At £40,000 it is worth twice as much as the Turner, which should provide twice as much scope for controversy. While installing work by shortlisted artists at National Museum Cardiff, the organisers make clear their intent. “We’ve taken down a …
March 18, 2010
Marcus Coates, The Plover’s Wing, 2009. Courtesy the Artist and Workplace Gallery. Marcus Coates arrives wearing neither badger fur nor stag antlers. He drinks tea, not peyote, and does not bark, yelp or fall into a trance. In fact there is no evidence at all this man has a hotline to the animal kingdom. His …
March 11, 2010
Exhibition: Imogen Stidworthy, Arnolfini, Bristol, until April 25 In some ways the work of Imogen Stidworthy goes beyond the limits of visual art, because her main area of interest is speech. Accent, slang and speech therapy are all explored in her new show at Arnolfini. It is the first UK survey of the Liverpool-based artist. …
March 6, 2010
Ai Weiwei, best known for helping create a ‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium for the Beijing Olympics, is bringing his talents for grand scale work to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Ai becomes the eleventh artist to accept the Unilever-sponsored commission, yet still the first who lives and works in the Asia-Pacific region. Vicente Todolà described …
March 6, 2010
Exhibition: Richard Hamilton – Modern Moral Matters, Serpentine Gallery, London, until April 25 2010 More than 50 years since Pop Art began, it is a 1960s aphorism which best explains the varying effects in this show. Marshall McLuhan may have coined the phrase, but it is Richard Hamilton who really demonstrates the adage that “the …
March 4, 2010