art blog since 2009
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: Here and Now – 2nd Year Fine Art BA (Hons), University of Brighton, until February 23 2010 It will typically take an art student three years to hone their technique, but to give a piece a great title can be the work of seconds. Here and Now is a group show by second year …
February 16, 2010
Exhibition: Star City: The Future Under Communism, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, February 13 – April 18 2010 With horizons sealed off by climate change and economic meltdown, it may be time to look backwards in order to start looking forwards again. Star City at Nottingham Contemporary presents visions of the future from behind the Iron Curtain. …
February 6, 2010
Exhibition: Party!, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, February 12 – April 18 2010 The birthday bash of a 10-year-old can easily get out of hand. It certainly looks that way with an exhibition called Party! at the New Art Gallery Walsall. More than 50 artists feature in the show, which celebrates a decade since …
February 5, 2010
The very first gallery pays homage to Ghandi. 4,479 fibreglass bones spell out a text which pleads for non-violence so it seems perverse to name this show The Empire Strikes Back. But violent reactions wait round every corner of the Saatchi Gallery’s 11 main spaces. On this evidence, Indian art causes shudders, sharp intakes of …
February 2, 2010
Spike Island will hold the first major solo show in a public space for Amanda Beech. The West Country gallery promises a nightmarish trip to America’s West Coast. Sanity Assassin is a three screen video installation with a sinister sculptural element, a series of chainsaws atop a mirrored plinth. This display, based on a real …
January 23, 2010
London Art Fair, Business Design Centre, London, until January 17 2010 “The cynic,” Oscar Wilde once said, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In which case, London Art Fair risks making cynics of us all. 136 galleries and dealers have set out their stalls at the Business Design Centre in Islington …
January 15, 2010
Published on Culture24 The Sacred Made Real at The National Gallery, London, until January 2010 As you would expect from a pallid corpse in a darkened room, Dead Christ draws quite a crowd. Gregorio Fernández’s wooden bier is surrounded by a dozen curious visitors. If this was a roadside, they would be driving past slowly, …
November 25, 2009
Written for Culture24 Exhibition: Keith Tyson – Cloud Choreography and Other Emergent Systems, Parasol Unit, London, until November 11 2009 It goes something like this: n pigeons/a non-graceful tree of 2n generations where each gen has r vertices and then has r+1 edges and r and n are random integers within the limits (0<n>5) (1<r>9). …
October 30, 2009
Published on Culture 24 Exhibition: Peter Randall-Page, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Underground Gallery, Garden Gallery and open air, Wakefield, until January 2010 Glacial boulders provide much of the raw material. And having been thawed out and carved up by Peter Randall– Page, the rocks still appear to be moving. To claim that stones have energy fields …
October 21, 2009