art blog since 2009
There are two Barbicans, we soon learn on a tour of the East London council estate: the multi-purpose arts centre; and the mysterious residential units which sell for seven figure sums. Most visits to the former involve passing beneath the latter. But there is so much more to this brutalist landmark and unlikely home than …
December 14, 2014
It’s a curious thing. It is hoped that not many typos find their way from this keyboard onto your screen. But a recent blog post for Bad at Sports had at least three. My very bad. What made it strange was that the subject of my review, Nick Davies, has been doing fantastic things with …
December 10, 2014
Nothing like the Turner Prize to deliver half an hour of overwrought excitement. Not that the writer of this blog was there. He was wound like a spring on the sofa, as the reportage photo above implies. But how close can you get to this Prize? Like the man in a Kafka parable, you wait and …
December 1, 2014
Let’s get a comparison out of the way. Art is like an infinite game of chess. An artwork will reorient all the pieces round it, and inevitably change the game. But chess fans visiting Beswick in East Manchester may be frustrated by the inscrutable configuration of pieces in Ryan Gander’s third major artwork for the public. It’s a checkmate, apparently. But …
November 27, 2014
JCHP are a two-man art ‘team’, who have been accused of ‘nigh-on psychotic self-analysis’ (in their own catalogue to boot*). So where to start and what to add? First, it’s a relief that Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock are in fact hard grafting artists Dave Smith and Thom Winterburn. Thankfully, they’re not just one horrendously posh …
November 21, 2014
Just minutes into our interview at a gallery in Bermondsey, 30-something Jasmine Surreal pulls a toy cat from her bag and begins ventriloquizing, in a cat voice, for my benefit. “With my painting, I do nice, fantasy, imaginative things, because I’m so beautiful and glamorous like Zsa Zsa Gabor,†says Surreal, lost for a moment …
November 19, 2014
For those who don’t already know, Aston Villa FC are an underperforming English football team from the West Midlands. It might not be common knowledge in the wider art world. Three artists staged a gallery event last Saturday: Bartlett, Selmes and Roberts. We’ll drop the first names, in the spirit of football. Because all support …
November 18, 2014
At a point of maximal chaos, the objects in this sculpture hang together and you feel you could take your finger off the pause button and return this scene to order. The tableau is composed of ‘junk’, but white paint gives it a wintry appearance, akin to a seasonal shop window, and perhaps one dressed …
November 16, 2014
Joy Division plus cats equals instant clickbait for this blog. But that was probably never the intention of a Stuckist painter so surreal she calls herself Jasmine Surreal. In a colourful, cat-mad show at Trispace Gallery in South London, this work brings a sobriety to proceedings, a stony sense of the monumental, or indeed the memorial. …
November 14, 2014
Shot with minimal and remote means, Episode III is an uncinematic film in which the most stunning aspect of the production is the artist’s radical cynicism. Martens oscillates between western messiah and unsentimental doom-monger as he gives advice, hope and (it seems) no assistance to villagers and plantation workers in Congo. And yet his apparent cruelty …
November 8, 2014