art blog since 2009
New touring exhibition Tainted Love positions itself somewhere between group show and group therapy. Twelve artists have produced work with the theme of obsessive, one-sided love. At least they will now have company. “We’ve transformed the gallery with these partitions,†says artist and curator Corinna Spencer, speaking on the phone midway through the installation at …
May 4, 2012
Quite a newsy Found Objects this week, so hold page 23: German artists threaten to guillotine a sheep if the public don’t vote to save it. Let’s hope it has the X Factor; story in The Telegraph. Larissa Sansour has reimagined Palestine as a tower block. But the Swiss Musée d’Elysée got cold feet, or …
April 30, 2012
This bench-like sculpture is made with showermats. The candy covered suckers draw the eye and hold the attention, so this work could be the most attractive in its show. But it seems perverse to pick out one artwork from an exhibition which was all about the interplay between pieces by Kox and her friend the …
April 29, 2012
One of the more surprising things you might hear about the work of Francis Bacon is that one of his paintings hangs in a museum at the Vatican. The work is a study for a better known painting of Pope Innocent X. In the subsequent work his holiness appears in a gold cage screaming blue …
April 28, 2012
Another frenzy of links from the last seven days: Is anyone using Artstack yet, or is everyone using it already? *panics* Whatever the case here’s an enticing primer from the Guardian. As a victim of procrastination, I love this curated twitter stream by media artist Cory Arcangel: wrknonmynovel or “working on my novel”. Daily Serving …
April 23, 2012
It is the largest cultural celebration in the history of the modern Olympics, but you could be forgiven for letting the 2012 Cultural Olympiad pass you by so far. And if it conjures images of community dance projects and corporate sponsors holding up giant cheques at photo calls, you may be trying to ignore it …
April 19, 2012
More links to edify and entertain: Plimack Mangold demonstrates you can stay at home, paint and still be conceptual. That’s what gets so well argued in this essay by John Yau on Hyperallergic (Parts one, two and three) Everyone’s favourite least-favourite art critic now has his own two part sampleboard on a website dedicated to …
April 16, 2012
Freedom from Eva and Franco Mattes aka 01.ORG on Vimeo. In the terms of the ongoing wars, there is really only one side you or I can be on in the infiinte struggle between freedom and tyranny. But Eva and Franco Mattes have questioned the extent of that freedom, with a novel approach to playing …
April 14, 2012
For no real reason, this week is a Bank Holiday special: It’s always good to hear what the animal world might have to tell us. Guardian chats with their spokesman Marcus Coates (via @LizzieHom.) Beverley Knowles writes up a pleasing memory feat and takes in art, human rights and, emo. Intrigued? 90% of guns seized …
April 9, 2012
If needing just one word to sum up Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, you might resort to some made up slang invented for a work of dystopian fiction. The violence of his killed and pickled animals is horrorshow, as is the vitrine pictured. Real horrorshow, the ultimate accolade for gang member Alex in A Clockwork …
April 8, 2012