Visual arts
fisun.guner
It’s the time of year when Tate Britain unveils its much-anticipated, artist-designed Christmas tree. Over the years, we’ve had Fiona Banner decorating hers with unpainted Airfix models of fighter planes, while Sarah Lucas hung hers with stuffed tights instead of baubles. Tacita Dean vied between tradition and Minimalism with a simple arrangement of beeswax candles, while both Mark Wallinger and Julian Opie decided to forego the fir tree altogether: Wallinger opted for a bare, spindly aspen decked with mass-produced Catholic rosary beads, while, true to his cartoon/Ikea aesthetic, Opie’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As I wandered round this year’s New Contemporaries at the ICA, a few yards away in Trafalgar Square, thousands of students braved the cold for the third time to protest against the Government’s proposed spending cuts on education. How many art students joined the rally is impossible to tell, since most London art schools have been swallowed up by universities and lost their individual identities in the process. Whereas the high-profile sit-ins of 1968 were orchestrated by students from Hornsey College of Art (now part of Middlesex University) and, 20 years later, students from Camberwell Read more ...
fisun.guner
Dexter Dalwood appeared to be an early favourite, while many wished Angela de la Cruz, who had suffered a debilitating stroke five years ago, a deserved comeback triumph (though the artist who makes evocative “sculpture/paintings” of crumpled canvases did win the prestigious £35,000 Paul Hamlyn Award last month). Few, apart from this reviewer, appeared to be backing the Otolith Group. But in the end, it was 45-year-old Glaswegian artist Susan Philipsz, with recordings of three different versions of a traditional Scottish ballad, who bagged the Turner Prize last night.Philipsz accepted the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The unseen Dalí? Surely not. Anyone who ever popped into Dalí Universe, the now defunct gallery on the South Bank which was devoted to the flamboyant Surrealist's work, might well ask. Since there have been so many editions of his well-known sculptures, cast in prodigious numbers both during his lifetime and after his death in 1989, it seems only right and proper to raise a sceptical eyebrow: what more, indeed, is there to discover? And not just this. There’s a further thorny question of authenticity. The posthumous sculptures still manage to fetch a price, of course, because Dalí gave Read more ...
fisun.guner
Fashion and conceptual art come together, sometimes awkwardly, often provocatively, in the Royal Academy’s third and final annual GSK Contemporary exhibition. Instead of celebrating glamour and excess, designers and artists – as well as those, such as Helen Storey (1) and Hussein Chalayan, who have successfully made a fashion to art crossover - take on big themes: cultural and personal identity, conformity and freedom, globalisation and the environment. The exhibition explores the shifting concerns that have preoccupied these practitioners over the past five decades.Storey addresses the Read more ...
mark.hudson
A retrospective at Tate St Ives can be a poisoned chalice for the major artist. It postpones his or her prospect of a showing at Tate Britain by a couple of decades, and can appear to consign them to the comfort zone of "Cornish Art": the heritage Modernism of Barbara and Ben, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron et al, stuff we love (well, most of us) because it reminds us of being on holiday, but may feel, in our heart of hearts, to be more than a touch minor. On the positive side, Peter Lanyon, who was killed in a gliding accident in 1964, isn’t around to mind, and there’s something to be said Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In England you may joke about having Siberian weather with minus 7 degrees. This is really what Siberian winter looks like - at minus 26 degrees. The river is gushing steam, a hellishly peculiar sight. After travelling for 16 hours and through seven time zones to get to Krasnoyarsk at six in the morning, I am not sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing.Krasnoyarsk is plumb above Mongolia, and nearly the last stop east on the Trans-Siberian railway before you enter the empty white taiga, where almost no one can live. It is 4,000 kilometres back west to get to Moscow - and that’s only halfway back to Read more ...
sue.steward
The thin line between Art and Craft gets slimmer as artists like Carlos Zuniga ignore the borders and delve into hands-on production processes. This Chilean photographer, architect and graphic designer works compulsively on large, imposing portraits and landscapes using intensely obsessive techniques.His earliest portraits featured young people from his home town, Santiago de Chile, but the collection has now expanded literally and metaphorically into images which represent the generation born during the era of Latin American dictators - in Zuniga’s case, during the Pinochet years. The Read more ...
joe.muggs
I once passed up the chance of meeting Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, who - it was announced by his Throbbing Gristle bandmates on Twitter - died in his sleep last night aged 55. In the late 1990s I was invited to interview him and his long-term partner Geoff Rushton aka John Balance at the country house where they recorded their ritual electronic music as Coil, but being a young and inexperienced writer at the time, I got scared off by their reputation as exploratory occultists and opted instead for a phone interview with Rushton. He proved to be a spectacularly charming and fascinating Read more ...
fisun.guner
Lovers of the beautiful game may already be familiar with the name Philippe Parreno, or at least with his best-known work. In 2006 he collaborated with artist Douglas Gordon (24-hour Psycho) on Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, a film that trained 17 cameras on the footballing genius for the duration of a game. Following Zidane’s every move, the 90-minute feature proved an especially intimate portrait: the cameras stayed close, never straying, never hinting at the 80,000 strong crowd nor bringing the other players into view. Zidane, who was also miked up, appeared oblivious to the intense Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, we all make mistakes. Or, in my case, we (I mean “I”) sometimes just fail to look. This new, small but perfectly formed exhibition of Bridget Riley’s work in the National Gallery’s Sunley Rooms follows the pattern that the gallery has developed over the years, with a single artist entering into a conversation with the great art of the past. Riley’s conversation is gripping, and one of the things it says (to me) is, “Shame on you for not looking.”Shame on me indeed, for I have for far too long looked but not seen, tagging Riley as an Op Art operator, shrugging her off as “very good Read more ...
sue.steward
“Hot sweaty tight jammed in can’t breathe heart pumping centre of the universe Monday night action in town. Racing down to Bar Rumba at midnight through the blaring siren wailing darkness of south London to the tinsel town wet streeted fakeness of the West End and the That’s How it Is sessions, Gilles Peterson, James Lavelle, UFO, Patrick Forge, Roni Size spin…” [sic] Peter Williams, London, 1994.That was written by the photographer whose 70 black-and-white photographs are showing at a blink-and-you-miss-it gallery in east London until Saturday. Since the heyday of London’s New Jazz scene in Read more ...