Visual arts
josh.spero
Works of art are usually quite easily recognisable: they’re in a frame, or on a pedestal, or (if it’s a particularly expensive one) there’s a security guard nearby. You’ll probably be in an art gallery or a smart private house too. But what about when the art is in the land? And moreover, when that art is almost too subtle to be noticed?This is what confronts the viewer of Ana Mendieta’s work, on show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London. Cuban-born Mendieta (1948-85) made interventions in the landscape based around her own silhouette, such as pressing her hand into grass or arranging stones Read more ...
howard.male
In the mid 1940s when the Queen Mother purchased Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (1943) Princess Margaret remembers saying, “Poor Mummy’s gone mad. Look what she’s brought back.” But though this painting is one of the undoubted masterpieces of 20th-century British art, it’s easy to see why the Princess responded as she did. At a glance, the dry, scrubby brushwork, muted colours and somewhat lumpen forms don’t exactly sing out of the grandeur of the English countryside in the way that, say, the paintings of Samuel Palmer or John Constable do. But Nash was a metaphysical poet as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Over the past couple of years, maverick photographer Gavin Bond has built up a contacts book that would be the envy of Rankin or Annie Leibovitz. He’s been shooting everyone who is anyone: subjects range from godfathers of rock such as Bono and AC/DC, through familiar acts like The Killers and Gwen Stefani, to fresh faces and emerging starts like Katy Perry and Vampire Weekend. Borrowing a vocabulary from the highly imagined and stylised world of the pop video, Bond’s photography largely concentrates on the impact of the artists as performers. However, "behind-the-scenes" shots of bands on Read more ...
fisun.guner
Arshile Gorky found it almost impossible to finish a painting. Something would always call him back. So he would go back and would add and retouch and tinker around over several years - sometimes over the course of a decade or two. “When something is finished,” he once said, “that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for a while. The thing to do is... never finish a painting.”His early paintings, his figurative still-lifes, particularly - not the late, softly fluid, lyrical abstractions that would profoundly influence the course of American art - Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As Jude Kelly put it today, the Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil this summer is about a country "living its future now" (link here for the initial programme). That is certainly exciting for a city like London trying to live down its last decade (writes Josh Spero).
Kelly, the Southbank Centre’s artistic director, was keen to talk about the "ardent escapism" Brazilian culture manifests in its desire to forget its often tough reality. To this end, the livelier muses have been invoked: Ernesto Neto’s vibrant, delicate and organic art at the Hayward Gallery (19 June-5 September); the Campana Read more ...
fisun.guner
Modernist art movements are a lot like totalitarian regimes. They produce their declaratory manifestos, send forth their declamatory edicts, and, before you know it, a Year Zero mentality prevails: the past must be declared null and void. Seeking to overturn 1,000 years of Western civilisation with a universal aesthetic utopia of brightly coloured squares and boldly delineated lines, a confident Theo van Doesburg, founding member and chief theorist of the Dutch movement De Stijl, wrote, “What the Cross represented to the early Christians, the square represents to us all. The square will Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s a rare national culture festival that presupposes its audience will have no knowledge whatsoever of the culture concerned - or even be able to locate the country itself on a map. But that, we must assume from the “Azerbai-where?” promotional bus ads, was the starting point last November for organisers of the BUTA Festival of Azerbaijan Art, a series of very well-connected art and music events in London going on this month. Realistically, until petrol starts to be sold with a “produce of” notice, the country’s brand recognition looks set to stay on the low side.BUTA may have started as Read more ...
simon.tait
We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House, and he chairs the board that appointed her. More than that, on Friday Hall was given a cross-bench seat in the House of Lords to thump the tub for the arts in 2012, and we’ll take notice then. Won’t we?The entire soap opera is eerily reminiscent of the events preceding Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture. That too was all set to be an Read more ...
josh.spero
Everything was green at 20 Hoxton Square this week as Kilimanjaro Magazine Edits opened: forget the environment, it was the plentiful absinthe imparting a verdant hue.The show features photos from Kilimanjaro, a self-described "vibrant printed space", and by common consent there was one heart-stopping beauty: Charlotte Rampling shot by Henry Roy, a Haitian expat. The photo catches Rampling in a distressed moment, looking away from the camera with a smear of bright pink lipstick providing the only colour. (The online version doesn't come close.)
Robi Rodriguez and J.H Engstrom were among the Read more ...
mark.hudson
Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is without doubt one of the year’s most enterprising and original exhibitions. Attempting to trace the impact on art of black cultures from around the Atlantic – in Africa, Europe and the Americas – from the early 20th century to today, it takes on a massive swathe of culture and experience. Or perhaps that should be several massive swathes. Beginning with the first earnest gropings towards a black modern style in inter-war Harlem and Brazil, the exhibition moves through Africa’s rediscovery of its own culture in the Negritude movement of the Read more ...
joe.muggs
My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" over and over on a loop. It's a dreadful cliché to say knowingly of a bar "it Read more ...
joe.muggs
Original Cultures is an artistic collective with bases in the UK, Italy and Japan, dedicated to audiovisual collaborations inspired by street art, graffiti, hip hop and electronic music. It is staging its first London event over the course of a week from 27 February to 5 March this year, in which artists Ericailcane, DEM, Will Barras, Hiraki Sawa, Om Unit, Tatsuki and Tayone will be joining to create new works in a series of public events and workshops in and around the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London.The schedule of activities for Original Cultures London 2010 is as follows:
Original Read more ...