contemporary art
fisun.guner
Things you might know about Oslo: it’s expensive and the cost of a beer, wine, dinner for two – whatever your tourist yardstick – might make your hair stand on end (the cost of living is currently second only to Singapore city, according to a 2014 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit); it’s small (population: 600,000), yet it’s also the fastest growing capital in Europe, thanks to both overseas immigration and the fact that many Norwegians are now moving to the capital; its most celebrated son is, of course, Edvard Munch.Luckily, it’s art, not the beer or the exchange rate, that’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
Feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feeeelings. Just like that Morris Albert hit of the Seventies for star-crossed lovers everywhere, I lost count of the number of times I heard that word in this Alan Yentob meets Jeff Koons love-in. Or, more precisely, “feeling” singular, since Koons, one of the most bankable artists in the world, was talking about the “feeeeling” aroused when you looked at one of his art works. The engendered feeling was, we learned, a cross between sex-lust, consumer-lust and religious transcendence – “transcendence” being another favoured Koons word. And left to his own words, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
For all the wrong reasons, the work of Dexter Dalwood serves as a useful metaphor for this exhibition. Trite, tokenistic and desperate to look clever, Dalwood’s paintings are as tiresomely inward-looking as the show itself, which is a dismal example of curatorial self-indulgence at the expense of public engagement. It’s not always a bad thing to give free rein to theorising curators, but this show compares unfavourably with exhibitions at, notably, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Courtauld Gallery that have successfully introduced the public to sound, but arguably arcane academic Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Zurich, London, New York…Somerset. It may seem unlikely, but an 18th-century farm in the West Country is the new place to be for contemporary art aficionados. Last year, renovations were completed on the 10 buildings of Durslade Farm, left to fall into disrepair over decades. Now, the world-class arts centre boasts five gallery spaces, the Roth Bar & Grill – where locally sourced produce meets bold, eclectic installations – shop, guest house, library and learning room, backed by Piet Oudolf’s sumptuous 1.5-acre perennial meadow. But how did Hauser & Wirth’s creators make the intuitive Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Enzo Green, Shirim, Raethro Red, Raemar Magenta. Everything has a name. But beyond the meaningless but musical sounds of their titles, the light projections and installations on view at Houghton Hall by the leading American light, land and skyscape artist James Turrell are an ineffable art whose presence and effect is subtle, substantial, utterly memorable and almost beyond words. Descriptions, yes, as light projections make the spectator believe that these are solid if translucent slabs and walls, voids and curves, convex, concave, real: the brain and eye respond in innumerable Read more ...
fisun.guner
Imagine if broadcasters thought the only living pop star worth giving air time to was Lady Gaga. Imagine – the horror. It would be wall-to-wall Gaga for the foreseeable future. And then imagine if the only living contemporary artist commissioning editors at Channel 4 and the BBC even bothered looking at was… Grayson Perry. Imagine. But wait. You don’t need to imagine – Perry has carved himself a big niche: as the go-to telly transvestite sociologist-cum-artist, fronting programmes trying to pin down the essence of Englishness, taste and class, and why critics seem to sneer at the type of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Glasgow-based Corin Sworn is the fifth winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Every two years a British artist is chosen on the basis of a proposal, rather than existing work. The fashion house then supports the project with funding, a bespoke, six-month residency in Italy and, following the Whitechapel Gallery show, an exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, where the HQ of the family-run business is located.It's an extremely enlightened form of patronage, but its emphasis on process rather than product is risky. Since artist’s projects are likely to change course en Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In an oft quoted moment of self-deprecation, WH Auden once described his own face as looking like “a wedding cake left out in the rain”. But the poet might have thought twice if confronted with the Porcelain confections of Rachel Kneebone. The London-based artist has brought three of her sculptures to the gallery of the University of Brighton; each one piles flora, vines and body parts onto a tomb-like plinth. They are as grand as wedding cakes, sugar white, and slick with a wet-looking glaze. Look closer and delicate flowers dissolve into less seemly clumps of undergrowth. Tendrils look Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical thinking and reflectivity.HIs best-known works, quotations in illuminated text, blazon themselves on the mind. They occupy a tidy niche and reproduce well in books, magazines and social media updates. So when you first see his work here on the south coast, in an 11th-century church no less, you might for a moment get a sense that, were this not a cosy Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Described by the Tate as the Laurel and Hardy of the art world, John Wood and Paul Harrison are best known for appearing in superbly timed, comic videos using their own bodies to explore spatial relations. Projected over the concrete stairwell of the Carroll/Fletcher gallery 100 Falls (pictured below right) is excruciating to watch. A black-clad figure in a white room disappears from view up a wooden ladder. Seconds later he plummets down to crash land in a crumpled heap on the floor. Sometimes he smashes into the wall, sometimes his legs are bent awkwardly beneath him. Surely he must be Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
On a snowy day in early spring in New York, the On Kawara – Silence show at the Guggenheim is unlikely to warm you up. His date paintings, postcards, telegrams and other coldly ur-conceptual accountings spiral up those famous white Frank Lloyd Wright stairs, seemingly ad infinitum. But it’s a powerful, hypnotic experience, one that seeps into your subconscious and becomes a meditation on time and space.On Kawara, who died last year in New York at the age of 81, almost never gave interviews or let himself be photographed. You won’t find him on YouTube, though you will find footage of people Read more ...
fisun.guner
This is work that wears its heart on its sleeve. That’s what gets you in the end in this big retrospective of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. The French-American artist, who died aged 71 in 2002, is probably best known for two very different bodies of work: her Shooting paintings, the series of collaborative performances in which she and others blasted paint-filled polythene pouches with a rifle, creating chance-based abstract paintings as the sacs burst over the white-plastered canvases they were attached to; and her exuberant Nanas, a nimble, tippy-toed troupe of gargantuan women, fat- Read more ...