Hayward Gallery
Steven Gambardella
Central to this thoughtful show is not really the use of light in art per se but how light appropriately serves a post-minimalist shift from the work of art to the environment itself. For the most part, the works here endeavour to shape the space around us or invoke a response on a physiological level.The lower gallery’s main room is dominated by Cerith Wyn-Evans’s S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E ("Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motives overspil..."), 2010, made up of floor-to-ceiling columns of incandescent lights which “breathe” by slowly glowing bright and dimming, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the 35th anniversary of the year punk met the mainstream, it’s to be expected that retrospection and nostalgia are in the air. Television has had a go, albums are being reissued and old soldiers are telling their stories. By its very nature an anniversary suggests that things were cut and dried, that 1977 was a beginning or a marker in the sand. But the exhibition Someday All the Adults Will Die: Punk Graphics 1971-1984 at the Southbank’s Hayward Gallery Project Space and the publication of the related book Punk: An Aesthetic both underline that things aren’t and weren’t so clear.Both the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the Hayward Gallery a young woman falls over backwards; her flight is magically arrested at a gravity-defying point of imbalance. Since she is blinking, one can safely assume that she is alive, present, and human rather than a waxwork or an illusion. How, though, does she sustain such an impossible position? No wires are visible, so she can’t be suspended, but look carefully and you can detect a rigid frame of some sort, hidden beneath her clothing to prevent her from crashing to the ground.The perfect embodiment of ongoing instability, this glorious piece by Shangai-based artist Xu Zhen Read more ...
Anne Blood
In May 1958, Yves Klein invited the Parisian art world to the Galerie Iris Clert for the opening of his latest exhibition, which was entitled The Specialisation of the Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility. Driven by ample press coverage, large crowds eagerly awaited the unveiling of the artist’s latest creation, only to be met with nothing. The gallery was empty and the artist best known for his eponymous shade of blue had left colour far behind and painted the entire space white.While many cried foul, the exhibition was far from a cruel trick. Yet when Read more ...
judith.flanders
It has been nearly a century since modernism decreed that “art” is whatever is produced by an artist, and “an artist” is whoever claims to be one. Mostly I agree with this, and my eyeballs tend to roll back in my head when the conversation moves on to the “my three-year-old could do this” refrain. But I’ve got to say, with David Shrigley, a lot of me spent a lot of time in the Hayward thinking, “Um, is this art?”I suppose the very fact that the work I was looking at made me think this way is a mark in its favour: it made me think, it made me consider what art is, or isn’t. But what I ended up Read more ...
josh.spero
The easiest mistake to make in appreciating George Condo would be to assume that his manic style reflects a manic creation or a manic practice. Some of Condo's paintings and drawings, with their childlike loops and gurning, disfigured faces, look like he made them in a fit of violence or some hysterical trance, but the real surprise of two new shows at the Hayward Gallery and at Sprüth Magers in Mayfair is the care and the calmness that lies behind them.Condo has developed a language of painting which mixes quotations from earlier artists with a cartoonish accent, adding his familiar Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 1997 the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist produced one of the most delightful videos ever made, and it won her the Biennale. Ever is Over All shows a young woman skipping down a city street gaily smashing car windows with a red-hot poker; and since it is shaped like a knobkerry, the flower makes a surprisingly convincing weapon. Oh dear, though, here comes a policewoman; but instead of admonishing or arresting the vandal, the bobby gives her an encouraging smile, salutes and walks on by. On the adjoining screen meanwhile, close-ups of the orange bloom reveal that, although its overall Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Tracey Emin is one of the defining personalities of our time isn’t in doubt. Even if you never want to hear another second of her guileless wittering, another word about her abortions, traumatic early rape and relentless onanistic neediness, you can't deny that her self-effected transformation from chippy Margate outsider to big-league art-world player represents something extraordinary. As to her work, it's been difficult to be certain of her value - or to entirely write her off - as there's never been the chance to see a big enough body of her work at one time. Read more ...
fisun.guner
After writing about a recent survey of French artist Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I found myself wondering about his collaboration with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. In 2006 the two artists made the acclaimed film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and while Parreno’s skills as a film-maker were pretty evident from that first UK solo exhibition, Gordon’s talents must surely lie elsewhere - that is, outside the frame. Neither technically ambitious nor visually seductive, his films are not even meant to be seen in their entirety, certainly not his 1993 24-hour Read more ...
mark.hudson
West Coast pop art always was a poor relation to the world-beating New York original. Beside the Big Apple titans – Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg – LA painters such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin and John Altoon remained essentially local figures. Or that’s certainly the way it has looked from this side of the pond. Ruscha (pronounced to rhyme with touché) may now be acclaimed as one of America’s greatest living artists, but with this first major British retrospective, the 72-year-old artist still has a lot to prove here and a lot to tell us about an aspect of American Read more ...