installation
Sturtevant: Leaps, Jumps and Bumps, Serpentine GallerySaturday, 29 June 2013Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries. Borrowed from the BBC’s... Read more... |
Boris endorses abstract electronicaWednesday, 23 May 2012Unlikely electronica fan Mayor of London Boris Johnson this week celebrated the work of South African born experimental musician Mira Calix aka Chantal Passamonte, who has created an "Olympic sound sculpture work" made of stone being exhibited... Read more... |
Damien Hirst, Tate ModernTuesday, 03 April 2012How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien... Read more... |
Yayoi Kusama, Tate ModernMonday, 13 February 2012Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated... Read more... |
Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space, Serpentine GalleryWednesday, 14 December 2011The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali, White Cube BermondseyTuesday, 13 December 2011That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel... Read more... |
Turner Prize is won for the third time in a row by a Scottish artistTuesday, 06 December 2011George Shaw might have been the popular favourite, but it was Martin Boyce who carried the vote to win this year’s Turner Prize. The 44-year-old artist from Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, follows fast on the heels of two fellow Scots: Susan Philipsz... Read more... |
LUMIERE, DurhamFriday, 18 November 2011It would be hard to say which was the more breathtaking: a sunny autumn morning walk around the woody-banked loop of the River Wear, looking up at Durham’s monumental Norman cathedral from every perspective, or seeing the great edifice illuminated... Read more... |
Paul McCarthy: The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship, Hauser & WirthFriday, 18 November 2011Until recently, on YouTube, you could watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992), one of the funniest and most transgressive videos ever made. In a Swiss chalet, the children Heidi and Peter are being “educated” by their abusive grandfather... Read more... |
Turner Prize 2011, Baltic, GatesheadFriday, 21 October 2011The Turner Prize has headed to the North East. It’ll be back in London next year, thence to Derry for 2013. Tate Britain plan to host the prize biennially, with a regional public gallery presenting it in the years in-between. This must be hailed as... Read more... |
Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage, Hayward GalleryTuesday, 04 October 2011In 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... Read more... |
Museum Show Part 1, ArnolfiniWednesday, 28 September 2011A 50th birthday is a landmark occasion. One has plenty to look back on, whilst still having much to look forward to. Plus there’s all that life experience to draw on. What’s not to feel positive about? In the case of a gallery that’s built up a... Read more... |