
Art Basel in Basel is double B big.. Toby’s Journey
19 June 2025 • Toby Upson
I want to recall my journey through the fair in writing, speaking about some of the stuff I saw.
19 June 2025 • Toby Upson
I want to recall my journey through the fair in writing, speaking about some of the stuff I saw.
18 June 2025 • Toby Upson
Specifically young and emerging galleries — or those not as yet run ragged in an attempt to stay on the art world’s hamster wheel.
17 June 2025 • Toby Upson
The perfect place to actually see and discuss the artworks on offer. Now I am no buyer, but if I were, June would be my place to splash out
17 May 2025 • Toby Upson
Osamu Shikichi is a dancer — a choreographer and artist too.
13 May 2025 • Toby Upson
Littlewhitehead expose the affect of ideological landscapes on the human body.
2 May 2025 • Toby Upson
my laptop is an odd place to start a review of Amelia Barratt’s solo exhibition Out of Hours
28 April 2025 • Toby Upson
Ahead of this year’s VO, which has shifted from September to May, here are five things I look forward to talking to friends about.
10 March 2025 • Toby Upson
This is a film which demands witnessing. It is a monument, a memorial, a hard work of art that demands our affective labour.
21 January 2025 • Toby Upson
I want to focus on one para-exhibitionary example of the fusion of art and life which suffuses Basel
18 November 2024 • Toby Upson
Leanne Ross’ exhibition Dirty Dancing Flowers transforms the clerical ‘white cube’ into a party, quite literally a karaoke party, one we are all invited to.
4 November 2024 • Toby Upson
Indeed, it’s hard to compete with any of the artist, film maker, costume and stage designer, writer, poet, gardener, gay rights activist’s work.
26 October 2024 • Toby Upson
Now in its sixth year, the Art Car Boot Sale (Tramway, Glasgow) is something of an art fair antidote. One of Scotland’s biggest contemporary art events
21 October 2024 • Toby Upson
Time to pitch up and feel part of the community: Art Car Boot Sale, 2024
11 September 2024 • Toby Upson
I have been thinking about perception; how one comes to know the world and how artists work with this process of knowing.
7 September 2024 • Toby Upson
Cool and confident with a hint of performativity, the protagonists in these photos face out, with each of their mascara-laden lashes pressed towards the means of their filmic production: Rineke Dijkstra and her camera.
27 August 2024 • Toby Upson
I’m kicking the season off in Munich with Various Others. An “international format”, the event enlivens the city’s art scene through collaboration and reciprocity.
15 August 2024 • Toby Upson
To start with a bold statement: I do not like ‘the make of’ type exhibitions. Not moving nor sublime, wall texts and reportage never provide the romantic materialist in me with the space to get all wayward and dreamy; what I seek in exhibitions is never an ‘“interesting” …[full-stop]’.
12 August 2024 • Toby Upson
As the ‘vigintennial’ festivities get going, here are three things I would like to celebrate from this year’s EAF.
13 June 2024 • Toby Upson
Writing from this year’s Liste Art Fair, Basel two booths, each featuring a single series of artworks, presented artists who embrace the formalities of their chosen media to shine a new light on the flows of quotidian life and the habitation of domestic space.
26 March 2024 • Toby Upson
To think about Maxmine Bichon’s first institutional exhibition analogously, I will begin with a quote from Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl… Read More
24 February 2024 • Toby Upson
Composed from a minimal range of surplus materials, Ghislaine Leung’s exhibition Holdings lovingly rescores the ‘infrastructures of dependency’ that animate… Read More
12 February 2024 • Toby Upson
Not a flash pan fad but thick formal plots. Alexis Hunter’s 10 Seconds images acts of revolt which demand we… Read More
21 November 2023 • Toby Upson
Balance. Fountain. Personally, the title of Nari Ward’s first UK exhibition is patterned with a joyous feel.
28 October 2023 • Toby Upson
It felt harrow. The weight of white-washed walls rising. Here, that is there, space was made thick, or disturbingly claustrophobic, through an empty, automated, ambience.