Most days Art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
The London Art Fair’s online edition runs 18th-31st Jan. As in the physical versions, the best material is fairly evenly split between 20th century British classics and contemporary work – so here are two picks from each category:
Back in the days when people asked ‘does my bum look big in this?’ rather than ‘does my bum look… Read More
There’s a mode of work, developing from the found object tradition, which simply presents lots of something to potentially transformative effect.
Just how long does Christmas last? Maybe it’s because covid time passes oddly, but I’ve recently noticed some artworks which might be taken as stretching it out somewhat…
One characteristic of the computer is its potential to cause glitches. That’s been of interest to artists, either as a… Read More
Artist jewellery isn’t rare, but it is normally produced by specialists in collaboration with the artist using the artist’s… Read More
Already it seems somewhat normal that Art Basel Miami and its numerous satellites were held online this year. That doesn’t mean the sun and parties and in-person experiences of art aren’t missed, but they’re not easy to get to anyway… Here are four works which interested me among the 2600 works ‘shown’:
Plates are a rather convenient way to display art, somewhere between ceramic – for the most part, though metals are possible – and painting. Ceramics are in vogue anyway, and as functional objects go, plates are easy to display. In ascending order of price, here are three recent initiatives which have stepped up to the plate:
In this selection, which came out of research for the arts-meets-sciences magazine Seisma, five international artists use the theories and methods of science to generate art with distinctive shapes.
The Discerning Eye (19 Nov- 31 Dec) is a show – usually in the Mall Galleries, online only this year… Read More
I like it when you can track an artist’s development through their own account…
Clare Price hasn’t followed a conventional path:
For the ‘festival in a box’ – in Director Shoair Mavlain’s words – ‘the artworks travelled to people’s homes, classrooms and community spaces’, so eliminating the reliance on personal travel ‘which itself relies on economic privilege’ and allowing the viewer to ‘become the curator’ by choosing how to hang the work.
‘What is that really?’ is often a sensible question once you’re used to the tricky ways of artists. Four current shows are evidence.
You could say that 1:54 is the Frieze fair this week – at any rate it’s the only real life fair in the city during ‘Frieze week’. So it seems only fair to pay it attention.
You can’t put everything on the increasingly central art medium of Instagram, as it’s censored. Specifically, any photographic image of genitals, naked buttocks or bare female breasts are out. The fact that it’s art isn’t held to make any difference, which has caused some annoyance.
I was sorry to hear that the small but splendid Tintype Gallery is sailing into the sunset.
The New Art Centre in Wiltshire combines the ideal socially distanced art experience – sculpture in the landscape – with three indoor galleries.
The past few years have tended to see Georg Baselitz in fine, adventurous form, at least in the studio (less so in the interview room, where his ludicrous generalisations about female painters have tended to put people off). And you have to hand it to him here: well into his ninth decade, Baselitz has come up with a series of works quite unlike anything he has done before – a whole show of hands, many of them monumental
107 artists have made works in a Perspex cube for the third edition of Cure3, which provides the triple good of keenly-priced chances to obtain interesting art in a good cause – The Cure Parkinson’s Trust, which has described sufferers as feeling ‘boxed in’.
It’s obvious enough that this year’s graduates have missed out on the traditional benefits of a degree show. But the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery has teamed up with the Saatchi Gallery to do something about it by facilitating students to curate a ‘best of ‘ selection through an open call to all those graduating this year.
I guess no one visits the Eden Project in Cornwall to look at art: to enjoy the plant life, take in the biomes and reflect on environmental sustainability, yes; to zip across the half-mile SkyWire, maybe. But there is an art trail, along with a map identifying sixteen works to see, and I followed it last week.
It did mean that the end of Parasol unit at Wharf Road programme in London came rather unnoticed, but a handsome tome* now commemorates more than 50 major exhibitions held over the sixteen years 2004-20.
Another, proposed as the leitmotif of the new edition-driven project ‘Assembly Line’ by Shane Bradford, is to use the fact of multiplicity as the inherent driver of editioned art.
The ceramic painting seems to be a form on the rise. Ceramics have been a trend for some years now, triggered perhaps by a desire for the visibly hand-made in the era of outsourced and / or digital production.
