28 October 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
21 October 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
‘What is that really?’ is often a sensible question once you’re used to the tricky ways of artists. Four current shows are evidence.
10 October 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
9 October 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
It’s not a criticism of the art in ‘Five Hides’ to say that the biggest wow moment is seeing the space, a vast Victorian hall close to Kennington tube station which is hosting its first exhibition. The soaring 800 square metres of Manor Place, which has been left empty over the last decade, has a colourful history.
7 October 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
29 September 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
I was sorry to hear that the small but splendid Tintype Gallery is sailing into the sunset.
23 September 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
The New Art Centre in Wiltshire combines the ideal socially distanced art experience – sculpture in the landscape – with three indoor galleries.
16 September 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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
15 September 2020 • Mark Westall
A dozen artists from Europe and Asia inhabit ‘Super Flatland’ at White Conduit Projects. Some are there as an artistic strategy, either for aesthetic reasons or to generate confusion between what is 2D and what 3D.
6 September 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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’.
3 September 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
12 August 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
5 August 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
22 July 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
I have also been newly interested in artists now on my list of ‘see IRL when you get the chance’. Such as these three
8 July 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Three artists mentioned that they liked the poems, and Richard Schur titled a painting after one of them. Then I asked the other two if they would like to link a work to a poem, so here I am virtually running around with three of my favourite artists, replacing my photos of the park with their art:
1 July 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Art UK is the online home for every public art collection in the UK, recently represented to make 250,000 works easily searchable with a facility to curate your own show. Faced with so many options, I took took the simple approach of looking for less usual examples from some of my favourite C20th artists.
21 June 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Art Basel’s online viewing rooms can be visited until 26 June. There is plenty of trouble in the world for that art to reflect: not just the virus, the economy, wars, terrorism and global warming but also bad attitudes. Here’s my selection of work which addresses the anti-discriminatory agenda so effectively foregrounded by ‘Me Too’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’…
17 June 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Perhaps the most heartening coronavirus development in art has been the development of the Artist Support Pledge, whereby works are offered for sale for up to £200, and when an artist sells £1,000-worth they pledge to spend £200 supporting another artist. Over 250,000 works have now been posted on Instagram at #artistsupportpledge, generating over £20m! Naturally, quality is variable at that quantity, but it is easy enough to access artists you like through their own Instagram accounts. I posted some examples in my 22 April column. Here are three more who appealed to me…
10 June 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Mark Manders makes striking work which originates in a unique way of thinking. Antwerp’s Zeno X Gallery is currently showing two typical pieces in the online version of Art Brussels.
3 June 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Here are three rainbow-channelling works which I like: superficially similar concatenations of rectangular blocks which have many underlying differences.
27 May 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Everyone knows the ‘date paintings’ of On Kawara (1933-2014), collectively known as ‘Today’. 0r do they? Can you answer the following questions?
20 May 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
Instagram has become the default means for artists to present themselves online. Mostly, that’s to show new work, how it comes about, inspirations, recommendations – all of which can be interesting. But some go further: their Instagram account becomes, in effect, the platform for creating new work, perhaps at a slant from the work for which they’re best known. Here are four artists whose posts I look forward to from that less usual angle.
12 May 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
What are artists doing during lockdown? Here are some further examples, following on from last week.
6 May 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
What are artists doing during lockdown? This week and next I will feature work made in last couple of months which reflect some of those factors.
