Where to Go to Find Out Where We Came From: The Artists Self-Publishers’ Fair
27 July 2022 • Paul Carey-Kent
The Seventh Artists Self-Publishers’ Fair takes place this Saturday 30 July 2022 at Conway Hall in London WC1. Free to… Read More
Tag: Paul’s Art Stuff on a Train
Plates
2 December 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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:
Shapes of Science
25 November 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
Dale Lewis’ Discerning Eye
18 November 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
The Discerning Eye (19 Nov- 31 Dec) is a show – usually in the Mall Galleries, online only this year… Read More
Jacqueline Poncelet’s Multiplicities
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.
This Year’s Cubism
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’.
London Grads Now
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.
Why visit the Eden Project?
26 August 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
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.
Shane Bradford’s Authentic Editions
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.
Ceramic Paintings
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.
Virtual with Virtue – 3 more artists to see IRL
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
Rebecca Fairman 1960-2020
18 March 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
The sudden death of Rebecca Fairman (1960-2020), who ran ArthouSE1 from 2014-20, dismayed the artists and curators connected with the gallery, witness the many who attended her funeral last week.
Portrait special
5 March 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
It’s easy enough to ignore the genre of portrait painting in the age of the camera, but the best examples do plenty apart from that. David Hockney carries on the tradition in his new show at the National Portrait Gallery, but it isn’t hard to find interesting portraits on elsewhere. Here are three…
Eric Fischl: Life is a Beach but Art is Like Tennis
12 February 2020 • Paul Carey-Kent
American painter Eric Fischl’s new show at Skarstedt (‘Figures’ to 9 April) presents, approximately life-sized, people on the beach. They come from Fischl’s own photographs of characters and poses which interest him – ‘I can’t tell people what I want’
Heavy in Bilbao
11 December 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
These days Bilbao’s art fame rests mainly on Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim, finished with 33,000 titanium sheets and containing eight of Richard Serra’s massive works from the series Torqued Ellipses, 1996-98. Gehry and Serra fit with a – rather macho – tradition of working sculpturally in heavy materials consistent with the Basque region’s industrial base. Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) and Jorge Otieza (1908 –2003) are the most famous Basque artists of the 20th century, but I found contemporary practitioners, too, on a recent visit.
Deep Time in the Netherlands
4 December 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
How can art accommodate the burning issues of global warming in the context of our history and the possible end of it? Several shows in a recent visit to the Netherlands seemed to touch on such matters…
Hailing Hans Hartung
13 November 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
Hans Hartung (1904-89) seems to be an increasingly highly regarded artist, whether measured by market or exhibition profile.
Acceptance: Alice Anderson at the Atelier Calder
6 November 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
I visited the current recipient, Alice Anderson, and it was immediately obvious what can be gained. The spacious house is isolated in a classic Loire Valley landscape. The natural world, from which Calder abstracted many of his forms, is right up close through the extensive windows of the thirty-metre long studio. Not surprisingly, Anderson is taking the chance to work on a larger scale..
Rising in the East? Chinese Abstraction
30 October 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
The western profile and marketability of contemporary Asian art has risen sharply in recent years, principally through the Japanese Gutai (‘concrete’) and Mona-ha (‘school of things’) and the Korean Dansaekhwa (‘monochrome painting’) schools, with their distinctive titles
Mandala Zone
16 October 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
If two’s a tendency and three’s a trend, then mandalas – orient-originated schematized circular representations of the cosmos through intricate geometry – are in fashion at the moment.
Climate Change in Retrospect
9 October 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
It’s a sign of the pervasive effect of global warming on our current thinking that as I wandered round Frieze Masters, I found works from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s which seemed plausibly related to the theme – whatever their original agenda:
Comfort Stops
25 September 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
Spend a day wandering around a large art fair or a city’s galleries, and you will need the odd ‘comfort break’. In Berlin recently, however, there were several interesting works featuring the process itself.
New at Art Berlin
18 September 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
What are art fairs good for? They get a bad press, but I particularly like the chance to catch up with developments in the work of familiar artists. Art Berlin (11-15 Sept) gave plenty of such chances. Here are five directions which were new to me:
Artists Writing: Paul Winstanley
11 September 2019 • Paul Carey-Kent
Michael Craig-Martin is almost as famous for his collection of writings ‘On Being An Artist’ as he is for his impeccably flat yet crisply sculptural drawing style.