FAD Magazine

FAD Magazine covers contemporary art – News, Exhibitions and Interviews reported on from London

Plates

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

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.

This Year’s Cubism

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’.

Jenny Kendler: 'Bird Watching' 2018-19

Why visit the Eden Project?

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.

Ceramic Paintings

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.

Portrait special

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…

Heavy in Bilbao

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.

Acceptance: Alice Anderson at the Atelier Calder

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..

Mandala Zone

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

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:

New at Art Berlin

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:

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