FAD Magazine

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

Saatchi Changes…

If you haven’t been to the Saatchi Gallery lately, the current shows might surprise you. Free presentations of Saatchi’s own acquisitions, typically foregrounding big paintings, are absent. The two main shows are pay-to-enter affairs

Modes of Performance

Performance is present in many – maybe even all – artworks in some way, given that making is itself a performance. Here are three performative works I’ve liked recently:

Portrait of the NPG

The National Portrait Gallery’s mixture of history, people and art can is currently at its strongest. The pay-for exhibition, of Cindy Sherman, is a convincing presentation of 40 years of self-images which includes some fascinating rarely-seen early works and new-to-Britain late works as well as her most seminal series, including all 70 ‘screen tests’.

Destination Bracknell

I like it when art takes me somewhere I might not otherwise go. Bracknell, the Berkshire new town of 100,000 where many IT companies have their offices, has something of Slough’s unglamorous cachet without the double-edged compensation of having been the setting for ‘The Office’.

Textile Arts of Peru

Textile art has an increasing profile, witness Phaidon’s new ‘Vitamin T: Threads & Textiles in Contemporary Art’, which presents 100 current practitioners. A logical place to see it must be the Fashion & Textile Museum in Bermondsey.

Sophie Layton’s Japanese Prints

I recently visited Sophie Layton at her workshop in the Shakespeare Business Centre in Brixton. It’s a print studio which operates on a hot desk basis so that some 30 printmakers can share the impressive facilities.

Hair Today

Hair is an interesting subject for art: of the body, and yet at a remove; and its own aesthetic area in the day to day. The most famous sustained body of work featuring its styles is probably the work of the Nigerian photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere

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