Elmgreen & Dragset, Harvest
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012 Elmgreen & Dragset, showing at Victoria Miro, have stripped the top layer from the walls of the most famous institutional ‘white cubes’. The fascination comes in the detail of the wall painting methods from London, NY and Cologne. From familiar roller application to paintbrush and unknown texture and method.
In the upper gallery,they have utilised the pitched, beamed roof structure and transformed it into a hayloft. The smell of the straw is really strong and reminds me of a room installation I saw where the walls, furniture and floor were made of cedar wood. Smell is such a strong sense and stays with you long after the concept has been forgotten.
David Hockney
Monday, April 9th, 2012
I’m sorry the Hockney exhibition is finishing today. The colour range of his painted landscapes is so energizing in the real British weather. He describes himself as an opportunist and said that a lot of the new large scale work wouldn’t have been created if it wasn’t for that show.
Between the paintings, film and photographic work it puts landscape right back in perspective and it will be interesting to see how the Damien Hirst show stands up in comparison.
Olafur Eliasson
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Your rainbow panorama is a new permanent sculpture for the Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark. Perched on top of the building, it is a huge, circular corridor of rainbow coloured glass panels which look out across the city. As your eyes adjust to the coloured glass, the 1cm strips between the panels appear to be the opposing colour in the colour circle. After-images are the sensation that Goethe wrote about in his Theory of Colour where colour effects the retina in response to what you have seen.
Other works include a room of multi-colour mist based on the RGB colour model but transforming to CMYK where the colours overlap.
New Contemporaries
Sunday, January 9th, 2011
Bloomberg New Contemporaries is back at the ICA. I liked two figurative pieces. One a line-drawn animation by Kristian de la Riva, featuring a man inflicting violent injuries on himself. Surprisingly gruesome.
The other, a video called The Encounter by Agnieszka Kucharko shows an unidentifiable man in an establishment setting. A carefully worded and spoken monologue questions emotions and agendas. The focus is very much on the sound, making the oblique language more dense.
Christian Marclay
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
Time has run out for The Clock, Christian Marclay’s amazing and compelling video work. The video shows thousands of clips from films expressing time or interaction with clocks and corresponds to real time. Rather than feeling like a series of disjointed clips, the work has it’s own narrative with all the tension and emotion of the original films it draws from. The soundtrack is skillfully edited and drives the mood of the video.
I hope it comes up again so I can see more of the 24-hour show in real time.
Shadow Catchers
Sunday, October 17th, 2010
Floris Neususs is among 5 cameraless photographers who’s work is being shown at the V&A. Neususs makes photograms and his early, large scale work from the 60′s has a beautiful textural and painterly quality often missing in digital prints. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a film featuring the artists discussing their work.
Square the Block
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
I caught sight of this building from across the street and it’s quite shocking. It looks like an accident or an abandoned building project where the money ran out.
In fact, it’s an architectural intervention by Richard Wilson for the LSE in Holborn. The sides of the 5-storey sculpture are copied from separate vertical slices of the original building and contorted at the bottom.