Jonas Mekas
Thursday, January 17th, 2013 The Serpentine has a great Mekas exhibition on at the moment. The films are so joyful and it’s really interesting to see a nonlinear narrative or maybe no narrative at all, just poetic inquiry in the films.
3 frame stills have been printed up from his Super 8 film diaries and exhibited on the walls. The colour and texture of the prints is amazing and repeated images never looked so good.
Peter Doig
Monday, September 24th, 2012
Peter Doig is showing his new paintings at Michael Werner. His move to Trinidad in 2002 has influenced the subjects and colour of his work and the thick layers of paint have become lighter with canvas showing through. He only produces 2 or 3 paintings a year and the prices have risen hugely to more than $10m at auction.
Culture 3 Sheet 72
Sunday, July 29th, 2012
Photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were invited to respond to an archive of material about the troubles in Northern Ireland.
The archive was uncategorized and open to the public so prints and contact sheets had been marked with stickers and scribbled on by people to make themselves unrecognisable.
In the resulting work, ‘People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground‘, the circular areas of print underneath the stickers are enlarged and reprinted. The fragments still have a feeling of difficulty and unease, maybe more so, because the events are decontextualised.
Some images are included in the Saatchi ‘Out of Focus’ exhibition.
Guy Bourdin
Monday, February 13th, 2012
Michael Hoppen Gallery in London is showing photographer, Guy Bourdin until 10.03.12. They have a selection of new and previously unseen works and a small selection of unique Polaroids. Philippe Garner of Sotheby’s believes that Bourdin was interested in two great themes – desire and death. This picture for Charles Jourdan from Spring 1975 was said to be a reconstruction of the death of his first wife, Solange.
Taryn Simon
Monday, June 6th, 2011
This evening, Taryn Simon introduced A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters at Tate Modern and talked about the ideas behind the portraits and text. Each bloodline required meticulous research and the most difficult to persuade were 2 feuding Brazilian families. The works are presented in a formal way with the text enclosed so that the artist retains control of all the elements. She loves making books and was very passionate about presenting the work in that form – 900 pages.
She was also nice enough to pose for me.
Savage Beauty
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
The Met has done McQueen proud in their staging of Savage Beauty. The sets and lighting of the pieces is exquisite. The curator, Andrew Bolton, has focused on McQueen’s love of Romanticism and included 100 pieces from the first show to the last. The dramatic exhibition includes videos of the runway presentations and a hologram of Kate Moss.
The intricacy of the workmanship in combination with his complex concepts makes a memorable show, each room more amazing than the last. Seeing the pieces up close is a very different experience from the shows.
Concrete Islands
Thursday, April 14th, 2011
The group exhibition curated by Elias Redstone for Analix Forever is a contemporary view of utopian architectural projects. Originally designed with weighty social and political values, the buildings now appear in various states of inhabitation and destruction. Photographers Iwan Baan and Frederic Chaubin have included work from Chandigarh, Brasilia and the former USSR. Chaubin’s images of late Soviet era buildings are fantastic.
Pick Me Up
Saturday, March 19th, 2011
The contemporary graphic art fair is on until 27 March at Somerset House. 24 new graphic designers and illustrators are exhibiting and selling the prints. Some great collage from Yoh Nagao and Eda Akaltun and magical illustration from Victo Ngai. Collective, It’s Nice That, have also curated some animations and shorts for their cinema.
Anthony Burrill is running an open studio with changing events – interactive iPad projections, kinetic print making, spray stencils. No Days Off will customize 100 album sleeves with collage on the last two days and then raffle them off.
Francesca Woodman
Friday, January 7th, 2011
Victoria Miro are showing Francesca Woodman’s photographs until the 22nd.
I would also like to see The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis’ award winning documentary about her family, and the importance of art-making in their lives. Using journals, experimental videos and photographs, he pieces together her life which ended in suicide in 1981 at the age of 22.
Emergency Exit
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
Was this picture of Elias Redstone for Soma a portent of the installation by artist Agnieszka Kurant and architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska for the Polish Pavilion in Venice. He has curated a show of ‘urban portable holes’, in-between spaces. The visitor, climbing a caged structure and jumping into the unseen, is metaphorically freed from the controls and regulations in the urban environment.
Designer, Sebastian Coles, keeping things under control.