Tag Archive "london"

Meekyoung Shin at Haunch of Venison, London

The London gallery Haunch of Venison, currently housed in the back of the Royal Academy, would seem to be out of place. While its main location undergoes renovation, the contemporary art gallery is running its shows in the cavernous spaces of the eighteenth-century museum. Upon first impression, however, the sculpture (a polychrome fragment of Roman Antiquity?) in the niche at the top of the landing of the grand main staircase appears to fit right in. The sculpture, though, reveals itself to be Korean artist Meekyoung Shin’s Translation- Greek (1998), a figure made entirely of soap. Within this artist’s first major ... More » »

Susan Philipsz wins Turner Prize

Glasgow-native Susan Philipsz was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Britain earlier tonight for Lowlands, a sound installation featured at the 2010 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. The fourth woman to win the illustrious Turner Prize, Philipsz is also the first ever artist to have her sound piece garner the accolade recognizing the best in contemporary British art exhibitions. Lowlands is an incantation, the multi-channel sound piece originally haunted the undersides of three bridges in Glasgow with the shuddering song from a drowned sailor. (Read more to hear an excerpt of the winning piece…)

Under An English Sky [Part II] : Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives Du Coeur At The Serpentine Gallery

London, Kensington Gardens, August, Sunday, blue skies, warmish. Just off the entrance to The Serpentine Gallery stands a temporary pavilion in hospital white.  I approach the small building just as one of the last English heartbeats is recorded for posterity; that is, copied to a fat hard drive to be added to yet another fat hard drive then shipped to the uninhabited Japanese island of Teshima and digitally secured at the Benesse Art Site Naoshima…until Doomsday. This is the premise of the expanding and ongoing work of Christian Boltanski, Les Archives du Coeur, registering a rambling sample of the world’s ... More » »

Under An English Sky [Part I ] : Wolfgang Tillmans At The Serpentine Gallery, London

I spent a week in London in August, and each day attempted to focus on a substantial outing, an interesting exhibition.  My first jaunt was to cross Kensington Gardens to The Serpentine Gallery where the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans put on something of a retrospective, an expansive display of his alchemical results with photography. The 2000 Turner Prize winner, born in 1968, today a bona fide blue chip in the art world, offers a cornucopia of stolen, manipulated and performative photographic works in his first full-on exhibition in London in seven years. Each piece conspires to reveal the over-reproduced world ... More » »

Ernesto Neto in London: The Edges of the World

Post by Judith Stein To get to The Edges of the World, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s extraordinary installation at London’s Hayward Gallery, you first have to find the Hayward. It is situated above street level in the cultural complex known as the South Bank Centre. You might approach it from the Thames walkway, mounting one of three hulking stairways gamely painted yellow, blue or red, to arrive at the Hayward’s front door. Better yet, walk across Waterloo Bridge heading south and step down directly into its entrance courtyard.

Tripping across the pond – No Soul for Sale at the Tate Modern

Post by Marianne Bernstein In his book The Empathic Civilization, economist Jeremy Rifkin, investigates the evolution of empathy. Recent scientific studies suggest that we are wired for collaboration. Our natural impulse is to get along with our native kin; which over time have evolved from our fellow cave men, to our state, country, or religion, to the planet at large. When we are prevented from engaging with others openly the best parts of ourselves are repressed, and this results in narcissism, fear, anger, and violence. However, when we see ourselves in each other, harmony often ensues. 
We have an innate ... More » »

Tate Modern invites FLUX and Vox

FLUXspace is taking a kitty moon bounce to the Tate Modern for a wild weekend in May. It us one of Two Philadelphia collaborative galleries–the other is Vox Populi–that will be in the May 14 to 16 festival, a redux of sorts of the No Soul for Sale festival of independent art organizations, part of the X-Initiative at the old Dia in New York.

KieranTimberlake’s design for American embassy in London skewered

Martin Filler’s piece at the NY Review of Books excoriates the Philadelphia architecture firm‘s new design for the American embassy in London.  A large part of the design constraints apparently came from the US government, which wanted a building in a less populated part of London; a building with less shatterproof glass (the glass exterior is coated with polymer);  and landscaping with water and lots of hillocks and berms — all of which are to protect against expected terrorist bomb attempts.

ART LUBE

 “Liquid Modernity” by the Russian artist Andrei Molodkin opened in the spectacular new Orel Art gallery in London last week. Redolent of a wedding ceremony we witnessed a juxtaposition of two different closed circuit energy states corsetted in tubes configured to reproduce two Russian prison cells. Light was wearing her neon chiffon which produced a wonderful  chaud froid effect. The groom’s proboscis was sucking from a 10 gallon drum of  authentic fine Russian crude to top himself off.  A special page-less edition of “Das Kapital” with hollow Vampire typeface half filled with oil served as the Holy book. The walls were ... More » »

The Warren Report

Are you thinking of being a sculptor? Then check out the Rebecca Warren survey at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It borders on the sublime but keeps a foot firmly planted in an interior building site. Many parts are stretched across five rooms but we see no whole. Poise, balance and delicateness and electricity enliven relative material poverty and culminate, sometimes, in a triumphant neon halo. But we aren’t in Paradise even though there is a power to be in awe of here. Who’s in charge the artist or the material?