Art & Photography

The Open West 2012 - Gloucester Cathedral

2012-03-10T14:18:00.002-08:00

Emma Critchley, Single Shared Breath, 2011, video installation

The Open West 2012 is currently installed in the glorious setting of Gloucester Cathedral where it is open to view until 31 March.

This, the 4th annual Open West competition, has been selected from an international submission, by organisers Lyn Cluer Coleman and Sarah Goodwin, together with artists Iain Andrews and Dan Chadwick. 90 works by 55 artists are on show. The cathedral is a formidable space in which to show contemporary art - however Lyn and Sarah have exercised great curatorial skill and sensitivity in their installation of the work which is respectful of the architectural space but not overwhelmed by it.

A selection of works are illustrated below.

Aaron Distler, Between Here and Here, 2010, steam bent hardwood

Tina Hill, Excavating Babel, 2009, installation of over 2,000 books

Catherine Dormer, Shimmer (detail), 2011, digital print on silk

Ione Rucquoi, Ballet Shoe I, 2011, ballet shoe, gold plated acupuncture needles

Angela Conway, For One Removed, I, 2011, emulsion paint on paper, chalk, graphite

Jiho Won, Memory Pond, 2010, glass

Jackie Brough, Continuity, 2011, silk, organza, concrete

Kentaro Yamada, Hackney Sublime, 2011, broken glass window, perspex

Jonathan Wright, No Head for Heights, 2010 plastic, pewter, neon

HENRY/SEATON, Ante-Chamber: 187 Objects (detail), 2011, concrete and plaster

George Petrou, My Brother, 2010, video installation

David Teager-Portman, Other Side, 2010, concrete, canvas, boat, handmade bricks

Gilbert & George: London Pictures - White Cube

2012-03-09T15:41:00.002-08:00

Gilbert & George, Schoolboy, 2011

Gilbert & George have, over recent years, been systematically stealing newspaper bill posters from newsagents - 3712 in total. Now 292 of these posters have been turned into the London Pictures, 72 of which are currently being exhibited at the 3 London White Cube galleries until 12 May. Grouped together by themes - yobs, schoolboys, stabbings, killers, paedos - they add up to a gruesome portrait of contemporary London life.

Read a profile of the artists by Nicholas Wroe, a news report about the exhibition and exhibition notice on the White Cube website.

Gilbert & George, Sex & Money, 2011

Gilbert & George, Knife Murder, 2011

Gilbert & George, Paedo, 2011

Gilbert & George, Cemetery, 2011

Gilbert & George, City Money, 2011

Gilbert & George, Kills Straight, 2011

Man Ray (Film & Music Night) - Xposed Club, 14 March

2012-03-09T00:07:00.003-08:00

Poster by Mark Unsworth

On Wednesday 14 March, Xposed Club will present an evening of improvised music to accompany a selection of silent films in the Chapel of Francis Close Hall, at the University of Gloucestershire.

Peter Urpeth (piano) and Stuart Wilding (percussion) will create soundtracks for Man Ray's 1928 film L'Etoile De Mer (The Starfish) and Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone) from 1926, as well as Dimitri Kirsanoff's 1929 Brumes d’Automne (Autumn Mists). They will then be joined by the Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra to accompany videos by Michael Basov.
Watch: L'Etoile de Mer, Emak-Bakia, Brumes d'Automne, and films by Michael Basov.

Kiki de Montparnasse in a still from Emak-Bakia by Man Ray (1926)

Kiki de Montparnasse in a still from L'etoile de Mer by Man Ray (1928)

Nadia Sibirskaia in a still from Brumes d'Automne by Dimitri Kirsanoff (1929)

Michael Basov, still from Rooks

Michael Basov, still from Digital Clepsydra

Michael Basov, still from Perforated Memory

Thomas Ruff - Gagosian Gallery

2012-03-07T22:03:00.000-08:00

Thomas Ruff, nudes dr02, 2011

Astronomy and pornography are the twin preoccupations which, via the internet, supply the material for Thomas Ruff's two exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery: MA.R.S is at the Britannia Street gallery and Nudes is at Davies Street (both until 21 April).

Ruff is a graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, famous for the influential teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher on a generation of photographers which includes Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer as well as Ruff.

For the MA.R.S series Ruff has injected colour into black and white images of Mars, taken from the NASA web site; for Nudes he has taken images from internet pornography, enlarged them to monumental scale producing blurred and painterly images.

Read Geoff Dyer's essay: Porn and the shadow side of paradise: ThomasRuff's Nudes. See also 2003 article in Tate Magazine and video of Ruff talking about his work in 2010.

Thomas Ruff, ma.r.s. 04_III, 2012

Thomas Ruff, ma.r.s. 01_III, 2012

Thomas Ruff, nudes ro04 (detail), 2011

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan - Tate Modern

2012-03-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

Alighiero Boetti, Aerei, 1989

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan at Tate Modern until 27 May is a rare opportunity to see the work of this intriguing artist. Boetti, who died in 1994, was included in Germano Celant's 1967 Arte Povera exhibition and subsequently developed a socially collaborative practice that anticipated relational aesthetics. Dividing his time between Italy and Afghanistan, but also working in Ethiopia, Japan, Pakistan and Guatemala, his work includes world maps emroidered by Afghan craftspeople, collaboratively produced biro pen drawings, mail art and a box containing a light bulb (Lampada Annuale, 1966) which, teasingly, lights up for only 11 seconds per year - at a random moment.

Read reviews by Laura Cumming and Adrian Searle. See also articles in Parkett (1990) and Art in America (2001) - both available on the Sperone Westwater website, and Frieze (2000).

Alighiero Boetti, Mappa del Mondo, 1994

Alighiero Boetti, Mappa del Mondo

Alighiero Boetti, Ping Pong, 1966

Alighiero Boetti, Immaginando Tutto, 1982

Alighiero Boetti, Lampada Annuale, 1966

Ha Ha What Does This Represent? - Standpoint

2012-03-01T14:22:00.002-08:00

Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Modern Art in America (detail), 1946

A detail from Ad Reinhardt's 1946 drawing, How to Look at Modern Art in America, provides the title for an exhibition of contemporary abstract painting at the Standpoint Gallery until 31 March: Ha Ha What Does This Represent?

Exhibiting artists are:

Andrew Bick (lecturer on the MA Fine Art course at the University of Gloucestershire), Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs, Katrina Blannin, Hazel Chalk, Ben Cove, Stewart Geddes, Dan Hays, Vanessa Jackson, Roger Kelly, Caroline List, Gina Medcalf, Alex Gene Morrison, Carol Robertson, James Ryan, Francesca Simon, Daniel Sturgis and Trevor Sutton.

The exhibition is sponsored by abstract critical - see article by David Ryan.

NB Selected illustrations below are representative of the artists' work but are not necessarilly works included in the exhibition.

Andrew Bick, OGV [Double Spider] Dirty B, 2009

Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings, The Unseen, 2010

Katrina Blannin, Ultrapolation, 2009

Ben Cove, Crosses and Quadrangles, 2011

Alex Gene Morrison, Vanish, 2010

Carol Robertson, Starstream, 2011

Daniel Sturgis, Living Well, 2007

Trevor Sutton, Japanese Folk Song, 2011

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People - Hayward Gallery

2012-02-21T13:52:00.001-08:00

Jeremy Deller, Art Exhibition

Jeremy Deller is, I think, one of the most interesting of contemporary British artists and I am looking forward to visiting Jeremy Deller: Joy in People at the Hayward Gallery. (This was not his choice of title, as he revealed in an interview on radio 4's Front Row (20 Feb), he proposed Animal, Vegetable, Pop Music.)

Treats in store include a 3D film of bats, a re-creation of Deller's teenage (and later) bedroom, a film of his restaging of the 1984 Battle of Orgreave between striking miners and the police, the remains of a bomb blasted car from Baghdad, a film about 1970s wrestling star Adrian Street, and free tea from a reconstructed Lancashire café! A Middle Class Hero is something to be!

Read a reviews by Adrian Searle and Laura Cumming.

Jeremy Deller, Open Bedroom, 1988-1994

Jeremy Deller, Exodus, 2012

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001

Jeremy Deller, Valerie's Snack Bar, 2009

Jeremy Deller, Life is to Blame for Everything

David LaChapelle: Earth Laughs in Flowers - Robilant + Voena

2012-02-20T13:58:00.002-08:00

David LaChapelle, The Lovers

I am not a fan of David LaChapelle's work, though I know many are: I find his mannered, baroque excess repellent. According to an article by Elizabeth Day LaChapelle 'retired' from the fashion world, six years ago, to concentrate on art photography. This exhibition at Robilant + Voena, Earth Laughs in Flowers is his take on the vanitas theme in which the traditional motifs are supplemented by contemporary objects. There is certainly something compelling about these lush, suffocating images and I think they very effectively represent the idea that all is vanity. But I don't like them!
Watch a video of LaChapelle talking about his work.

David LaChapelle, America

David LaChapelle, Early Fall

David LaChapelle, Springtime

Picasso and Modern British Art - Tate Britain

2012-02-15T09:08:00.000-08:00

Pablo Picasso, Compote Dish and Grapes, 1924

Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain until 15 July should be a really interesting exhibition. Britain's relationship to Picasso and Modernism was somewhat equivocal: Andrew Graham-Dixon in his television series A History of British Art unearthed a tape recording of a 1949 speech by Alfred Munnings, retiring president of the Royal Academy, in which he recounted a conversation with Winston Churchill: he [Churchill] said to me: "Alfred, if you met that Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his something something?" I said, "Yes, sir! I would!" (Graham-Dixon, A. (1996) A History of British Art, London: BBC, p82)

On the other hand, Richard Shone, in Pablo Picasso and his influence on British Art, recounts how members of the Bloomsbury Group - Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Duncant Grant - were early enthusiasts for, friends to, and collectors of, Picasso.

The exhibition includes work by British artists who were admirers of Picasso: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and David Hockney. It will be interesting to see whether these artists can stand comparison with Picasso - whether or or not, the exhibition will be a treat just for seeing the Picassos.
Read reviews by Laura Cumming, Jonathan Jones and Richard Dorment.

Pablo Picasso, Man with a Clarinet, 1911-12

Pablo Picasso, The Source, 1921

Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925

Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937

Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, 1932

Lucian Freud Portraits - NPG

2012-02-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

Lucian Freud, Man with a Feather (Self-portrait), 1943

Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery until 27 May has been gathering (mostly) ecstatic revieres. Planned in collaboration with Freud who died last summer this is a monumental and fitting memorial.

Read reviews by Laura Cumming, Adrian Searle, Andrew Graham-Dixon.

Lucian Freud, Girl in a Dark Jacket, 1947

Lucian Freud, John Minton, 1952

Lucian Freud, Girl in Bed, 1952

Lucian Freud, Girl with a White Dog, 1950-1

Lucian Freud, Reflection (Self-portrait), 1985

Lucian Freud, Eli and David, 2005-06

Song Dong: Waste Not - The Curve, Barbican Centre

2012-02-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

Song Dong: Waste Not is an intriguing exhibition in The Curve at the Barbican Centre until 12 June.

As reported in The New York Times in relation to the installation of the exhibition at MoMA in 2009, Waste Not represents the accumulated possessions of Zhao Xiangyuan. Mrs Zhao lived in Beijing with her husband and two children in a tiny house. The house became crammed with clothes, toiletries, buttons, ballpoint pens...which were used, recycled and hoarded - a seemingly extreme response to the Cultural Revolution's dictum of frugality in daily life.

Mrs Zhao's son, Song Dong has now turned the contents of his childhood home, some 10,000 items into the installation Waste Not. The Guardian reports that, after Song's father died in 2002, depression turned his mother's thrift into hoarding and her house in Beijing was stuffed with clutter. "I asked her why she wanted to fill the room with what to me is rubbish, and she said: 'If I fill the room, the things remind me of your father.'"

See a video of Song Dong in conversation with Barbara London.

Antoni Tàpies, 1923 - 2012

2012-02-07T15:51:00.000-08:00

Antoni Tàpies, Metal Shutter and Violin, 1956

Antoni Tàpies died on 6 February, 2012. The Spanish artist's abstractions are notable for the use of readymade objects, sombre, rich colours, and textured materials - marble dust and sand mixed with pigment and varnish. He was, arguably, one of the greatest of European abstractionists.

Read an obituary by Christopher Masters.

Antoni Tàpies, Matter in the Form of a Foot, 1965

Antoni Tàpies, Great Painting, 1958

Antoni Tàpies, Grey and Green Painting, 1957

Antoni Tàpies, Grey Ochre, 1958

Antoni Tàpies, Creu I R, 1975

Mondrian // Nicholson in Parallel - The Courtauld Gallery

2012-02-06T14:27:00.000-08:00

Ben Nicholson, 1937 (painting), 1937

Mondrian // Nicholson in Parallel at The Courtauld Gallery examines the brief moment when London became an international centre of Modernism, in 1938. In that year Piet Mondrian, at the invitation of Ben Nicholson left war threatened Paris for London. Mondrian and Nicholson together formed a nucleus of avant-gardism in Hampstead (also present were Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Berthold Lubetkin, Ernő Goldfinger, Ernst Gombrich and Sigmund Freud).

At the outbreak of war, in 1939, Nicholson and Hepworth left London for St Ives; they invited Mondrian to join them, but the countryside hating Mondrian declined and subsequently made his way to New York.

Read a fascinating account of this moment by Frances Spalding as well as in The Courtauld Gallery press release.

The exhibition continues until 20 May.

Piet Mondrian, Composition No.III White-Yellow, 1935-42

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932

Ben Nicholson, 1936 (white relief), 1936

Ben Nicholson, 1940-43 (two forms), 1940-43

Lise Sarfati: She - Brancolini Grimaldi

2012-02-05T12:16:00.012-08:00

Lise Sarfati, Sloane #07, Oakland CA, 2007

Lise Sarfati: She, at Brancolini Grimaldi, is a photographic portrait study of 4 American women: sisters Gina and Christine, and Christine's daughters, Sloane and Sasha. The photographs were taken on Kodachrome slide film and made over a period of 4 years, 2005-2009.

Sarfati has photographed [the women] separately in various settings from the interiors of Victorian houses to outside on the street. Sometimes wearing wigs or make up, it is hard to distinguish the pairs of sisters from each other and there is a sense that their identity is fluid, almost interchangeable. Their expressions are often inscrutable though each photograph is filled with psychological intensity and often melancholia too… the individual images of these four women make up one story. (From the gallery website.)

Read a review by Sean O'Hagan and watch a video interview with Sarfati; See more work by the artist here, read an article by Sandra S Phillips written for Aperture Magazine, No194, Spring 2009, and an interview by François Adragna published by ASX (American Suburb X).

Lise Sarfati, Gina #12, Oakland CA, 2009

Lise Sarfati, Gina #09, Berkeley CA, 2009

Lise Sarfati, Christine #06, San Francisco CA, 2005

Lise Sarfati, Christine #45, Pioneertown CA, 2008

Lise Sarfati, Sloane #06, Oakland CA, 2005

Lise Sarfati, Sloane #68, Oakland CA, 2009

Lise Sarfati, Sasha #20, Emeryville CA, 2007

Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings - Hauser & Wirth

2012-02-03T14:28:00.000-08:00

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1992

Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell died in 1992; Hauser & Wirth are showing an exhibition of exuberant work made in the last decade of her life. Born in Chicago in 1925, Mitchell moved to New York in 1950 where she exhibited alongside Willem De Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline; in 1959 she moved to France where she remained for the rest of her life. Her late work displays her admiration for Van Gogh and Monet. The exhibition continues until 28 April.

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990-91

Joan Mitchell, Tondo, 1991

Joan Mitchell, Trees, 1990-91

Joan Mitchell, River, 1989

gaNNets + Japonika - Xposed Club at Slak Bar, 4 February

2012-01-30T14:05:00.000-08:00

Poster by Mark Unsworth

Gannets - Fyfe Dangerfield, Chris Cundy, Alex Ward, Dominic Lash and Steve Noble - will play an Xposed Club event at Slak Bar, Cheltenham on Saturday 4 February. Gannets are the experimental sister band to the more pop Guillemots - also featuring Dangerfield, Cundy and Ward.The band have been featured recently on both Radio 3 and 6 Music and are curently on a UK tour. Their debut album, Transmissions of Not is due for release in April. Listen to samples here.

Support will be provided by Japonika - a four-piece from Cheltenham: 3 guitarists, Steve Grund, Luke Stow, Jamie Dawson and drummer Chris Gage.

£6.00 on the door (£5.00 in advance from Badlands). Starts at 8.00.

Ori Gersht: This Storm is What We Call Progress - IWM

2012-01-29T04:23:00.001-08:00

Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Against the Tide, Isolated, 2010

This Storm is What We Call Progress is an exhibition of work by Ori Gersht at the Imperial War Museum London.

The exhibition title is a quotation from an essay by Walter Benjamin, written in 1940, and his last finished work before his suicide in that year, in which he refers to a painting, once owned by him:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin (1968) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections; ed. by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, p257-8

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

Gersht's two-screen film Evaders (2009) relates to Benjamin's final and fateful journey following the 'Lister Route' across the Pyrenees, from France to Spain, in an effort to escape from the Nazis and to make his way to America. In Portbou, Spain, he found the border closed and chose to take his own life. One screen shows a figure walking towards the camera, evidently in some pain, the other shows a distant figure disappearing into the landscape.

Ori Gersht, still from Evaders, 2009

The exhibition also features Will You Dance For Me? (2011), another two-screen film, in which an 85-year-old dancer, Yehudit Arnon, rocks back and forth in a chair, slowly recounting her experiences as a young woman in Auschwitz. Her punishment for refusing to dance at an SS officer’s party was to stand, all night, barefoot in the snow, and she pledged that if she survived she would dedicate her life to dance.

Ori Gersht, still from Will You Dance For Me?, 2011

Chasing Good Fortune (2010) explores the symbolism of cherry blossom, in a series of nightime photographs made in Hiroshima, the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, and other sites in Japan.

Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Imperial Memories, Night Fly 1, Tokyo, Japan, 2010

Although not included in the current show, Gersht's earlier film Pomegranate (2006) deserves a mention. Gersht replicated one of the strange still life compositions by the C17 Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán featuring a suspended pomegranate. The stillness of the scene is disturbed by a soundless bullet entering from one side and spectacularly puncturing the fruit!

Ori Gersht, Pomegranate, 2006 (video still)

Juan Sánchez Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602

Watch a film of Gersht talking about his work, here, and see Mummery + Schnell for an archive of selected workby Gersht; read a review in the BJP. The exhibition at the Imperial War Museum continues until 29 April.

The Indiscipline of Painting - Mead Gallery

2012-01-24T14:31:00.000-08:00

Bridget Riley, Cantus Firmus, 1972-3

The Indiscipline of Painting: International Abstraction from the 1960s to Now is an exhibition of 49 artists, currently showing at the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre and continuing until 10 March. The exhibition has been selected by Daniel Sturgis and has been organised by the Mead Gallery in collaboration with Tate St Ives where it was shown October to January. Read a review by Mark Harris in Art Monthly, No,353, February 2012, pp27-8.

Artists include: Tomma Abts, Daniel Buren, Ingrid Calame, Keith Coventry, Michael Craig‑Martin, Bernard Frize, Tim Head, Peter Halley, Jane Harris, Alex Hubbard, Bob Law, Sherrie Levine, Jeremy Moon, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Robert Ryman, Sean Scully, Frank Stella, Daniel Sturgis, Niele Toroni, Richard Tuttle, Andy Warhol.

Tomma Abts, Thiale, 2004

Ingrid Calame, Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back, 2009

Michael Craig-Martin, Mirror Painting, 1990-2011

Bernard Frize, Suite Segond 100 No 3, 1980

Alex Hubbard, Horse Camp No. 1, 2010

Dan Sturgis No Other Home, 2011

Zarina Bhimji - Whitechapel Gallery

2012-01-23T13:05:00.000-08:00

Zarina Bhimji, still from Yellow Patch, 2011

Zarina Bhimji is showing at the Whitechapel Gallery until 9 March. The exhibition of photographs and film installations features 25 years work and includes the premiere of Yellow Patch (2011) which was shot on location in Mumbai, Kutch and Gujerat. The film comprises beautiful lingering images of interiors and landscapes. The film is also showing at The New Art Gallery, Walsall, until 14 April and can be viewed online here. Also showing is her atmospheric 2002 film Out of Blue shot in Uganda - view online here.

Zarina Bhimji, Your Sadness is Drunk, 2001-2006

Zarina Bhimji, Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over, 2001-2006

Zarina Bhimji, still from Yellow Patch, 2011

Zarina Bhimji, We are cut from the same cloth, 1995

See 'Zarina Bhimji's best shot':

Zarina Bhimji, Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt, 1998-2003

N.E.W. + Lund Quartet - Xposed Club, 20th January

2012-01-16T09:11:00.000-08:00

Poster by Mark Unsworth

Xposed Club returns: the first concert of the new year will be on Friday, 20 January in its new space at the Centre for Art & Photography at the Hardwick Campus on St. Paul's Road, Cheltenham.

The event will be headlined by N.E.W. - Steve Noble, drums, John Edwards, double bass, Alex Ward, guitar. Listen to samples here.

Stewart Lee wrote: The bass player John Edwards turns up on the best British free-jazz recordings. The drummer Steve Noble cleaves through improvisatory rumblings with dramatic, decisive moves. And the guitarist Alex Ward, a compulsively creative polymath of indiscriminately omnivorous appetite, is a reliably unpredictable axe-hero for collaborators of all backgrounds. The trio’s second record posits a bricolage bebop, an ugly ecstatic jazz, played on sheet metal, broken glass and barbed wire. Coming Up for Air bubbles like an electric soup, and an elastically extended Empty Ballroom finds Edwards and Noble stretching back to catapult Ward’s electric guitar far beyond the gravitational pull of Planet Rock.

N.E.W. will be supported by Lund Quartet - Simon Adcock, piano and Theremin, Jake Wittlin, turntable, Sam Muscat, drums and Rob Childs, double bass.
Audio and videos here.

£6.00 (students £3.00) on the door, starts at 8.00pm.

Catherine Yass: Lighthouse - Alison Jacques Gallery

2012-01-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (North north north west), 2011

Catherine Yass: Lighthouse is at Alison Jacques Gallery until 11 February.

Yass's photographs and films focus on the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse (50° 43'.40 N 00° 26'.13 E), 5 miles out to sea from Eastbourne on the East Sussex coast. The lighthouse was completed in 1971, replacing a light vessel which had marked the Royal Sovereign Shoal since 1875. The structure includes a cabin section - a perfectly square platform resting on a circular column - which contained accommodation for the keepers who manned the lighthouse before its automation in 1994, when it was converted to solar power.

The photographs and films use inversion and reversal to produce a series of beautiful and spooky images.
Read Catherine Yass's Best Shot.

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse, 2011. Detail from 35mm film transferred to digital video.

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (East), 2011

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (North), 2011

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (North north west, distant), 2011

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse, 2011. Detail from 35 mm film transferred to digital video.

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986 - 2011 - Gagosian

2012-01-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

Damien Hirst, N-Methylurea, 2005

As a taster for the Tate Modern's forthcoming Damien Hirst retrospective (4 April - 9 September), Gagosian has launched its ambitious, if slightly batty, global exhibition of the Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011. The exhibition will take place at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on 12 January and continuing until 10 March. If you have the time and money to pop into all 11 exhibitions you may be lucky enough to win a signed spot painting specially dedicated to you! Hmm...

Hirst on Spots:

I had an argument with an assistant who used to paint my spots. A fantastic argument. Because it's, like, nothing comes out of my studio unless I say it comes out of the studio. You've got loads of people working. You've got people you care about that you've known for long periods of time. When she was leaving, and she was nervous, she said, 'Well, I want a spot painting. I've painted loads for you. I've painted these spot paintings for a year, and I want one'. A year in the studio, getting paid a fiver, a tenner an hour, whatever it is. So I said, 'I'll give you a cheque for seventy thousand quid if you like. Why don't I just do that? Because you know you're going to sell it straight away. You know how to do it. Just make one of your own.' And she said, 'No. I want one of yours.' But the only difference between one painted by her and one of mine is the money.

[...]

I only ever made five spot paintings myself. Personally. I can paint spots. But when I started painting the spots I knew exactly where it was going. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it. And I employed people. And my spots I painted are shite. They're shit. I did them on the wrong background, there's the pin-holes [from the compass] in the middle of the spots which at the time I said I wanted, because I wanted a kind of truth to it. Under close scrutiny, you can see the pocess by which they were made. They're shit compared to... The best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel [Howard]. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.

Hirst, Damien and Burn, Gordon (2001) On The Way to Work, London: Faber and Faber: "Interview 4: Outbuilding, Combe Martin, Monday, 30.08.09", pp82 and 90.

Jerry Saltz on Hirst's Spots:

Hirst's spot paintings are spiffy riffs on Sol Le Witt’s sixties formula: authorless paintings that can be made by anyone. Each one looks cheery, fresh, and modern. The grids are machinelike, the color lifelike—bingo, a brand. I wouldn’t mind owning a spot painting at all. Yet the idea of owning more than one is unimaginable. You see one, and you really have seen them all. (Read Spots and Sharks andMaggots and Money: How Damien Hirst took over the world, by Jerry Saltz)
Read review by Adrian Searle, watch TV interview with Charlie Rose.

Damien Hirst, Methoxyverapamil, 1991

Damien Hirst, 1-Bromododecane, 1996

Damien Hirst, DL-P-Chlorophenylalanine Methyl Ester, 1998

Damien Hirst, Bromchlorophenol Blue, 1996

Damien Hirst, Levorphanol, 1995

Damien Hirst, Spot Painting, 1986

Damien Hirst, Ethyl Laurate, 2003

Damien Hirst, Eucatropine, 2005

Damien Hirst, Cupric Nitrate, 2007

Damien Hirst with Spot paintings, Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, NY

Eve Arnold, 1912 - 2012

2012-01-05T14:56:00.000-08:00

Eve Arnold, Bar girl in a brothel in the red light district, Havana, Cuba, 1954

Eve Arnold died on 4 January, 2012.

Arnold, the first woman member of Magnum, was best known for her portraits of both the famous (especially Marilyn Monroe) and the unknown as well as for photojournalist assignments from Harlem to China, and Russia to South Africa.

Asked by Sarah Brown of the BJP, how much power photojournalists actually have to change the things they see, Arnold [brought] her hand up to eye-level, a tiny gap between forefinger and thumb, "very little," she said. "You know in the beginning we thought we were going to change the world. I think people live in so much visual material these days, billions of photographs annually, that they grow numb after too much exposure. But it's hard. You see something and it's your profession and you want to do something about it." (Quoted from BJP obituary by Oliver Laurent)

Read obituary by Amanda Hopkinson, read/listen to an interview with John Tusa for BBC Radio 3, and listen to her Desert Island Discs!

Eve Arnold, Josephine Baker, 1950

Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe, 1955

Eve Arnold, Malcolm X, Chicago, 1961

Eve Arnold, Anthony Quinn and Anna Karina on the set of Guy Green's The Magus, Mallorca, 1976

Eve Arnold, Retired Woman, China, 1979

Helen Frankenthaler, 1928 - 2011

2011-12-30T01:37:00.000-08:00

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952

Helen Frankenthaler died on 27 December, 2011.

Frankenthaler has an assured place in C20 art history: her 1952 painting, Mountains and Sea, is credited with launching a new movement: Post-Painterly Abstraction or Colour Field Painting. William Agee has described the genesis of the painting:

In August 1952, Ms. Frankenthaler traveled to Nova Scotia, where she continued her practice of doing small landscapes. She painted in watercolor and oil on paper, working freely from nature. These studies helped to keep her limber and flexible, like a dancer or athlete tuning up or, as was the case here, a painter preparing for a major new effort.
On the afternoon of Oct. 29, back in New York, she tacked a large—roughly 7-by-10-foot—piece of untreated canvas to the floor of her studio to begin the largest painting she had ever undertaken. Her mind and her arms were filled with memories of the spectacular Cape Breton landscape. After roughing in a few charcoal marks as an initial guide, she poured highly thinned oil paint from coffee cans directly onto the canvas, as if she were drawing with color. She had no plan; she just worked, with control and discipline. At the end of the afternoon, when she had finished, she climbed on a ladder and studied the painting. She was not yet sure what she had done; she was “sort of amazed and surprised and interested.” … It soon became clear that what she had done was invent a new way of making art. (Quoted from article by James Panero in The New Criterion)

The story goes that Clement Greenberg took Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to Frankenthaler's studio, in 1953, to see Mountains and Sea and they saw her pouring and staining method as the bridge between Pollock and what was possible. By allowing her colour to be in the weave of the canvas rather than on top of it Frankenthaler exemplified the 'flatness' that Greenberg was to identify as the essential condition of Modernist Painting in his 1960 essay of that name; an idea, and an achievement that was lampooned by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word (1975).

Frankenthaler continued to produce lyrical and luminous abstracts through six decades - an achievement that was celebrated by an exhibition, Frankenthaler at 80: Six Decades, in 1980.

Read obituaries in The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

Helen Frankenthaler, Western Dream, 1957

Helen Frankenthaler, Nature Abhors a Vacuum, 1973

Helen Frankenthaler, Viewpoint II, 1979

Helen Frankenthaler, A Green Thought in a Green Shade, 1981

Helen Frankenthaler, Driving East, 2002

John Chamberlain, 1927 - 2011

2011-12-23T02:31:00.000-08:00

John Chamberlain, Tambourinefrappe, 2010

John Chamberlain, the artist who made sculptures out of crushed cars, died on 21 December, 2011. Read obituaries in The Guardian, and in The New York Times.

Chamberlain found his material in 1957 when he made Shortstop from 2 car bumpers, run over repeatedly by another vehicle, and welded together. Although best known for the car junk work, Chamberlain also made work in diverse materials, including urethane foam, sheet metal and paper bags as well as making prints, paintings, photographs and films such as The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez (1968) featuring the Warhol superstars Taylor Mead and Ultra Violet.

Common material is what an artist should use because it doesn't get in the way of doing an uncommon thing. (John Chamberlain quoted by Michael Auping in Ammann, J-C et al (1984) Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, [Vol.] 2, London: Lund Humphries, p14.)

Read a statement by Chamberlain, made in in 1982, on the Chinati Foundation website, and watch a video of him making (or 'directing') work on the Gagosian Gallery website.
A comprehensive retrospective of Chamberlain's career will be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from 24 February to 13 May, 2012.

John Chamberlain, S, 1959

John Chamberlain, Superjuke, 2011

John Chamberlain, Dolores James, 1962

John Chamberlain, Untitled (Couch), 1990

John Chamberlain, Essex, 1960

John Chamberlain, Turm von Klythie, installation in Q205 shopping mall, Friedrichstadtpassagen, Berlin

Lygia Pape - Serpentine Gallery

2011-12-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

Lygia Pape, Untitled, 1954-56

Lygia Pape (1927-2004), together with Lygia Clark, was a founding member of "Neoconcretismo" in Brazil in the 1950s; a later member was Hélio Oiticica. Neo-concretism was an interpretation of European geometric astraction, in particular the "Conrete Art" of Max Bill as exhibited in São Paolo in1950. Lygia Pape: Magntized Space at the Serpentine Gallery presents work from throughout Pape's career, including early drawings and poems from her Concrete period to her Neo-Concretist Livros and Caixas series, as well as ballets and performances such as Divisor and O ovo.The exhibition continues until 19 February, 2012. Read a review by Adrian Searle and watch his video introduction to the exhibition.

Lygia Pape, Livro do Tempo (Book of Time), 1961-63

Lygia Pape, Eat Me: Gluttony or Lust?, 1975 (still from film)

Lygia Pape, O Ovo (The Egg), 1967

Lygia Pape, Divisor (Divider), 1968

Lygia Pape, Tteia 1,C (Web),2008 (installation view at the Serpentine Gallery, 2011)

Anselm Kiefer - White Cube

2011-12-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali is showing at White Cube Bermondsey, the gallery's huge new space in South London. The title of the exhibition is taken from a 1926 publication by Fulcanelli, which claimed that the Gothic cathedrals of Europe had openly displayed the hidden code of alchemy for over 700 years.

The exhibition promises big themes (alchemy, German history) and Kiefer's trademark large-scale work. In an interview in The Guardian, Kiefer says:

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art – it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

Asked his response to Charles Saatchi's recent outburst, declaring that,

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.

Kiefer replied,

"He described himself, no?"... laughing uproariously. "[These days] art becomes fashion, it becomes [financial] speculation, but Saatchi started it."

The artist also reveals that he has bought a decommissioned nuclear power station: the Mülheim-Kärlich reactor; he remarks that standing inside the power station's cooling tower was overwhelming. It's so wonderful it's like the Pantheon. It will be a challenge for me to do something with it because it's already very good. (See picture, below.)
The exhibtion continues until 26 February, 2012.

Anselm Kiefer, Dat rosa miel apibas (detail), 2009

Anselm Kiefer, Antonin Artaud Heliogabalus, 2010-2011

Anselm Kiefer, Samson (detail), 2010

Anselm Kiefer, Tempelhof, 2010-11

Anselm Kiefer, Sprache der Vögel (detail), 1988-2011

The decommissioned Mülheim-Kärlich reactor being bought by Anselm Kiefer