Michael Craig-Martin - Serpentine Gallery

Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (light bulb), 2014

Michael Craig-Martin: Transience is at the Serpentine Gallery until 14 February 2016.
It's been a busy year for Michael Craig-Martin: in the spring his excellent book On Being an Artist was published, in the summer he was co-ordinator of the Royal Academy Summer Show and now he has an exhibition of his distinctive paintings at the Serpentine spanning the years 1981to 2014.
Craig-Martin has been making his crisply-delineated drawings of common-place, manufactured objects since the late 1970s and has assembled a lexicon of archetypes. In On Being an Artist he explains that he chose "objects so familiar that they had become invisible" and he set himself a rule  that "I would never draw something that could not be recognised instantly". (p171)  However, along the way many of those consumer objects which were once so familiar have become obsolete as new technologies and social habits have emerged. Transience charts a cultural transition from the days of clipboards, portable TVs, audio cassette tapes and Palm Pilots to the digital world of laptops, smart cards and smart phones - all rendered in his signature black outlines and clashing hyperactive colours.
Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Alastair Sooke, Laura Cumming and Waldemar Januszczak.
Read an interview with Tim Adams on the occasion of the publication of On Being an Artist. (Click on images to enlarge.)

Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled battery), 2014

Michael Craig-Martin, Cassette, 2002

Michael Craig-Martin, Eye of the Storm, 2002

Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (watch), 2015

Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (xbox control), 2014

Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (iPhone purple), 2013

Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (laptop turquoise), 2014

Michael Craig-Martin, Biding Time (magenta), 2004

Michael Craig-Martin, installation view of Transience, Serpentine Gallery 2015-16

Yoko Ono: To The Light - Serpentine Gallery

Yoko Ono, still from Film No. 4 [Bottoms], 1966 (Watch the film here)

Yoko Ono: Into the Light is at the Serpentine Gallery until 9 September.

Ono was associated with the Fluxus Group in the 1960s: a loose, international collective founded by George Maciunas taking its cues principally from Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The optimistic aims of Fluxus were, according to Joseph Beuys, to purge the world of bourgeois sickness... of dead art, to promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art, promote non art reality, and to fuse the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front and action. (Walker, J.A. (1973) Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design, p94)

Ono's most celebrated work is, probably, Cut Piece (1965) a performance in which Ono knelt on the floor with a pair of scissors at her side: the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothing. Ono remained unflinching until there was no more to cut away.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Carnegie Hall, 21 March 1965 (Watch a film of the perfomance here)

Read a review of Yoko Ono: Into the Light by Adrian Searle, a profile by Charlotte Higgins, watch Ono perform with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth; follow Yoko Ono on Twitter.

Lygia Pape - Serpentine Gallery

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)