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Crazy God. Photographs by Yvonne De Rosa A psychiatric hospital in Southern Italy is the subject matter of Yvonne De Rosa’s current exhibition ‘Crazy God’ at Diemar/Noble Photography. After spending time as a volunteer at the hospital in the 1990s, De Rosa returns to capture the remnants of the now disused building. Image after image, the viewer is confronted with rooms and corridors in various states of disrepair.
Less and More – The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams The exhibition, Less and More - The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams, at the Design Museum in London is the first to present a definitive exposition of the career of Dieter Rams in the UK for more than 12 years. But Less and More could also have been called “How Braun regenerated the Modern Movement in Germany after the Second World War”. For, following the death in 1951 of W. Max Braun, who founded the company in Frankfurt in 1921, his two sons, Artur and Irwin, abandoned the radios with their mahogany cabinets and decorative flourishes and, instead, adopted a radically new design philosophy that was carried through to every aspect of the company’s activities – from its products to its graphics, advertising and exhibition design.
Inscription: drawing, making, thinking Inscription: drawing, making, thinking is the fourth of Jerwood’s ‘Encounters’ exhibitions – the idea behind the series is to ‘explore … the borderlands between the main disciplinary fields of the Jerwood Visual Arts programme’, drawing, painting, photography, moving image, sculpture, and jewellery. Curated by Anita Taylor, champion of drawing and inventor of (what is now) the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and Amanda Game, freelance curator and director of Innovative Craft, Inscription celebrates passionate enjoyment of process and materials.
Drawn Together is a London-based group of artists (Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall) who collaborate on performance drawing projects. Their work involves live action mark making with graphite and light, sound and animation. Through repeated processes they explore body and presence, time and space. Gary Hill: Poetics Beyond the Third Dimension If a word is worth 0.001 pictures, as stated at the entrance of American artist Gary Hill’s first work in this, his second solo exhibition in Brazil, talking about his work seems superfluous. Nevertheless, Hill's pieces are not simple images but a language of images frequently also composed of words. It is not by chance that, often, his work references poets, writers and philosophers. Clearly, the 'word' is not an expletive for Gary Hill.
Using a curious Internet nickname that plays with a literary reference used in his work, pioneering American video artist Gary Hill gave this interview to Studio International after the opening of his recent exhibition, Gary Hill: O lugar sem o tempo/Taking time from place, at Oi Futuro gallery in Rio de Janeiro. The second solo show of Hill's work held in Brazil, O lugar sem o tempo consists of five works that will appear in Brazil's two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
GSK Contemporary The Royal Academy of Arts in London, joining with sponsors GlaxoSmithKline, opened this new exhibition on 3 December. The central theme relates to global warming, an issue, which has increasingly preoccupied statesmen, politicians, scientists and creative artists around this imperilled world. Those engaged in organising and sponsoring the exhibition have rightly recognised the extent to which numerous artists have in their current work interpreted what is a universal and unifying issue in bringing key artists from Britain and abroad into collaboration with architects and environmental scientists. At the core of the show, the contributions of Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Shiro Takatani, Cornelia Parker, Spencer Finch and Antony Gormley seem most to represent the apprehension, cause and effect of humanity’s long-term abuse of the delicate ecology of Planet Earth, raising alternative questions of damage and survival to confront art today.
Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain Paul Sandby (1731–1809) occupies a prominent position in British art of the 18th century in the practice of Landscape Art. This is nonetheless the first comprehensive exhibition of his work to cover the full range of the artist’s work over the actual length of his career. It also provides a considerable amount of biographical information. As the preface to the catalogue points out, Paul Sandby stood with such contemporaries as Richard Wilson, Joseph Wright of Derby or indeed William Hogarth, yet he has never been deemed by critics worthy of the same critical attention as the others.
Pop Life: Art in a Material World ‘What make[s] you rich, we have been taught by a decade of casino capitalism, is precisely the opposite. What makes you rich, fabulously rich, beyond your wildest dreams, is leveraging.’ These may seem relevant words for the past few years, though they were written at the close of the eighties, as Rosalind Krauss attempted to explain the opening of museum doors to the mass consumer culture of ‘late’ capitalism. Then she suggested that Minimalism had unwittingly validated the combination of art and mechanized mass production. The break with the aesthetic original and the new ahistorical emphasis on immediacy of experience, though conceived in resistance to ‘fallen mass culture’, led from the artisan to the factory, and from the ‘Minimalist subject of lived bodily experience’ to the postmodern ‘dispersed subject awash in a maze of signs and simulacra’. |
Andrzej Jackowski: The Remembered Present Andrzej Jackowski is known for his poetic reveries of dispossession, epic scenes of trees floating across the night sky. The sense of displacement in his paintings stems from a childhood spent living in wooden huts in a refugee camp in Wales, expecting to return to his native Poland after the War. The layers of memory are conjured up in the slatted architecture of The Tower of Copernicus (1980), a primitive work of haunting beauty modelled on the story of an astronomer-monk, who lived with a glittering view of the stars.
Solutions: Contemporary Scottish Watercolours New Year at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) was celebrated with the opening of Solutions: Contemporary Scottish Watercolours - shown in the galleries adjacent to the National Gallery of Scotland, where the Turner watercolours from their collection are exhibited every January. A year ago an exhibition of contemporary and historic watercolours from the collection was mounted to coincide with the popular annual Turner show. This year at the suggestion of Marian Leven, (RSA RSW), the work of six current RSA artists who work in the medium of watercolour was chosen.
Conceptual drawing: recent work by Bernhard Sachs, Mike Parr, Greg Creek and Janenne Eaton In a global context drawing exists irrespective of cultural identity. It is a basic human instinct to make marks, to draw, to write. It could be perceived as ironic, that charged with the knowledge of new technology and the multitude of new forms and attitudes, that artists have chosen drawing in manifold forms. Over the past 10 years, drawing has assumed a pivotal role in defining contemporary culture. With powerful threads running from cave art through 19th century academies and salons, drawing has absorbed history and knowledge as artists themselves absorb influences from history, education, research and autobiography.
On the front cover of Ruth Barcan Marcus’ philosophical essays entitled Modalities is an image of an art-piece consisting of eight rectangular-shaped pieces created by a combination of materials: open-weave cloth, fibreglass, and latex, suspended from the ceiling. From the type of material used and the way the light is cast, this work appears strangely ephemeral, as though it might at a moment, or in respect of a certain angle, merge with the surroundings. The art-piece is entitled Contingent (1969) by Eva Hesse.
Spanish art of the mid-seventeenth century achieved a level of naturalism, which in some respects was quite unprecedented. The manifestation of this impulse in painting, through the work of artists like Velasquez and Zurbarán, is already widely known outside Spain. What is less well known is the fact that, in parallel with this development in painting, there emerged a tradition of polychrome sculpture, which was so lifelike in its hyperrealism that it constitutes a kind of sculptural trompe l’oeil.
Designated in 1956 as a ‘Living National Treasure’ by the Japanese government, textile artist Serizawa Keisuke (1895–1984) had a series of transforming experiences that led him to realize the fullest extent of his vision. For example, the seismic change he felt upon seeing Okinawan bingata stencil-dyed textiles registered at every stage of his subsequent career. Although he did not visit the island of Okinawa, in Japan’s southernmost prefecture, until 1939, more than a decade after his initial encounter with an example in Japan, his future direction had been set.
Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting Ed Ruscha’s oeuvre has been canonised as the output of a modern American master, but it shrugs off the labels that usually accompany such elevation: certain works or sequences are aligned with pop or conceptual art, but the majority resist such designation. Another apparent incongruity concerns form and content: Ruscha is often invoked in the same breath as Los Angeles, the city which been his home since 1956 – yet his most enduring concern has been not with places but with words, and the ways in which their meaning can be attenuated, inverted or reinforced by their material form.
The Unilever Series: The Unilever series are commissioned works whose proportions bear a relation to the space in which they inhabit: the gargantuan space of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Room. As a consequence, the pieces produced within this space are on such a scale that they can be considered environmental: one’s engagement with these pieces is not so much a relation whereby the viewer looks at the art-piece, but rather one where the viewer is subsumed, sensorially speaking, within the space created by the artist. This type of experience goes beyond the video or light-projected installations often seen in smaller gallery spaces.
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