installation
John Akomfrah: Vertigo Sea, Arnolfini, BristolSaturday, 23 January 2016![]() Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah’s multi-screen film installation Vertigo Sea is an epic meditation on mankind’s relationship with the watery world. Exploring themes of migration, environmental destruction and slavery, it was one of the most... Read more... |
Lumiere London 2016Monday, 18 January 2016![]() To liberate traffic-choked city streets for pedestrians, to suspend phantasmagorical, literally high art above their heads and give a sense that London belongs to them: that’s an admirable vision, surely. Artichoke has been wowing the crowds since... Read more... |
Fabio Mauri: Oscuramento, Hauser & WirthSaturday, 12 December 2015![]() Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an... Read more... |
Jimmie Durham, Serpentine GalleryMonday, 12 October 2015![]() The first thing you encounter is a ballot box bolted to the lid of a school desk; what or whom you might be voting for – apart from the hope of change – is not specified. In the eyes of Jimmie Durham, change is badly needed; in fact, most of the... Read more... |
Nathan Coley, BrightonThursday, 07 May 2015![]() Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical... Read more... |
Imagine... Anselm Kiefer, BBC OneTuesday, 18 November 2014![]() Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results,... Read more... |
Sturtevant: Leaps, Jumps and Bumps, Serpentine GallerySaturday, 29 June 2013![]() Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries. Borrowed from the BBC’s... Read more... |
Boris endorses abstract electronicaWednesday, 23 May 2012Unlikely electronica fan Mayor of London Boris Johnson this week celebrated the work of South African born experimental musician Mira Calix aka Chantal Passamonte, who has created an "Olympic sound sculpture work" made of stone being exhibited... Read more... |
Damien Hirst, Tate ModernTuesday, 03 April 2012![]() How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien... Read more... |
Yayoi Kusama, Tate ModernMonday, 13 February 2012![]() Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated... Read more... |
Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space, Serpentine GalleryWednesday, 14 December 2011![]() The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali, White Cube BermondseyTuesday, 13 December 2011![]() That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel... Read more... |
