@londonart blog

advent calendar 2016 - part 3 (13 - 18 December)

Part 3 of our advent calendar series have the following artists and works featured -

Day 13: 'Lay Down' by London artist Leah Capaldi is a site-specific installation at Matt's gallery's newish south of river space. The work consists of a video sculpture with continual performance, inspired by the artist's time in the deserts of the American West. There, Capaldi met a Utah cowboy & his horse, a film exploring their relationship and the vast, performative landscape that surrounds them forms the core of the installation. 'Lay Down' asks how power is constructed & understood, this question arising throughout the installation, in the iconic figure of the American cowboy, the influence of the sublime landscape and the authority of the screen. The crossover area between the disciplines of sculpture & performance are of particular interest to Capaldi's practice, with echoes of the seminal performance work of the late 1960s & early 70s.

Day 14: "under the N2 flyover, Woodstock" by South African photographer David Lurie represented by Sulger-Buel Lovell. Lurie's work captures the graffiti in urban environment which reflects the social fabric and local culture of a place.

Day 15: the Music Lesson by Frederic Leighton in Guildhall Art Gallery's Victorians Decoded: Art & Telegraphy exhibition. The show explores the impact of telegraphy on the artistic imagination & wider social consciousness in the 19thC. Art works selected are chosen with the 4 themes around the ground-breaking technology of that era - distance, transmission, coding and resistance. In this piece, a mother teaches her daughter to play a Turkish saz. The rhythmic patterns in the pillars and inlaid marble of the interior give a visual equivalent of the spaced-out sequence of notes. The dangling legs of parent and child also suggest notes on a stave. The transmission of knowledge is achieved by steady pulsing, something like the telegraph key tapping to transmit a message.

Day 16: The Celestial Teapot by Lukas Duwenhögger, is a proposal for a memorial site for the persecuted homosexuals of National Socialism in Berlin. The work was displayed in his solo show in Raven Row @raven__row earlier this year. Duwenhögger’s figurative paintings conjure his subjects into situations and worlds that are inventively adorned, allusive, anachronistic & compelling.

Day 17: Mantle Deposits by Hermoine Allsopp @hermioneallsopp in @arthouse1_ldn 's group show 'It's Offal' - From excrement to innards, 'It’s Offal' looks at the work of artists who have chosen to explore what lies within. A guttural festivity that triggers questions about who & what we really are, our fears & desires, and what we value in the end.

Day 18: the use of vivid colours from 'winter evening in the Black Fens' by english painter Fred Ingrams in Art Bermondsey Project Space @abprojectspace is characteristic this series of works: "The future of ditches in The Fens is for others to decide upon and maybe when all the soil has been blown & eroded away from the land in between them the battle between the “re-wilders” and the property developers can really commence. To me these precious margins are just dividing lines that run at ninety degrees to each other and border the huge fields of crops. The fields they frame are slabs of ever-changing colour. You can look down them or across them. Depending on your viewpoint ditches form either horizontal lines that divide the landscape or converging lines that meet at the vanishing point. Looking down a ditch creates one kind of painting, looking across a ditch another. The result is two types of landscape." - Fred Ingrams @fredingrams

See the previous entries in Part 1 here, and those in Part 2 here.

Frieze Art Week 2013

It's the time of the year in London when everybody suddenly talks about art. Yes, it's Frieze week (or weeks) coming up. Following our tradition, we have handpicked our favourites from the endless offers in town so you don't have to be frustrated scanning through the listings.

Our top 10 of the week are as follows (in no particular order!) -

1. Catch L’Expédition Scintillante, Act 2 (light show) by Pierre Huyghe in Raven Row's current show “Reflections from Damaged Life” - A great retrospective show spanning decades of works, make sure you stay in the gallery until you see this performance, it runs every half hour.

2. "Tomorrow" by Elmgreen & Dragset in V&A - The Norwegian duo's greatest site specific commission yet in Britain inside the V&A museum's former Textile Galleries.

3. "Beyond the Black" by Idris Khan int Victoria Miro - an important departure from Khan's photographic based works, this show comprises a suite of large black paintings, a monumental site specific wall drawing and a series of works on paper.

4. Tatsuo Miyajima's "I-Model" in Lisson Gallery - the Japanese artist is famous for his zen minimal pieces incoporating LED digit displays. There is a clay chamber room for meditation in the show, only one person to enter at time.

5. Wolfgang Tillmans' solo show C entral Nervous System in Maureen Paley - once again Tillmans returns to Frieze week and we couldn't wait to see his latest creations.

6. "A series from Within" by Larissa Nowicki in Man & Eve - intriguing pieces formed from the printed pages of books, sliced and intricately woven to form new works that cannot be read in the traditional sense

7. "Sandra Blow Paintings & Prints" in Kings Place - Sandra Blow is a pioneer of the British post-war abstract movement. Seeing her works in the multi-storey atrium in Kings Place is a joyful experience

8. "Erebus" (film) by Du Preez & Thornton Jones in Londonewcastle Project Space - Du Preez & Thornton Jones have created a new body of work in collaboration with choreographer Russell Maliphant, inspired in part by the work of Auguste Rodin

9. "The Seymour & Milton Posters Show" in Kemistry Gallery - a great retrospective show about one of the most influential designer duos in the 20th century who signature push-pin style has become iconic.

10. Frieze Sculpture Park in Regent's Park - this year's sculpture park is the largest in the history of Frieze, and it's free so how can you miss it?

And apart from the Original Frieze and Frieze Masters, you have the choice of numerous satellite fairs around town. Here are a few we believe most of our followers could find something they like and go have a look -

Sunday & Touch Art Fair in Marylebone

Sluice in Bermondsey

The Other Art Fair in Brick Lane

1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Somerset House

Multiplied at Christie's

Moniker in Brick Lane

Visit our facebook page over the week to see what we have found in town apart from the above. Enjoy the best London offers in the Autumn!

*****

fragments of life

Hilary Lloyd

Raven Row

25.11-06.02.2011

Trousers (2010)

Raven Row is currently showing Hilary Lloyd's intruging video installations in its elegant 18th century household premise. The stripped space, free of any furniture but with the wall linings, motifs and fireplaces restored, is sublimed to the 21st century with the injection of clinical-gestured flat-screens installed by Hilary.

Motorway (2010)

Hilary's works are multiple projections of the same subject in each piece, varying in different manner. In Tunnel and Crane, a seconds-long clip footage is repeated on two split screens but of slightly different frequencies. You feel like watching two unsynchronised pendulum clocks going side by side in an empty household abandoned by its master. Eventually they overlap and go back in tune again, but for a very short instance. Then they diverge again. This seemingly endless cycle of overlapping/slipping clips is quite intriguing.

Tunnel (2010) - video link

Crane (2010) - video link

There are also other works which do not behave in cycles as unsynchronised pendulums. One of the highlights is the curated positioning of all these pieces with the physical space of the gallery - the projections on a wall to the windows by the street, the screen in the middle of a corridor etc. And the abundance of space help to separate the works from one another, such that when you walk past a piece with the sound distancing, you have a transition moment before picking up sound coming from another piece. The experience is enjoyable and memorable.

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*****

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advent calendar 2016 - part 3 (13 - 18 December)

Frieze Art Week 2013

fragments of life