Viewing articles from 2018/07

LADA

LADA Screens - Nicola Fornoni

Selected as part of the 2018 LADA Screens Open Call, “Overshoot Day” is a film shot in vast marble quarry, featuring artist Nicola Fornoni using his mouth to keep a glass with a drop of water in it raised in the air for an hour and a half.

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Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street, London, NW1 5DA

Mary Corse

Mary Corse, installation view, Lisson Gallery London, May 2018

Mary Corse’s first major UK show at Lisson Gallery, London, is as much a scientific inquiry as it is art. Newtonian science extracts emotion from the situations it is used to examine, the same, by extension, could be said of its strange alter ego quantum mechanics. Review by Matthew Turner

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Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art (Modern One), 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR

Jenny Saville: Trace

JENNY SAVILLE  Olympia, 2013 - 2014  Charcoal and oil on canvas, 217 x 290 cm copyright Jenny Saville.  Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Jenny Saville’s paintings have always explored the insistence of corporeal mass, the fleshiness of flesh...

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Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX

Katja Novitskova: Invasion Curves

Installation Image of Katja Novitskova: Invasion Curves at Whitechapel Gallery

Entering Katja Novitskova’s ‘Invasion Curves’ at Whitechapel Gallery is like stepping into the set of a science fiction film. Metallic wires, flashing lights, giant eggs and a human brain occupy the gallery space. Surrounding this landscape, floating sheets of Perspex and resin hang from the ceiling and display phrases such as ‘the right to harvest resources’, ‘we are at an inflection point’, and the title ‘invasion curves’. Review by Fiorella Lanni

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Mother's Tankstation, 26 Holborn Viaduct, London EC1A 2AT

Maria Farrar: Eaves Deep

Dresser

Though it appears brittle, the Greyhound is strong and quick, its structure contradicts its force. Similarly with Maria Farrar’s paintings, lines become not just convenient structure, but a directional thing-in-itself. Review by Alex Bennett

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The Bower 'Ladies', Unit 1, Brunswick Park, Camberwell, London, SE5 7RH

Frances Scott: Diviner

Diviner

Made from seemingly hours painstakingly trawling through the South West Film and Television Archive based in Plymouth, Frances Scott’s exquisite film work, ‘Diviner’, marks the inaugural outing for newly opened exhibition and event space, The Bower. We are presented with an opulent 23 minute-long work which uses the short documentary, ‘Diviner Water in Luppitt’ (1976), as a locus for a broader sociological investigation. As a diviner might predict the future or locate water, Scott’s acute dexterity to hone the archive both realises and relinquishes the agency within; here her ability to re-appropriate the past negotiates a space for the present day to find shelter. Review by Sophie Risner

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National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN

Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire, and Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire

The Course of Empire: The Savage State

Looking at some of Cole’s earliest American landscape paintings, made after his move to New York from Philadelphia in 1825, the contrast is arresting. The Edenic quality of his scenery is hard to miss. There’s a quiet stillness to paintings like ‘View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains’ (1827), in which the landscapes seem both fresh and undisturbed; not only are they new to Cole – and “new to Art”, as he writes in his journal – but they seem somehow newly created, as if the painting’s mists were rising from a just-finished topography. Review by Rowland Bagnall

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Handel Street Projects, 14 Florence Street, London N1 2DX

Graham Gussin: The Mary Jane Paintings

Graham Gussin: The Mary Jane Paintings installation view

Graham Gussin’s The Mary Jane Paintings are illegal. They aren’t illegal in the same way that the art market is increasingly criminal, such as how the sale of da Vinci’s Salvador Mundi was called ‘the biggest art fraud in history’ or how works of art featured heavily in the Panama Papers as vehicles for tax evasion and other financial crimes. Instead, they are directly illegal; made from hashish that has been ground down, mixed with linseed oil and applied to linen and paper. Review by Matthew Turner

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Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norfolk Road, Norwich NR4 7TJ

Brian Clarke: The Art of Light

Brian Clarke: The Art of Light at the Sainsbury Centre, supported and organised in association with HENI

Stained glass artist Brian Clarke can remember when the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts was merely a sketch on the back of a napkin. The napkin belonged to architect Norman Foster, and the sketch utilised a unique approach - integrating building with landscape - using the style of structural expressionism. Considering this integration, it would seem fitting that the ‘finally-celebrated’ artist should take advantage of the centre’s grand windows. Review by Paul Black

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