ART REVIEWS
To read the full review please click on the title below
Isis by Simon Gudgeon, Halcyon Gallery A major statue, called ‘Isis’ has been donated to London’s Hyde Park – the first major installation to a London ‘Royal Park’ in 100 years. The Halcyon gallery has arranged this commission, together with a commemorative book, in which I've been asked to write an essay/profile on the sculptor, Simon Gudgeon.
These books –with a forward written by Prince Charles—are not for sale but will be given to people who sponsor a plaque at the bottom of the statue for £1,000.
The statue was unveiled at the Serpentine in Hyde Park in September 2009 at a gala ceremony.
I have attached a .pdf file of my piece, from the book, here - Isis
This is the link to the web copy of the book where I've written my feature - here
This is the link to Halcyon Gallery’s site – here
Chris Ofili, Tate Britian
Tate let-down is Chris Ofili. I’m sorry, this exhibition stinks. As an art critic it’s my job to honestly tell you this. Masquerading under the black African experience Ofili is still, hopelessly, lacking in skill as he tries, painfully, to express the wonderful primitive fetishism of African art. His doctrinaire formula of decorating his canvas with elephant dung and glow-in-the-dark dots of bright fluorescent colour are now nothing more than simply naïve. Much overworked and predictably garish...
Van Doesburg & the International Avant Garde: Constructin A New World, Tate Modern
In 1924, after van Doesburg and Mondrian argued over a diagonal line, Mondrian (believing the horizontal and the vertical line, straight up, down and flat, to be far more vital than van Doesburg’s visually idealistic diagonal line) broke with De Stijl. Then by means of retaliation, he created his ‘double-line’ painting ‘Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932’. Academically thought-provoking, Tate’s superbly installed Van Doesburg & The International Avant Garde: Constructing A New World confirms what a lot of people don’t know; van Doesburg is to Mondrian what Picasso is to Braque...
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Tate Modern
In Tate’s ‘Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective’ it is fascinating to see how, for most of the 20th century, American modern art was far far behind the European modernist brush of Cezanne, Picasso, Leger and Matisse until Gorky transcribed their techniques. Painting in the manner of, rather than directly copying from, existing paintings, Gorky was manifest in bridging the gap between the 1920s Paris School of Art and 1940s New York American Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko)...
Art, War and Religion: The Post 9/11 Relationship Between the Artistic, Political and Moral Stance Created by Artists During the Bush Administration.
The public resentment and hostility for America, is striking in the art world. Since 9/11, the Iraq war, and the Bush administration, art has been created to target America and her loyalist allies in the ‘war against terror’ - the UK and Israel.
When artist Damien Hirst said the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks "need congratulating" because they attained "something which nobody would ever have thought possible" on an artistic level, artists went political for publicity. Describing the image of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers as "visually stunning," Hirst said "you've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America.”
Consider too, 9/11 as a sculptural experience happening, in which two minimalist architectural shiny iconic totemic symbols were brought down to debris...
‘Go Figurative’: Going Figurative via Barack Obama
Since the 1990s, the phrase Conceptual Art has been unfairly manipulated to become an all-encompassing term, generating derision, which some erroneously apply to the Turner Prize, and other anti-figurative art.
As change comes politically, so it follows artistically with art imitating politics, reflecting its time. And so it was, that under former-President George W. Bush art moved towards temporary sculpture, with artists remembering 9/11 as a ‘sculptural’ event based around two Giacometti-tall Judd-shiny minimal ‘sculptures’, razed to the ground. Demolished as a Happening art-from.
Now with President Obama in charge, figurative artist Shepard Fairey was selected to paint Barack’s official Presidential portrait. Deem it au courant for artists to investigate the ‘self’, promoting the figurative back into art, back into vogue.
Putting the ‘F’ word, figurative, into ‘Neo-Figurativism’, Go Figurative...(www.gofigurative.com)
Obamaism Pushes Neo-Figurativism With The Return To Figurative Art
Much contemporary art can be marked as a response to 9/11. However immense the shock, in Obama's age of "change", art proves its substance. Figurative Art feels like comfort food, when Shepard Fairey’s Portrait of Barack Obama came to symbolize the historic campaign that was President-elect Obama’s triumph in 2008.
Fairey created the initial illustration of Obama for the election race. His portrait soon became one of the most memorable, highly collectable, images from the election. As an unprecedented and powerful icon for Obama’s historic campaign, this portrait portrays a saviour coming to our rescue. Jesus-like...
Behind the Veil
The art exhibition 'Veil', at Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, England, 2004, looks at the symbolic consequences of the veil and veiling in contemporary culture, in the work of twenty international artists. Veil matches photography, film, video and sculpture, and merges historic material with fancy contemporary work...
Saatchi: Unveiled - New Art from the Middle East
After 500 years of Islamic artistic tradition (calligraphy and rugs) and antediluvian codes of Shariah law, today’s artist is open to abstraction, colour, form, narrative relationships and humour. Charles Saatchi bought art from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, for his latest exhibition...
Anti-Americanism in the Art World
The public resentment and hostility for America is striking in the art world as well as the political arena. It has been for a spell. The penchant to burden America for all the evils of the world, even the art world, is completely surreal. But it is real...