When Italy entered the First World War in Spring 1915, the Greco-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico departed the Paris of Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire to enlist with his brother. They were billeted with the 27th Infantry Regiment in Ferrara, far from the front line, where their mother rented them furnished rooms in the viaread more
Category: Exhibition Review
Haroon Mirza IKON, Birmingham
Haroon Mirza’s exhibition at Ikon, ‘reality is somehow what we expect it to be’, is the artist’s most comprehensive since his 2015 survey at Museum Tinguely in Basel and his largest to date in the UK. Yet, despite featuring 31 works across two floors – including the influential installation Taka Tak (2008) and The Nationalread more
Hannah Sawtell, #STANDARDISER, Focal Point Gallery
Tilbury Port, 1967: the design critic Reyner Banham noted vast shed-lined landscapes of single, unbroken ten-acre tracts. The shed, ‘a stiff tent’ made of hi-tech materials, corrugated asbestos and ribbed aluminium, found its form around the increased import of containerized goods in standardized steel containers. An early Modernist ideal made manifest, these sheds could beread more
Eileen Quinlan Campoli Presti
Whether you call it ‘new photography’, ‘new formalism’ or, as Aaron Schuman opted for in frieze 170, ‘constructed photography’, Eileen Quinlan is exemplary. It’s not that new anymore. Alongside Annette Kelm and Josephine Pryde, with whom she exhibited in MoMA’s ‘New Photography 2013’, as well as Walead Beshty, Lucas Blalock and Mariah Robertson, Quinlan problematizesread more
The House of Fame, Nottingham Contemporary
‘The House of Fame’ consists of four houses ‘convened’ by Linder: ‘The House of the Future’; ‘The House of Rest’; ‘The House of Unrest’; and ‘The Abode of Sound’. Houses within a house housed by – under the roof of – Nottingham Contemporary. Equally mysterious, perhaps, as the institutional processes of an art gallery, ‘houseread more
‘New Order: Art, Product, Image, 1976-1995’, Sprüth Magers Gallery London / BANK: ‘Summa’, Piper Keys London
For the so-called young British artists, 1995 was, according to the writer Michael Bracewell, curator of ‘New Order: Art, Product, Image: 1976-1995’, what 1976 had been for London punk – a mythical Year Zero. Between these zeroes, British self-image and identity – and the ascendant ‘style wars’, as Peter York called them, later brilliantly theorisedread more
Stephan Dillemuth at 3236RLS/LE BOURGEOIS, Eros House
When the French restaurant beneath Eros House in Catford was evicted following complaints of late-night raves-cum-orgies, the new tenants kept its name: Le Bourgeois. It’s an irony not lost on Stephan Dillemuth. Crummy, gleeful, serious, his installations in “Diskodekorationen: From Another Century” literally decorate a disco, or what’d been a sort of disco before theread more
Lyon Biennale 2017 ‘Floating Worlds’
Few images conjure techno-modern utopia’s discontents like Buckminster Fuller’s Montreal ‘Expo 67’ biosphere in flames. Lit by a welder’s spark during structural renovation in 1976, the acrylic carapace of the icosahedron dome burnt fiercely for 30 minutes before extinguishing. Probably the lean efficiency of Fuller’s structures – he converted, as the critic Martin Pawley nicelyread more
Filipa César & Louis Henderson: Gasworks
‘We need a lighthouse philosopher,’ suggests Roque Pina, the protagonist of Filipa César & Louis Henderson’s captivating essay-film Sunstone, 2017. Though you would be forgiven for thinking that Pina already fulfils this role as he flatly, matter-of-factly addresses the origins of the lighthouse, its development and future, and reveals its inextricable relations with Enlightenment epistemologies,read more
Over Hang: W139, Amsterdam
After fifteen hours on the Newcastle-Amsterdam ferry I was hungover for ‘Over hang’ at W139. I arrived, then, in the dual traditions of ‘creatives’ who’ve found that a bastard behind the eyes enables a more corpuscular encounter with art and tourists ruining Amsterdam for the locals. Or maybe, as this show, curated by exhibiting artistread more