Frith Street Gallery

Golden Square

17-18 Golden Square, London W1F 9JJ
T +44 (0)20 7494 1550 ~ F +44 (0)20 7287 3733

Press

  • Does cinema film have a future? ~ Will Gompertz

    Published in BBC News, October, 2011

    The artist is using the opportunity of being asked to fill this very public platform to raise awareness of what she says is the imminent demise of film; as a medium for making and presenting.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15238480

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • Tacita Dean: Film – review ~ Adrian Searle

    Published in The Guardian, October, 2011

    The Turbine Hall is both set and cinema, a real place and a place of illusions in Dean’s Unilever commission. The more I think about it, the richer and more complex it gets. We are projectors too, life clattering through our brains. Film looks totally new and oddly out of time, with its cutaway images, hand-painted mountains, rivers of lightning like pulsing nerves, beautiful rocking reflections of leaves in water, sunsets glancing through foliage. Dean’s eye, and that of her young son Rufus, peer out as though through keyholes cut in the layered image.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/oct/10/tacita-dean-film-review

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • Look with all your eyes, look ~ Ossian Ward

    Published in Time Out, September 2011

    This elevated take on the much-feared August group exhibition advises us not to be so complacent, else we might have our eyes burnt out - a threat faced by the protagonist of the Jules Verne spy novel which gives its snappy title to this eight-artist effort.

    http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/15982/look-with-all-your-eyes-look

    Related Exhibitions: Look with all your eyes, look

  • View with a room ~ Louise Jury

    Published in Evening Standard, September 2011

    It is set to be one of the must-do experiences of 2012, the chance to spend an exclusive night in a designer hotel with a panoramic view of London stretching from Big Ben to St Paul’s.

    http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/article-23984186-a-room-for-london-londons-view-with-a-room.do

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • A Room for London: Spend an extraordinary night above the Thames.

    Published in Living Architecture & Artangel, September 2011

    Perched high above the city, this beautifully crafted space offers a unique and playful
    perspective on an area of London more commonly seen from river level. With an en-suite
    double bedroom, kitchenette, library and viewing deck, guests are invited to rest and
    reflect upon what they see and hear during their one night stay; logging their thoughts,
    observing cloud patterns, the character of the river and deeper undercurrents.
    David Kohn Architects and artist Fiona Banner drew inspiration from the riverboat captained by Joseph Conrad whilst in the Congo in 1890, a journey echoed in his most famous work, ‘Heart of Darkness’.

    http://www.living-architecture.co.uk/the-houses/aroomforlondon/overview/

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • Cornelia Parker: Folkestone Triennial ~ Rachel Cooke

    Published in The Observer, June 2011

    It is Cornelia Parker’s bronze, The Folkestone Mermaid, on Sunny Sands beach, that the townspeople will want to claim as their own. It’s a delightful joke, of course, this nicking of Copenhagan’s most famous landmark, but Parker has made a beautiful work in its own right. Strong, proud and human – no flipper for her, though her feet are draped with seaweed – this mermaid’s jaw suggests the same patient indefatigability as that of the town she symbolises.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/26/folkestone-triennial-review

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Dorothy Cross: Review ~ Laura Cumming

    Published in The Observer, April 2011

    The paces of human and geological time are at the centre of this show. In the film, the camera gliding slowly down the sparkling stalactite, time is measured in millennia, but also in the brief notes sung by a boy soprano to the drips of the million-year-old rock. Sound is matched to vision – the fine high notes that might shatter the crystal, the little voice against the immense rock – in a subtle metaphor of awe and fear.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/03/nathaniel-mellors-dorothy-cross-review?INTCMP=SRCH

    Related Artists: Dorothy Cross
    Related Exhibitions: Dorothy Cross: Stalactite

  • JOHN RIDDY: Romanticism Gets Real ~ Nicholas Alfrey

    Published in TATE etc , January 2011

    John Riddy’s large colour photographs of London are in obvious contrast to the emphasis on the rural and marginal elsewhere. Two of them have an oblique connection to the Romantics, though they also suggest how quickly traces are erased in the modern city. London(Wapping) 2008 shows some of the real estate on the thoroughly madeover waterfront. This is post-picturesque all right, and a far cry from the place to which Turner liked to retreat (he had property here, too, a pub called The Ship and Bladebone). London(Bank) 2008 is a flat blank wall with a statue of John Soane in a niche. Soane worked on his designs for the Bank of England for more than 40 years, and the result was his masterpiece; it proved an ephemeral monument, however, and hardly any of his fabric remains. Through his attentiveness to surfaces, Riddy reveals a city of many losses.

    http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue21/romanticsalfrey.htm

    Related Artists: John Riddy

  • Ingrid Calame: The Exhibitionist ~ Maureen Davidson

    Published in SantaCruz.com, 15 December 2010

    The artist painstakingly traces the outlines of these layers upon transparent sheets of Mylar, kneeling on the sidewalks, asphalt roadways and industrial lots. In the studio, she integrates these tracings into a single Mylar layer using different colored pencils to achieve potentially vast drawings that could well be topographical maps. But the crisp cleanness of the Mylar, the even, elegant pencil lines in two or three radiant colors, is obviously a repository for more than geographical information. Each color appears to have a direction, and within the empty mazes of lines there appears an occasional recognizable outline. In fact the artist often integrates tracings from different locations to achieve a beautifully crafted composite that represents an impossible geographic confluence. 

    In the paintings—here oil on aluminum—the artist begins with tracings, then fills in the outlines with intense color in a limited but vibrant palette.

    http://news.santacruz.com/2010/12/15/the_exhibitionist_ingrid_calame

    Related Artists: Ingrid Calame

  • Fiona Banner: This artist is, in a word, brilliant ~ Charles Darwent

    Published in The Independent, November 2010

    Banner’s art has always concerned itself with systems, and this new work is no exception. In particular, it is about the separation of words and images. “Ut pictura poesis,” said Horace – roughly, let writing and pictures be the same – and yet they are seen as different, in some way inimical to each other. Not so to Banner.

    She has, in the past, blown up Times New Roman commas into waist-high bronze sculptures. Upstairs at her new show, a piece called 1066 re-enacts the Bayeux Tapestry in words: “The guy’s down on the ground, arrow in the side of his face. Another takes one in the hand, cries like a beast as he pulls it out.” Banner’s mural both describes the Battle of Hastings and depicts it, one army of words overprinting the other. History, as Orwell said, is written by winners. Words may be pictorial, they may even be beautiful, but they can never be neutral.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/fiona-banner-frith-street-gallery-london-2139591.html

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner
    Related Exhibitions: Fiona Banner: The Naked Ear