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Published in The Guardian , December 2009
Tacita Dean is an artist I revere. This year, she’s done the Tate Christmas tree; it is typical of her unostentatious and honest art. An ordinary Christmas tree stands in the entrance hall of London’s Tate Britain. Its only unusual aspect is to be lit by real candles, instead of electric fairylights. Lit every day at 4pm, the candles burn down as the sun sets. Time visibly passes.
Related Artists: Tacita Dean
Published in The New York Times, November 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/arts/dance/05dean.html?_r=1&scp=74&sq=Alastair+Macaulay&st=nyt
Related Artists: Tacita Dean
Published in Kaleidoscope, November 2009
Related Artists: Thomas Schütte
Published in ARTFORUM, October 2009
Some time after we worked together on ‘“Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS”, Merce asked me to collaborate with him on an Event. Through CalArts, Merce and Trevor Carlston, the executive director of the company, had found this huge space in Richmond-a former Ford factory.
I didn’t want to film the performance but the rehearsal. I couldn’t even stay for the actual Event. I filmed for four days-the first day it was raining and Merce just looked at the space. The next few days, the dancers came. There were pelicans everywhere, and the craneway was surrounded by glass., it was stunning light. Coincidentally, we filmed November 3-6 last year to do it. Obama was elected on the first day in the film, but I resisted putting any reference to that.
http://artforum.com/words/id=24061
Related Artists: Tacita Dean
Published in Art in America, 23 October 2009
I am in the unique position of still being able to work with Merce Cunningham. I encounter him daily, listening to him and taking my cues from him, as I spend my summer cutting the film we decided to make together last year. His death has meant I have lost the pleasure in imagining him watching it, so in that sense I have lost my muse, but the film cannot change as a result of this: it is about Merce and his dancers, in a particular place and at a particular time. I am just very sad that he will never see it.
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/a-tribute-to-merce/
Related Artists: Tacita Dean
Published in The Buffalo News, 8 October 2009
Her drawings and paintings combine the meticulous tracings from the wading pool, the parking lot and the steel plant into layered abstractions that give little hint about their source. Several of the pieces look like color-coded topographical maps of otherworldly landscapes; others have the look of more traditional abstract painting.
All of them are infused, in ways that are anything but obvious, with Calame’s ideas about mortality, her own family history and her interest in the perceptions of abstraction and representation.
http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/gusto/article16072.ece
Related Artists: Ingrid Calame
Published in Frieze, October 2009
Raqs Media Collective are self-styled critics and polemicists of the globalized world, urbanization and political representation, making work that is multi-facited and hyperactive, including installation, exhibitions (most recently a section of Manifesta 7) and publications. ‘Escapement’ (2009), their installation at Frith Street Gallery, comprised 27 clocks, each allocated to a city and the hands set to their respective time zones. However the clock hands marked emotions rather than time - epiphany, anxiety, duty, guilt, indifference, awe, fatigue, nostalgia, ecstasy, fear, panic, remorse - as if each city was on a nietzschean treadmill, doomed to an eternal return of extreme feeling.
Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective
Related Exhibitions: Raqs Media Collective: Escapement
Published in Frieze, October 2009
[Thomas Schütte] has long pursued a multivalent practice that – though it grew of the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the early 1970s Dusseldorf, where Schütte studied under Gerhard Richter and Benjamin Buchloh – has spoken mostly to itself. That conversation, broaching biggies like power, modernity and monument-making, carries forth with an internal humour that the viewer readily identifies but cannot entirely understand. Obscure or not, it’s this humour – dry, dark, a bit jumpy – that ties together Schütte’s wide-ranging oeuvre.
Related Artists: Thomas Schütte
Published in Twin , October 2009
Forget words. Fiona Banner turns punctuation into art. She explores the problems and possibilities of written language. For Banner, it’s all about the space between words, the urge and failure of communication. The British artist’s public artworks have included bronze casts of giant full stops, to be used as seats or to lean against. They’re objects to pause against just as we pause in conversation.
Related Artists: Fiona Banner
Published in Art Monthly, October 2009
The 27 clocks in ‘Escapement’, which span both real and fantastical spaces, the world appears simultaneously larger than ever before and yet somewhat flattened. Even the face moving around the column seems impassive, a kind of every-person.
There are many positives qualities to this homogeneity, however – it is reassuring to recognise the qualities that all human beings share, to emphasise that we all feel panic, have epiphanies, feel awe and indifference. This is especially true when looking at the clocks from war-torn cities such as Kabul or Baghdad, where it seems more important that ever to recognise the similarities between people, rather than to concentrate on the differences.
Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective
Related Exhibitions: Raqs Media Collective: Escapement
Published in The Guardian, 19 September 2009
My journey through tracing different sites, working with and meeting people and seeing their reactions to the work - all this has changed my understanding of representation and abstraction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/19/ingrid-calame-on-drawing-tracing
Related Artists: Ingrid Calame
Published in The Guardian, Saturday 15 August 2009
When The Scales Fall From Your Eyes is an installation of glass cast busts mounted with heads of weighing scales. Each assesses the worthiness and weight of objects ranging from downright junk through hints of fetishist import and mock preciousness. The Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective - Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta - go in for intriguing reflections on the spiritual vacuity and material wastage of consumer culture. An aura of ritualistic observance is ironically contradicted by the incongruity of the trash that is apparently held up for veneration.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/aug/15/exhibition-birmingham-raqs-media-collective
Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective
Published in The Guardian, 10 August 2009
Tacita Dean’s film Presentation Sisters towers above everything else here. The 18th-century philosopher Denis Diderot argued that truly worthwhile art must reject the triviality of theatre – of conscious performance – and instead depict characters whose absorption in their activities makes us in turn forget ourselves. This was an Enlightenment definition of serious art, and Dean’s film, a portrait of women living in a religious community in Ireland, fulfils it. Presentation Sisters homes in on mundane daily activities and finds infinite beauty in them: doing the laundry, preparing breakfast, making a cup of tea.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/10/art-edinburgh-enlightenment-eva-hesse
Related Artists: Tacita Dean
Published in Art World, August/September 2009
In one work from the series, entitled If will continue to grow except at that point, Penone wedges a bronze cast of his hand info a tree whose development is affected by having to grow around it. Penone describes this process as “a slow and continuous sinking into the mud of time, that absorbs the memory of lives and dissolves them into its matter.”
Published in The Guardian, 31 July 2009
Escapement, an installation by Raqs Media Collective at London’s Frith Street Gallery featuring tens of clocks, is, in spite of its title, ostensibly committed to the present moment. The Delhi-based Raqs seem well-placed to tackle changing ideas about space, time and what it means to exist today. They’re at the forefront of artists from outside the western art-world nexus to gain hefty international attention in recent years, and have frequently channelled globalisation’s slipstreams in their work. Yet, in spite of nods to world time zones and changing technology, this exhibition makes a surprisingly timeless, universal comment. A heartbeat featured on a sound piece provides the show’s bass thrum. Instead of numbers, the clocks’ hands point to loaded words like ecstasy, awe or guilt: it’s good old human emotions that remain the markers in our lives.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jul/31/exhibitionist-art-this-week
Related Exhibitions: Raqs Media Collective: Escapement
Published in Time Out London, 23 July 2009
A sweep of 27 clocks is arranged around the gallery in that way that offices do to make them look international – displaying time in London, Paris, New York and so on (why doesn’t Time Out have these?). In Mexico City it’s a quarter past fatigue, in Buenos Aires it’s just after ecstasy and in Shangri La it’s half past awe. There’s also panic in Beijing and Jakarta, but the beauty of these altered timepieces is that they will read differently every time you look. This is an international community of adjectives we all share, or at least we have done since 9/11, when words like fear and anxiety began to spread across our borders like flu pandemics.
http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/149593/raqs-media-collective.html
Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective
Related Exhibitions: Raqs Media Collective: Escapement
Published in Source: The Photographic Review, Summer 2009
[Riddy’s] photographs have a stillness, a mesmerising quality that is only partly the result of an absence of people and events. In ‘London (Marylebone)’, for instance, we see the underside of the A40 Westway. The frame is filled with detail, democratically but asymmetrically ordered, which sustains our attention through the process of repeat discovery, and yet the structure has a clarity and openness. The scene has depth but minimal layering: the image calms; it does not confuse.
Related Artists: John Riddy
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in Artforum, Summer 2009
So is Riddy a romantic or a realist? That such an uncertainty can exist is a function of the extreme subtlety of this photographer’s image-world. Exploring muted ranges of color and tone, and often representing unremarkable locations that would never make it into any tourist guide to London… the ten landscape-format color photographs that comprise “Low Relief” invite descriptors such as “quiet,” “subdued,” or even “self-effacing.” ‘London (Weston Street), 2009’, offers the most extreme example. The evenly dark-toned picture of part of a railway arch near London Bridge station in essence, an invitation to stare at a brick wall… Janus-like, the image has two faces, one dingy and banal and the other unexpectedly beautiful.
Related Artists: John Riddy
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in Art Review, May 2009
“I’ve made a conscious effort to take perspective our of the pictures”, [John Riddy] says; “I think it’s an attempt to use a more ‘primitive’ way of composing the image so that you end up with something more guttural, where flat planes are suspended in a different pictorial space.” The resuld is a London that seems built out of stage flats of trompe l’oeil hoardings, a city fabric made of grey facades on which are inscribed the traces of alternate histories.
Related Artists: John Riddy
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in The Guardian , April 2009
Describing the naked human form is a way of describing ourselves, an attempt to seize what we can’t hold.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/apr/07/whitechapel-gallery-fiona-banner
Published in Frieze, April 2009
Barriball’s work hovers between states, playfully bouncing between documentation and transformation, detachment and intimacy. In her recent exhibition at London’s Frith Street Gallery, the floor was seemingly scattered with leaves, a serene autumnal scene for a pleasant stroll. Each leaf in Untitled (2008), however, was a piece of cloth cut from the patterns of second hand curtains; countless inane floral draperies and vegetal patterns given a new, theatrical life that was neither natural nor domestic, though still relying on both.
Related Artists: Anna Barriball
Related Exhibitions: Anna Barriball
Published in Modern Painters, April 2009
Anna Barriball employs minimalist and conceptualist strategies with a rigor that suggests empirical propriety, yet her experiments with found objects and materials are rife with phenomenological paradoxes concerning art, matter, and the passage of time.
Related Artists: Anna Barriball
Related Exhibitions: Anna Barriball
Published in Frieze, April 2009
The exhibition takes its title from Dumas’ canvas Measuring Your Own Grave (2003), in which an inclined and foreshortened figure stretched her (or his?) arms to the edges of the painting. In addition to a formal evocation of the canvas’ underlying support, the gesture perhaps literalizes Protagoras’ dictum about man as the measure of all things, while it also unleashes a morbid pun on the Vitruvian man and an idealist aesthetics of the body.
Published in Time Out London, 24 March 2009
John Riddy is known for his formally rigorous and chromatically complex photographs of monuments and places. His wry, art-referential framing of man-made and natural world phenomena – from brutalist flyovers to painterly renaissance skies – conceals myriad overlooked details. London becomes the subject of Riddy’s fascination with texture – as material facet of the everyday urban experience and a less tangible spatial state of play.
In these, the people-free scenes of an elegantly edited dérive, the city appears a visually rich sculptural playground littered with narrative possibilities.
http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/24152/john-riddy.html
Related Artists: John Riddy
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in Flash Art, March - April 2009
Marlene Dumas’s work opposes a society that simplistically divided good from bad, and it resists political or ideological systems that teach brainless love or hate schemes. We find the resluts of such beliefs in paintings like The Pilgrim (2006), The Neighbour or the Look-Alike (both 2005).
Related Artists: Marlene Dumas
Published in Flash Art, March April 2009
On the walls of the space, Barriball has hung a series of delicate works that play with the concept of drawing. Created by covering sheets of fine cotton paper with silver-coloured ink, which are then left to dry against various brick walls, the resulting works are subtle portraits of surfaces ofter ignored or overlooked, with the unique lines of the walls penetrating the paper and forming marks and occasionally tears and holes.
Related Artists: Anna Barriball
Related Exhibitions: Anna Barriball
Published in Artdaily.org, 2 March, 2009
By “blotting” the fabric, Apfelbaum creates organic, rather than gestural, fields and patterns of pure color. Reminiscent of stained canvases by many artists associated with Color Field painting, such as Dan Christensen, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland, Apfelbaum’s dyed fabrics often are installed on the wall, stacked neatly, or sprawled across the floor, and allude not only to painting and sculpture, but also to a myriad of categories in between: drawing, collage, tapestries, bed sheets, and clothing.
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=29181
Related Artists: Polly Apfelbaum
Published in Art Monthly, March 2009
...Sunset/Sunrise V, a final work in this show which is a pencil rubbing of a sunshaped stained-glass window design. The surface of this bumpy glass is richly seductive in texture, like microscopic skin, and the symbol of a cold grey graphite sun is another example of a stylised natural form that is beckoned forth into a building’s threshold.
Related Artists: Anna Barriball
Related Exhibitions: Anna Barriball
Published in The Hindu, 22 February 2009
‘The works have no information — like captions — precisely because I think the “where and when” of photography gets in the way of your experience of the image. And I was not making a documentation of Indian industry.’ - Dayanita Singh.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/02/22/stories/2009022250030200.htm
Related Artists: Dayanita Singh
Published in Business Standard, 14 February 2009
Blue Book, Dayanita Singh’s new body of work, is actually a double entendre. It’s both a series of photographs, hung on the walls of Nature Morte in India, and a slick book of postcards, produced by Steidl publishers in Germany. The thing is, Dayanita intended it to be that way. It is her intervention in the art market. The book ensures you can own the images, if not as the expensive prints, then as high quality postcards. Photography is a medium that allows for this latitude, and Dayanita stretches it out to the fullest.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=348967
Related Artists: Dayanita Singh
Published in guardian.co.uk, 13 February 2009
Glitter and faded glamour appear in Polly Apfelbaum’s new floor-based installation Anything Can Happen in a Horse Race at Milton Keynes Gallery. Apfelbaum has used sequinned material, which she describes as “cheap magic”, to create three collage installations in separate rooms, each of which is named after an American gambling city – Reno, Las Vegas and Atlantic City. The artist describes this atmospheric floor poetry as “fallen paintings” that draw on unconscious, experimental forms of abstraction from the 20th century such as dadaism and surrealism. The colours and shapes attempt to capture the mood of these places - Atlantic City is black and cold, while Reno is the most faded. “Think of a sequinned showgirl on the morning after”, says Apfelbaum.
Related Artists: Polly Apfelbaum
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