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 from 2010

  • 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

  • Polly Apfelbaum ~ Nancy Princenthal

    Published in Art in America, November 2010

    Flat and either squarish or roughly round, the irresistibly appealing “Feelies” were shown on sheets of wax paper laid atop low, wall-hugging corrugated cardboard shelves. They suggested pint-size Thomas Nozkowskis or Mary Heilmanns—or potholders made by a preternaturally gifted preschooler.

    http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/polly-apfelbaum/

    Related Artists: Polly Apfelbaum

  • Fiona Tan: Cloud Island ~ Ossian Ward

    Published in Time Out, October 2010

    Narrative is but one softly spoken weapon in Fiona Tan’s disarming armoury, but she knows how to weave a magical tale or two. A short audio piece translates a Dutch fable about an Irish monk’s nine-year journey to ‘Brendan’s Isle’, a mystical, blessed rock, only to return home the minute he lands. Needless to say, no one ever finds it again - it’s a construct about mental space, rather than a physical place. 

    Related Artists: Fiona Tan
    Related Exhibitions: Fiona Tan: Cloud Island and other new works

  • Giuseppe Penone: 100 Words ~ Elizabeth Mangini

    Published in Artforum , October 2010

  • Tacita Dean: Craneway Event ~ David Ryan

    Published in Art Monthly , October 2010

    The ‘Craneway Event’ of Dean’s film took place on the West Coast, in a magnificent Albert Kahn building from the 1930s. A ford assembly plant until 1955, it overlooks San Francisco bay, with three sides of the building glazed in order to maximise the light. Dean filmed the rehearsals over three days, including all initial preparations up to the final dress rehearsal. This raised various important questions for the film project: the absence of music (as in most Cunningham productions, the music is rehearsed separately from the dance, sharing only a broad, overall time structure), though not sound; and the issue of the edit - that is, how to condense the span of the rehearsals into smaller time period without being either conventional or overly ‘arty’ ( in fact admirably realised by Dean)

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean
    Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event

  • DAYANITA SINGH: Postcards from the Edge ~ Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

    Published in Time Magazine , October 2010

    Her most recent work, Dream Villa, elaborates on this same glacial stupefaction, featuring streets and curious urban abstractions shot at night. There is darkness here, and the ineffable disquiet of great, harrowing art.

    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2022544,00.html

    Related Artists: Dayanita Singh

  • FIONA TAN: Willing Subjects, Resistant Souls ~ Matthew Guy Nichols

    Published in Art in America, September 2010

    Projection was one of three works featured in Tan’s recent solo show. Fittingly, it is also the first video that visitors encounter in “Fiona Tan: Rise and Fall,” an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery of seven films and video installations made over the past five years. Organized by senior curator Bruce Grenville, the show demonstrates Tan’s abiding interest in portraiture, her thoughtful interrogation of the genre’s traditional modes and limitations, and her inventive use of film and video technology to deepen our understanding of her subjects’ identities.

    http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/fiona-tan/

    Related Artists: Fiona Tan

  • TACITA DEAN: CRANEWAY Event Review ~ Gilda Williams

    Published in ARTFORUM, September 2010

    In Craneway Event, an art practice that combines in an unprecedented way moving and still images to capture a late-modernist culture on the brink of disappearing. In today’s culture, unable to preserve the relics-both mortal and architectural-of the last century, Dean’s film offers another means of reclaiming and displaying overlapping moments of our recent past.

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean
    Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event

  • Dayanita Singh: dream Work - The ongoing life of images ~ Sabeena Gadihoke

    Published in the Telegraph, Culcutta, August 2010

    http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100827/jsp/opinion/story_12854333.jsp

    Related Artists: Dayanita Singh

  • FIONA BANNER: Harrier and Jaguar ~ Charles Darwent

    Published in The Independent, July 2010

    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/harrier-and-jaguar-tate-britain-london-2023629.html

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • FIONA BANNER: Tooth and Claw ~ Patricia Bickers

    Published in Art Monthly , July 2010

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • Fiona Banner: Toys for boys are a turn-on at Tate Britain ~ Adrian Searle

    Published in The Guardian , June 2010

    Banner’s Harrier and Jaguar has upped the ante both of her own art, and of the Duveens commissions. This is more than a familiar transposition of two readymade objects from the hangar or the war zone into Tate Britain’s neoclassical galleries. It is a timely and well-placed work, which enters into a dialogue not just with the decorum of its architecture, but also with space.

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • CORNELIA PARKER: Interview ~ Mark Hudson

    Published in The Daily Telegraph, June 2010

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/7838693/Cornelia-Parker-interview.html

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • FIONA BANNER: Fight and flight ~ Laura Barnett

    Published in The Guardian , June 2010

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/21/fiona-banner-interview

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • FIONA BANNER: Fighting Talk ~ Martin Herbert

    Published in Tate ETC., June 2010

    http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue19/banner.htm

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • TACITA DEAN: Celestial bodies ~ Brian Dillon

    Published in Sight & Sound, June 2010

    Dean has a habit of chopping her wide screen into discrete-and a fearless willingness to let nothing happen in some of those segments for minutes on end. It’s a technique that pays off in some heart-stopping scenes: the sudden appearance of an exhausted dancer in the space beside a close-up Cunningham; the ponderous looming into shot of a huge ship in the harbour: the almost prissy movement of a thin mast behind the robust bodies of the dancers.

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean
    Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event

  • Cornelia Parker: A history of violence ~ Simon Hattenstone

    Published in The Guardian , May 2010

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/25/cornelia-parker-interview

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • cornelia Parker: Jupiter Artland Review ~ Duncan Macmillan

    Published in The Scotsman, May 2010

    The most striking of these new works is Landscape with Gun and Tree by Cornelia Parker. She has made a replica of a shotgun nine metres high in steel and rusty iron. It leans against a tree, its barrel cradled in the upper branches as though a giant had casually left it there, gone away and forgotten it. The iconography of gun and tree invokes the long tradition of sporting portraits. The model is Robert Wilson’s own gun and so obliquely, it implies his portrait.

    http://news.scotsman.com/arts/Art-review-Jupiter-Artland.6300419.jp

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Tacita Dean: Craneway Event Review ~ Sarah Crompton

    Published in The Daily Telegraph, May 2010

    In November 2008, she recorded three days of rehearsals for one of his “events” – selections from his works specially staged. But he died the following year, aged 90, before her film was finished. That turns an artistic record of one of the most important figures in contemporary dance into something more: an elegy, an epitaph, a memorial to the genius of creation. It is 110 minutes long, shown at specific times, and though you can wander in and out, it is so magical that you won’t want to.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/7733081/Tacita-Dean-Craneway-Event-at-Frith-Street-Gallery-review.html

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean
    Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event

  • Cornelia Parker: Jupiter Artland Review ~ Mike Wade

    Published in The Times, May 2010

    “I’m fascinated by man and nature. For me, the edge of the land has always been defined by a gun,” said Cornelia Parker, a Turner Prize-nominated artist whose work Landscape with Gun and Tree is one of three new exhibits revealed yesterday at Jupiter Artland, Scotland’s most remarkable landscape art project.

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7125909.ece

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Tacita Dean: Craneway Event

    Published in The Observer, May 2010

    Anyone familiar with Dean’s work will know that the rehearsal itself is not likely to be the main event. Rather, she notices the totality of the scene: the grids of the windows like hundreds of picture frames on the landscape beyond, the cavernous space, the liquid sheen of the floor with its ever-changing reflections. Her cameras drink in the sunshine. Occasionally, a dancer slides into shot, or a ship glides past, but it gradually becomes apparent that these are Cunningham’s preoccupations, too, precisely what inspire the wonderful abstractions of his choreography.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/09/tacita-dean-merce-cunningham-review

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean
    Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event

  • TACITA DEAN: Merce Cunningham’s last dance

    Published in The Guardian , April 2010

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/apr/27/merce-cunningham-tacita-dean

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean
    Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event

  • FIONA TAN: Tomorrow People ~ Alan Morrison

    Published in The Herald , April 2010

    http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage-visual-arts/fiona-tan-finds-hope-in-the-faces-of-tomorrow-1.1023196

    Related Artists: Fiona Tan

  • Jaki Irvine

    Published in KultureFlash, April 2010

    The looping and layering organise casually produced sounds into an intimate arrangement, which mimics a piece of scored music. An engrossing meditation on process, privacy, performance and repetition, the work also establishes subtle experiential relationships between image, object and sound

    http://www.kultureflash.net/eventDetail.aspx?Evt=144-Jaki-Irvine

    Related Artists: Jaki Irvine
    Related Exhibitions: Jaki Irvine: Seven Folds in Time

  • DOROTHY CROSS: UNDERWATER ~ Laura Cumming

    Published in The Observer, April 2010

    A good many works by the great Irish artist Dorothy Cross that evoke the deep blue in some form or other, not least her electrifying Ghost Ship, in which she covered a disused lightship with luminous paint and moored it off Dún Laoghaire harbour, where it haunted the coastline with its spectral glow, perfectly evoking the seafaring past as a mirage.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/04/underwater-touring-exhibition-bill-viola

    Related Artists: Dorothy Cross

  • BRIDGET SMITH: Swedenborg House: fourteen interventions ~ Peter Suchin

    Published in Art Monthly , April 2010

    Related Artists: Bridget Smith

  • Fiona Tan in Sydney ~ Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin

    Published in The Art Blog, March 2010

    Both videos cannot be seen at the same time, the viewer must literally move from a symbolic past to a contemporary present, all while hearing words from history brought to life. Tan asks her viewer to inhabit a complex space, traversing time and space and consequently creating a multiplicity of new meanings.

    http://theartblog.org/2010/03/fiona-tan-in-sydney/

    Related Artists: Fiona Tan

  • MARLENE DUMAS JUMPS THE WALL ~ Benjamin Sutton

    Published in The L Magazine, March 2010

    The installation is all about the opening up of space-with seventeen canvases varying in size and subject matter from tiny still lives to massive landscapes spread generously around four airy rooms-while the paintings themselves deal with the abrupt truncating and curtailing of space. The wall of the exhibition title refers specifically to structures in the Middle East that keep populations apart, serve as pilgrimage sites and force arbitrary divisions onto previously fluid territories. 

    http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/marlene-dumas-jumps-the-wall/Content?oid=1569644

    Related Artists: Marlene Dumas

  • NIGHT WATCH - Tales of the unexpected ~ Aveek Sen

    Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 19 March 2010

    To those who are familiar with [Singh’s] earlier, black-and-white work… the elusive menace of Dream Villa, moving unpredictably from the tender to the lurid, moonscape indistinguishable from mindscape, will come as a shock. The desolate expanses of light turning into colour in Blue Book (2009), her first body of colour work, have intensified, in Dream Villa, into a world of the night whose denizens become something other than human in the uncanny light of a radically estranging gaze.

    http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100319/jsp/opinion/story_12234912.jsp

    Related Artists: Dayanita Singh

  • A CONVERSATION WITH DAPHNE WRIGHT ~ Robert Preece

    Published in Sculpture Magazine , March 2010

    Daphne Wright’s work maneuvers things into what her biographical statement calls “Well-wrought but delicate doubt.’ Shifting between ‘taughtness and mess,’ it sets ‘imagery, materials, and language in constant metaphorical motion.’ Using a wide range of materials and techniques-plaster, video, printmaking, found objects, and performance-she creates beautiful and rather eerie worlds that feel like the threshold to somewhere new. 

    http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag10/mar_10/wri/wri.shtml

    Related Artists: Daphne Wright

  • DREAMINESS AND MYSTERY ABOUND ~ Aidan Dunne

    Published in Irish Times , February 2010

    Irvine’s film chronicles a kind of vigil. She invited “a diverse range of women” volunteers to populate Foley Street through the darkness of one night.

    We get a sense of solidarity among the women in relation to the surroundings, impinging and vaguely threatening darkness. A strange, dreamy atmosphere prevails, and that is a recurrent feature evident in many of Irvine’s films. 

    http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0226/1224265192411.html

    Related Artists: Jaki Irvine

  • FIVE FOR 2009

    Published in artasiapacific, January 2010

    Revered in international art circles, the New Delhi-based trio Raqs Media Collective are recognized as unique cultural figures, simultaneously researchers, documentary filmmakers and new-media artists. Since their introduction to the art world in 2002’s documenta 11, Raqs have pursued cross-disciplinary interests, which remains evident in their slide-and video-illustrated-performances, such as those given in New York’s New Museum and Hong Kong nonprofit Asia Art Archive. 

    Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective

  • SLOWNESS’ PANEGYRIC ~ Massimiliano Gioni

    Published in Flash Art , January 2010

    In another work, ‘Still Life’ (2009), Dean filmed the sheets of paper where Morandi traced the position of his objects, moving them around in the search of the perfect composition. These sheets are crisscrossed with hundreds of marks and lines, showing the infinite possible combination that led to each still life. As far as I know, this is the first time they have been made public: an important contribution to art history, but also a unique testament to a lifetime devoted to painting. Morandi’s involuntary drawings - his “accidental Twomblys”, as Dean calls them- are the cartography of an obsession, maps of an immobile existence spent between the four walls of a studio, weaving arabesques in an attempt to sort out that infinite chaos that is life.

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean