Review of Anni Albers: Touching Vision at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

28/10/17

Anni Albers: Touching Vision

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

6 October 2017 – 14 January 2018

In 1949, Anni Albers (1899-1994) was the first fibre artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, followed by an extensive tour across the US. This event was key in elevating fibre art to the canon of classical artistic disciplines. Now, nearly 70 years later, Guggenheim Bilbao, together with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, is putting on a retrospective of nearly six decades of the artist-designer’s work, starting with her early Bauhaus preparatory drawings, and moving through her hand-woven works and tapestries, to her later graphic prints.

Read this review here

Interview with Alex Katz

23/10/17
Interview with Alex Katz

Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to Russian parents, Alex Katz entered the prestigious Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan in 1946, where he was taught to paint from drawings, and exposed largely to modern art. Throughout the period of abstract expressionism, Katz remained a staunch figurative painter, spending his summers in Maine, where he made landscapes en plein air. In the early 60s, influenced by film, television and advertising, he began painting large-scale works, with dramatically cropped faces. His work is often described as “very American”, but Katz seemingly has no agenda. His motivation is to capture what he sees before him, be it landscape, cityscape, or portrait, and, unlike many artists, he doesn’t hanker after timelessness or immortality, recognising, rather, that time keeps moving and reality doesn’t exist beyond what he terms the “immediate presence”.

For Katz's latest exhibition in London, gallerist Timothy Taylor has chosen to bring out some very early pencil and ink drawings made by the artist on the New York subway during his student days and to show these alongside recent landscape paintings and sculptures. 

Read the interview here

Essay for Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon. Sculptures, drawings, photographs and animations 2007-2017

18/10/17

Essay for Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

Sculptures, drawings, photographs and animations 2007-2017

Cello Factory, London

23-30 October 2017

A cast of black-and-white characters cavort across the screen: Rat Man, Long-Eared Bat Person and Loki, a mysterious shape-shifter and epitome of the Trickster. It is Fasnacht – a night of wearing masks and releasing one’s innermost repressed psychological realities. In Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, the Trickster is an anti-intellect figure, entertaining and mischievous, yet bearing a deeper wisdom about the world. Fasnacht invites the Trickster to come out and play, and, in Victoria Rance’s short film, come out and play he does.

Much of Rance’s work deals with archetypes and the wearing of masks, exploring what Jung describes as the compromise between what one likes to be and how one likes to appear – the persona as it stands in contrast to the personality. Her cast of recurring characters, besides Loki and his friends, includes Medusa, Perseus, Nuit (the goddess of the sky), and, most recently, the Night Horse and the Holy Baboon. Her Sculptures to Wear include caterpillars, a worm, and wasp spiders – a striking variety of arachnid that disguises itself as a more harmful species to evade a common predator.

Full essay and catalogue available here

Image:

Victoria Rance

The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon 

2017

installation

wood, steel, felt, wool, palm, plaster, polyester

H 354cm

Feature: Lynn Hershman Leeson

07/10/17
Lynn Hershman Leeson: 'Don't say "sci-fi", say "sci-tru"'

Published in issue 32 of Elephant magazine, autumn 2017