Review of Miranda Donovan: Metaphors for Mankind at CNB Gallery

29/10/15

Miranda Donovan: Metaphors for Mankind

CNB Gallery, London

7 October – 12 November 2015

Deep beneath the ground in the heart of Shoreditch, a basement brims with hooded figures; pithy, stencilled statements; exposed bricks; graffiti tags and corrugated steel sheets. But these are not crude scribbles on a cellar wall; these are carefully crafted paintings – worth a bob or two, at that – by Miranda Donovan, a City and Guilds-trained artist, who refers to her deeply layered and textured works as “sculptural paintings” and who, through her own self-exploration, questions and challenges the viewer’s concept of the human condition.

The venue is the CNB Gallery – formerly Cock and Bull – named after the infamous Damien Hirst tank containing a Hereford cow and a cockerel, preserved in formaldehyde, and elevated above diners in the centre of the former electricity generating station, now Mark Hix’s Tramshed restaurant, directly above. Donovan and Hix first collaborated in 2009, when the artist was commissioned to create a bespoke mobile for his Soho restaurant. They have continued to work together on and off ever since.

Read the rest of the review here

Editorial: Views of the Art World

28/09/15

Published in issue 18 (autumn 2015) of StateF22

Book Review: This Is Not A Book About Gavin Turk

28/09/15

This Is Not A Book About Gavin Turk

ed Rachel Newsome

Trolley Books

Published in issue 18 (autumn 2015) of StateF22

Review of Sleepless: The Bed in History and Contemporary Art at 21er Haus, Vienna

22/05/15

Sleepless: The Bed in History and Contemporary Art

21er Haus, Vienna

30 January – 7 June 2015

Seeing that the 21er Haus, Vienna, was putting on an exhibition about the bed in history and contemporary art, thoughts immediately arose of Tracey Emin’s notorious My Bed (1998), but since that is currently on display as part of a BP Spotlight at Tate Britain, London, I was curious as to who else might have used this familiar and everyday motif in their work. Pretty much everyone, it seems. This tightly curated and fascinating exhibition brings together nearly 200 pieces, from an erotic fresco from Pompeii in the first century AD, displayed in front of a brothel, to, indeed, another of Tracey Emin’s beds (To Meet My Past, 2002), quite different from her previously Saatchi-owned exemplar, a beautifully appliqued and embroidered four-poster bed, remembering herself as a little girl, afraid of the dark.

The exhibition is broken down thematically, beginning with birth and moving through love, loneliness, illness, death, violence, politics, myth and the anthropomorphic. Each section is introduced by an informative and contextualising information board, and then the works are left to speak for themselves, opening up cross-cultural, cross-temporal and cross-spatial conversations.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/sleepless-the-bed-in-history-and-contemporary-art-review-tracey-emin

Interview with Michael Landy

01/10/14

Interview with Michael Landy

Michael Landy (born 1963, London) studied at Goldsmiths and is one of the so-called YBA (Young British Artists) generation, who took part in the first great artist-led warehouse exhibition, Freeze, alongside Damien Hirst, in 1988. He really made his name, however, in February 2001, when he systematically catalogued and destroyed all 7,227 of his personal belongings during a two-week long “performance” in a disused department store on Oxford Street, called Break Down. More recently, Acts of Kindness on the London Underground documented, as its titles suggests, kindly interactions between commuters and users of the transport system. Nowadays, Landy is, as he puts it, albeit very tongue in cheek, “all grown up”, having been elected not only as a Royal Academician, but also made Professor of Drawing at the Academy Schools. “Actually,” he laughs, “I’m just trying to find a way I can get thrown out of there, really. That’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.”

In October 2013, Landy moved in to a new studio on Calvin Street, in trendy Shoreditch. Just around the corner from Spitalfields fruit and vegetable market, the building is one of a whole line that used to be used as warehouse storage space. “You could actually walk between all of the buildings,” Landy explains, “but, at some point, someone decided to turn them into homes.” When he and his partner, fellow artist Gillian Wearing, bought the space at number 27, they had it gutted and built on a new top floor in which they now live. Landy describes it as a “live-work space”, although the studio remains very much just that, and is separate from their private quarters.

To read the rest of this interview, please buy issue 11 (September 2014) of Art.Zip or see the online version, pp55-62, here: http://www.artzip.org/art-zip-september-2014-issue-11-art-studio-london

Profile of Beaconsfield

22/01/14