Review of 31 Women at Breese Little

27/06/17

31 Women

Breese Little

2 June – 31 July 2017

Taking as its starting point Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 New York exhibition of the same name, 31 Women offers what is says on the tin – and much more. Josephine Breese and Henry Little transport Guggenheim’s two thematic threads – the first focusing on the surreal, the instinctual and the erotic; the second a formalist enquiry into modes of mark-making and production – across the Atlantic and across time, securing key works by Eileen Agar and Catherine Yarrow, two artists from the original curation, and inviting a further new 28 artists to join the conversation.

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Review of Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask at the National Portrait Gallery

13/03/17

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask

National Portrait Gallery

9 March - 29 May 2017

Exploring gender, identity and the shifting notion of self in one’s artwork, especially through photography and the “selfie”, might be de rigueur at the moment, but a century ago, when the French artist and writer Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob, 1894-1954) began to do so, she was alone in the field. Although only one of her photographs was shown during her lifetime, Cahun began experimenting with photography and self-portraiture as early as 1912, working together with her partner (and later step-sister), Suzanne Malherbe (who also changed her name to the equally androgynous Marcel Moore). Fashioning masks and costumes to masquerade as women, men, and everything in between – Cahun herself wrote: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that suits me” – she explored the construction of identity, decades before Judith Butler’s theorising on its performativity in Gender Trouble (1990). After time spent in Paris amidst the Surrealist movement – André Breton described Cahun as “one of the most curious spirits of our time” – Cahun and Moore settled on Jersey in 1937, where they went on to launch a resistance movement against the Nazis, before being imprisoned and sentenced to death in 1944 for counter propaganda tracts. Both attempted suicide but were taken to hospital and survived. They were released in 1945, on the eve of liberation. Much of Cahun's work had been destroyed by the Nazis, but she continued to experiment with photography until her death at the age of 60.

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Feature: Who is Maureen Paley?

13/09/16

Published in issue 22 of State magazine

Interview with Gillian Wearing

06/05/16

Interview: Gillian Wearing

As part of this year’s Brighton Festival, Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing (b1963) will be premiering her new film, A Room With Your Views, part of her collaborative, global film project, Your Views, for which she asked people – everyone – from around the world to film and submit a short clip of their curtains or blinds opening and the view from their window.

Wearing, whose work explores our public personas and private lives, describes her working method as “editing life”. She uses photography and film, alongside theatrical staging techniques, to record people’s confessions and present herself in various guises and with various masks.

She spoke to Studio International about the ideas behind her project.

Read the interview here

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