Interview with Richard Riley, curator of Sarah Lucas: I Scream Daddio at the British Pavilion, Venice Biennale

15/06/15

Sarah Lucas: I Scream Daddio

British Pavilion, Giardini di Castello, 30122 Venice

9 May – 22 November 2015

Sarah Lucas (b1962) came to prominence in the 90s with the generation of Young British Artists, but it has taken her until now, at the age of 52, to be invited to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. Curator Richard Riley talks to Studio International about why, with a new shift in her work, this is just the right moment.

The British Pavilion cannot be missed this year at the Venice Biennale, sending its bright yellow, sunny rays beaming across the Giardini. As curator Richard Riley notes, you really can’t help but smile when you see it. Inside, new works by Lucas, built in response to the scale of the pavilion – some domestic, with domestic objects integrated into the sculptures; others larger than ever before – contain all the well-known Lucas tropes: phalluses, the nud, pages from tabloid newspapers, the toilet and cigarette butts – which, she explains, “are for titillation mostly. That is, gentle stimulation of a sexual kind”. 

Describing the pavilion as “a bit like a dessert” with the yellow like custard and the white of the plaster casts like meringue, Lucas offers up lashings of bawdiness and dry wit. Is this too British for an international audience? Riley, who considers Lucas to be at the forefront of British art, thinks not.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/sarah-lucas-i-scream-daddio-british-pavilion-venice-biennale-curator-richard-riley

Review of Reflections on the Self: From Dürer to Struth at Christie’s Mayfair

10/06/15

Reflections on the Self: From Dürer to Struth

Christie’s Mayfair, London

2 June – 5 September 2015

Artists since time immemorial have painted self-portraits: at times because models’ fees were beyond their meagre means; at times because they found themselves in isolation; at times simply because no one knows anyone as well as he knows himself and such intimate knowledge permits exploration and honesty, the freedom to experiment, and fulfils the desire to express.

For its sixth exhibition, Christie’s Mayfair, the auction house’s dedicated exhibition space, brings together more than 50 artists and 70 works showing the diversity of media, formats and styles used by artists to reflect their selves, from Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) to Thomas Struth (b1954). A rare 15th-century woodcut by the former, The Bathhouse (c1496-97), depicts the artist leaning on a wooden support, a tap comically positioned where his genitals should be, wistfully watching the other men as they bathe. A photograph by Struth, Alte Pinakothek, Self-Portrait Munich (2000), from his Museum Portraits series, looks over the artist’s shoulder at the well-known later self-portrait by Dürer (1500). The exhibition as a whole is framed by this one work.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/reflections-on-the-self-from-duerer-to-struth-christies-london

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

Review of Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at the Freud Museum

09/12/13

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

Freud Museum

10 October 2013 – 2 February 2014

In late-19th-century Paris, after decades of political upheaval and social unrest, and an era of neurasthenia, fainting spells, and “the vapours”, a new psychological illness took to the stage: hysteria (from the Greek hystero, meaning womb) was pronounced “the illness of the age” by the prominent journalist, novelist, and playwright Jules Claretie. Largely considered a female malady, it turned women into the focus for the expression of many millennial fears and anxieties. From the 1870s onwards, stories about hysterical patients filled the newspaper columns. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists, photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn to such an extent that Georges Didi-Huberman feels “nearly compelled to consider hysteria, insofar as it was fabricated at the Salpêtrière [hospital] in the last third of the 19th century, as a chapter in the history of art.”

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/mad-bad-and-sad-women-and-the-mind-doctors

Review of Sarah Lucas: Situation - Absolute Beach Man Rubble at the Whitechapel Gallery

29/10/13

Sarah Lucas: Situation - Absolute Beach Man Rubble

Whitechapel Gallery

2 October – 15 December 2013

Rotting hams, kippers and kebabs; cucumbers, bananas, zeppelins; melons, lemons, and fried eggs. Sarah Lucas’ body part metaphors are far from subtle. Crude and conjuring up a raw, base, animal sexuality, her androgynous gestures are hermaphroditic to the hilt – none of this could-be-one-thing, could-be-the-other. No, Lucas’ constructs are absolutely and fully both.

Born in 1962 and part of the Hirstian Goldsmith’s generation (albeit two years his senior), Lucas took part in the now notorious Freeze exhibition of 1988. Running ‘The Shop’ with Tracey Emin for six months in 1993 and dating Gary Hume and Angus Fairhurst (who later committed suicide), she lived YBA (Young British Artist) life to the full. In fact, her credentials as a 1990s party animal stretch as far as her sometimes (self-)reportedly going out to post a letter and returning a week later. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/sarah-lucas