Q: Tracey Emin

02/12/20

Published in the winter 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

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.

Read the rest of this review here

Interview with Judy Chicago

12/09/15
Interview: Judy Chicago

Star Cunts & Other Attractions
Riflemaker
14 September - 31 December 2015

The World Goes Pop
Tate Modern
17 September 2015 - 24 January 2016

In 1968, Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, 1939) chose not to participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center because she didn’t want to show in any group defined as “women”, “Jewish” or “California”. A couple of years later, however, she coined the term “feminist art” and she then went on to become known worldwide for her epic $250,000 installation, The Dinner Party (1979) – a large triangular table, measuring 48ft by 43ft by 36ft (14.6 metres by 13 metres by 11 metres), with 39 place settings, each commemorating a historical or mythical female figure. Throughout her career, Chicago has been an outspoken advocate for female artists and has written, taught and co-founded educational establishments in a bid to put an end to what she terms the “institutional failure in our universities and museums to teach the history of feminist art”.

In 2011, the Pacific Standard Time project at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, brought attention to a lot of Chicago’s early work and reminded people that there is more to her than her iconic place settings. The following year, she had a show at Riflemaker in London, and the year after that, she was included in the Spotlight section – a section for artists whom the curator deems to have been overlooked and deserving of re-evaluation – of Frieze Masters, also in London.

Read the rest of this interview here

Review of Tracey Emin | Egon Schiele: Where I Want to Go at the Leopold Museum, Vienna

08/06/15

Tracey Emin | Egon Schiele: Where I Want to Go

Leopold Museum, Vienna
24 April – 14 September 2015

When Tracey Emin (b1963) was still a teenager in Margate, accumulating many of the experiences that continue to feed into her self-exploratory and self-revelatory work today, she discovered turn-of-the-century Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) and “instantly fell in love”. Fixated on David Bowie’s album covers for Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979), she was told by her then boyfriend that they were influenced by Schiele’s art. A trip to the local bookshop soon broadened her horizons.

“A lot of other art that I had been exposed to up until this point was about artists looking at other things and other people,” she says. “Egon Schiele appeared to be intensely looking at himself emotionally as well as physically. It was like his physical being was pulsating.” It became Emin’s lifelong ambition to exhibit alongside Schiele and, with this fabulous show, her dream has come true. Curated by Diethard Leopold and Karol Winiarczyk, it showcases around 50 works by Emin – her first exhibition in Austria – and 15 drawings and poems by Schiele, selected by Emin to bring about a poetic debate between the two artists.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/tracey-emin-egon-schiele-ndash-where-i-want-to-go-review-leopold-museum-vienna

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

Book review of Cat Garcia: Our Time

02/05/14

Our Time

By Cat Garcia

Hardback, 250 pages

ISBN 9780992821708

Published by Cat Garcia

£35 retail

Creativity spans a broad spectrum of means and forms, or, as Cat Garcia notes, in the foreword to her new, self-published photographic collection, Our Time: ‘Creativity will not be pinned down.’ Accordingly, the book, which presents photographs of creatives, each of whom Garcia and her camera spent a day with, includes a range of 60 well-known (and some less well-known) artists, designers, illustrators, editors, performers, photographers, writers, musicians, florists and, well, anyone for whom ideas serve as currency. The photographs are at once private and public. They do not pander to celebrity magazine format, with close up airbrushed photo shoot portraits, posed, refined and painstakingly selected; nor are they paparazzi snapshots, happenstance, hasty and intrusive. They capture their subjects at work, on their way to work, on their coffee breaks. They capture the people and places and objects which inspire their all important ideas.

They capture moments of inspiration and contemplation; aspects of character, every bit as much a signature of the artist as a sweep of the pen (or brush).

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2014/05/our-time-2/