Interview: Elmgreen & Dragset

09/01/19

Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset 

Since unveiling a decaying public swimming pool as part of their major overview exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery back in September, Elmgreen & Dragset – the Berlin-based, Scandi artistic duo comprising Michael Elmgreen (b1961, Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (b1969, Trondheim) – have been the talk of the town. Their often parodic and playful work, of course, was already familiar to Londoners and tourists alike (even if the artists’ names remained unknown), as their 4.1-metre golden sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse, Powerless Structures, Fig 101, had regally crowned Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth for 18 months from February 2012 – throughout the London Olympic Games – attracting largely positive responses, including from British actress Joanna Lumley, who unveiled the piece, describing herself as ‘thrilled’ to be revealing such a ‘completely unthreatening and adorable creature’ to the public.

Read the full interview here

Review of Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts at the Whitechapel Gallery

24/01/17

Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Whitechapel Gallery, London

18 January – 16 April 2017

“Presentations of work by women artists are usually accompanied by sob stories and violins,” says Kathryn Wat, chief curator of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), Washington DC – the only international museum dedicated to the exhibition, preservation and acquisition of works by women artists of all nationalities and periods. She continues: “They tell how women couldn’t get into academies, couldn’t get sponsorship, but, nevertheless, went on to achieve. But, with photography, it’s different because women have been at the forefront of this medium since the very beginning.” The one-room display at the Whitechapel Gallery, Terrains of the Body, co-curated by Wat, presents photography and video works from the NMWA collection, as part of the London gallery’s programme of opening up rarely seen collections from around the world. Building on the legacy of 1970s’ feminist art, the exhibition includes works by 17 contemporary artists from five continents, from the 80s to today, presenting woman as creator and subject of her work.

Read the review here

Interview with the Guerrilla Girls

04/12/16
Interview with the Guerrilla Girls

Published in issue 29 of Elephant Magazine, Winter 2016/17

Interview with James Richards

27/10/16

Interview with James Richards

Requests and Antisongs

ICA, London

21 September - 13 November 2016

Combining fragments of film, music, vocals, erotica and medical documentary, James Richards (b1983, Cardiff) creates site-specific audiovisual installations and morphing exhibitions, which immerse the visitor in a kaleidoscopic and cinematic sensorial experience. Keeping a diaristic digital scrapbook, Richards draws from this to create his collages and assemblages, inspired by Dada.

Already having won the Jarman award for film and video in 2012, and the Ars Viva Prize for young artists two years later, Richards was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2014, and will be representing Wales in Venice (Cymru yn Fenis) at next year’s biennale. He spoke to Studio International during the installation of his exhibition Requests and Antisongs, at the ICA, London.

Read this interview here

Review of Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Corin Sworn at the Whitechapel Gallery

02/06/15

Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Corin Sworn

Whitechapel Gallery, London

20 May – 19 July 2015

A darkened gallery filled with peculiar objects: ladders, signposts, a stuffed rat, cheese, coloured light bulbs, mirrors, a wardrobe on wheels. You could be forgiven for wondering whether you hadn’t perhaps wandered backstage at a theatre, rather than in to an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. But this is precisely the point. Corin Sworn’s exhibition is an installation piece – Silent Sticks (2015) – about mistaken identity, and these objects are all based on stage props used by 16th-century travelling theatre troupes.

Sworn (b1976) is the fifth winner of the biannual Max Mara Art Prize for Women. She was selected by a panel of judges, which was chaired by Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick and included gallerist Pilar Corrias, collector Candida Gertler, artist Runa Islam and curator and writer Lisa Le Feuvre. Based on her winning proposal, Sworn was awarded a six-month Italian residency, which she split between Rome, Naples and Venice. She used this time to meticulously research the 16th-century Italian Renaissance art form of the Commedia dell’arte, with its exaggerated expressions and gestures and tales of subterfuge and misrecognition at a time when rapid social and economic change were bringing about anxieties regarding status.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/max-mara-art-prize-for-women-corin-sworn-silent-sticks-review

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

Review of Collection Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: Have you seen me before? at the Whitechapel Gallery

06/07/13

Collection Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: Have you seen me before?

Whitechapel Gallery

18 June – 8 September 2013

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has enjoyed the status of one of Europe’s most prominent collectors of contemporary art since acquiring her first Maurizio Cattelan work in 1996. This past year has seen the Whitechapel Gallery share some of the highlights of her collection, otherwise rarely publicly seen, in four neatly curated quarterly displays. Following on from A Love Meal (19 March – 9 June 2013), which focused primarily on 3D works, Have you seen me before?, the fourth and final display, contains considerably more 2D works, a couple of sound pieces, and a whole host of glittering names: it’s almost like roll call for contemporary art’s A-stream.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/collection-sandretto-re-rebaudengo-have-you-seen-me-before