Interview with Madeleine Kennedy

12/10/19
Interview with Madeleine Kennedy
The Enchanted Interior
Laing Art Gallery
12 October 2019 - 23 February 2020

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Interview with Katrina Brown

12/10/19

 Interview with Katrina Brown

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

(Contemporary) Art in Stately Homes

09/05/16
(Contemporary) Art in Stately Homes

Published as part of a larger feature by Prince Charles, in the Mail on Sunday's Event magazine, 09/05/16

Book Reviews: Louise Bourgeois and two primers on Contemporary Art

16/12/15

Book Reviews

Contemporary Art in the United Kingdom (Black Dog Publishing)

Book Review: Art & Visual Culture: A Reader (Tate Publishing)

Book Review: Mumbling Beauty: Louise Bourgeois, ed Alex van Gelder

Published in issue 19 (winter 2015/16) of F22 magazine

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 Jasper Johns: Regrets at the Courtauld Gallery

01/10/14

Jasper Johns: Regrets

Courtauld Gallery, London
12 September – 14 December 2014

This small but hugely powerful exhibition of work by Jasper Johns (b1930) is the second in the Courtauld’s new series of shows by contemporary artists who speak to a longer history of art. The 10 works selected might be seen not only to summarise the oeuvre of Johns himself, demonstrating many of his known methods and stylistic marks, but also to tell a wider story of art and artists, their processes and interactions, and, more broadly, a prescient – and Old Masterly – tale of life and death.

In the early summer of 2012, Johns was sent a Christie’s auction catalogue for the sale of Francis Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait (1964). In it was a full-page reproduction of a photograph by John Deakin, showing Lucian Freud posing on a cheap bedstead in Bacon’s studio. Bacon had, unusually, used this photograph as the starting point for his self-portrait. Johns became entranced by the image, which, in its reproduced form, had heavy black areas where Bacon had folded and torn the original, and where the copiers had placed the damaged original on a backing sheet, and thick, wiggly lines, where he had creased it. For the next 18 months, Johns worked solely with this image, creating and recreating numerous versions in pencil, pastel, watercolour, charcoal, ink on mylar, oil on canvas and etchings with numerous state proofs. All but the etchings are on display here.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/jasper-johns-regrets-courtauld-gallery-francis-bacon-lucian-freud

Video Review of Richard Jackson: New Paintings at Hauser & Wirth, North Gallery, London

26/06/14

Richard Jackson: New Paintings

Hauser & Wirth, North Gallery, London

23 May – 26 July 2014

Richard Jackson (born 1939) has been a pre-eminent figure on the American art scene since the 70s and, in his current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, he certainly leaves his mark. Influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and action painting, this show is a playful, yet disturbing synthesis of the two.

To read the rest and to watch this video review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/richard-jackson-new-paintings-hauser-and-wirth

Review of Annie Kevans: Women and the History of Art at Fine Art Society, Contemporary

02/06/14

Annie Kevans: Women and the History of Art

Fine Art Society, Contemporary

13 May – 6 June 2014

If asked to name three significant personages from the history of art, most people, almost across the board, will come forth with suggestions such as Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Pablo Picasso and Damien Hirst. Few will offer up names such as the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1844-1926); Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), co-founder, along with her husband Robert, of Orphism; first woman member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945); or Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy. Women in the history of art have somehow repeatedly escaped the canon. Although this sad state of affairs has repeatedly been challenged over the last (nearly) half a century, kickstarted by art historian Linda Nochlin’s seminal 1971 article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, there is still an ongoing struggle to bring successful (and even less successful) women artists, past and present, on to an equal footing with their male contemporaries, in terms of recognition, exposure, and even just pay. Moreover, those with the power to change the knowledge of future generations, namely professors on Fine Arts courses, really do need to change their syllabus reading lists and refer to a much wider cross section of “great” names (and works) from the past.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/annie-kevans-women-and-the-history-of-art.aspx