Interview with Jo Stella-Sawicka, Deputy Director of Frieze London

13/10/14
Interview with Jo Stella-Sawicka, Deputy Director of Frieze London

As Frieze London revs up for its 2014 edition, there has been a lot of talk about the recent announcements regarding staffing changes at the top, as well as about the new Artist Award and Live section dedicated to performance art. What with hosting three international fairs annually and a seemingly ever expanding remit, Frieze is undeniably becoming a brand – so much so that this even forms the basis for one tongue-in-cheek performance work this year. Jo Stella-Sawicka, deputy director of Frieze London since 2011, is unashamed, however. ‘Of course Frieze is a brand,’ she exclaims proudly. The former director of London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery and one time art curator for British fashion chain Monsoon found some time on the eve of the fair’s launch to talk about all we have to look forward to, both this coming week and beyond.

Anna McNay: You’re coming up for four years working with Frieze now. What have you seen change during your time with the fair?

Jo Stella-Sawicka: Well, we’ve launched Frieze New York, which was obviously a major expansion for the company, and Frieze Masters as well, at the same time, so we've gone from producing one event a year to three. As a result, our activity is much more global. Also, we’re working with galleries that have to do with ancient art, medieval art and modern art, as well as contemporary art, so we’re working across the entire spectrum of 7000 years of art making.

To read the rest of this interview, please go to: http://uk.complex.com/style/2014/10/frieze-london-deputy-director-jo-stella-interview

Review of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: persistances at Aubette 1928, Strasbourg

03/10/14

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: persistances

Aubette 1928, Strasbourg, France

6 September – 22 November 2014

The original Aubette was built on Strasbourg’s Place Kléber by architect Jacques-François Blondel  between 1765–72. At the end of the 18th century the changing of the guard used to take place in front of the building at dawn each day. Between 1926 and 1928, Aubette was redecorated by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp and the De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg – the latter of whom envisaged the complex as a Gesamtkunstwerk – earning it the epithet of  “the Sistine Chapel of abstract art”. Covered over and partly destroyed after just 10 years, the avant-garde decor was only restored – and, at that, only in part on the first floor – in the 1990s and 2000s, following classification as a historic monument in the 80s. This first floor trio of foyer bar, function room and cine-dancing space now form an impressive contemporary art gallery.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/celeste-boursier-mougenot-persistances-review-aubette-strasbourg 

Interview with Deb Covell

01/10/14

Deb Covell: interview

Deb Covell (b1966) is a painter who seeks to celebrate the material qualities of paint. Rejecting pictorial imagery, she also eschews the traditional canvas support, producing paintings that hang from walls like drapes or lie folded and crumpled on the floor. There is a sculptural element to her works, but, she explains, it is far more about form, materiality and the versatility of paint.

Covell has just completed a very full on month-long residency, open studio and exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art but there is no time for a rest, as she is soon to be exhibiting in a group show in New York City. Luckily she managed to find time to answer Studio International’s questions.

To read the interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/deb-covell-interview-from-nowt-to-summat-sha-boogie-bop

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

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

Review of Daniel Buren: Comme Un Jeu d’Enfant / Like Child’s Play, Work In Situ at Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

23/09/14

Daniel Buren: Comme Un Jeu d’Enfant / Like Child’s Play, Work In Situ

Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

14 June 2014 – 4 January 2015

Admittedly, I don’t know what the exterior of the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCS) looked like before Daniel Buren (b1938) coloured its glass walls and 25-metre-high canopy with his tinted films, but it is hard to imagine it now without this stained-glass effect, sitting as well as it does on the Adrien Fainsilber building to the edge of the picturesque Petite France quarter of Strasbourg, seat of the European parliament. Reflecting the colours of the late summer flowers that spill from the window boxes and over the edges of the nearby ponts couverts, they alter the interior of the museum as much as they do its external appearance. Whichever gallery you enter, both in the modern and contemporary permanent collections, there are few corners in which you can stand where the dappling effect of pinks, blues and yellows doesn’t fall across your feet, reminding you that the touchstone of all art – of all visual perception – is colour.

“For me, colour is pure thought, and therefore completely inexpressible, every bit as abstract as a mathematical formula or a philosophical concept,” Buren once explained in an interview. “Colour is a huge problem. It seems to me difficult to apply rules to it. Are there any? At every moment, colour has to be invented. There are no safeguards.”

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/daniel-buren-like-childs-play-work-in-situ-review-musee-d-art-moderne-strasbourg