Review of Alighiero Boetti: Order and Disorder at Mazzoleni, London

17/06/15

Alighiero Boetti: Order and Disorder

Mazzoleni, London

5 June – 31 July 2015

The exhibition of works by the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-94) at Mazzoleni packs a double punch. Upstairs is an excellent museum-quality show featuring works from some of his best-known series, including ballpoint-pen drawings, a map, a postcard work and embroideries from the Tutto series. Downstairs, however, is a collection of archival materials from the collection of co-curator Rinaldo Rossi, who worked with Boetti for 30 years. It includes postcards, correspondence, sketches, photographs and a cushion made by Boetti as a gift for guests at his second wedding in 1990, embroidered with the names Alighiero e Catherina. Here we are treated to an insight into the artist’s personal life, mind and working processes.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/alighiero-boetti-order-and-disorder-review

Review of Roni Horn: Butterfly Doubt at Hauser & Wirth, London

17/06/15

Roni Horn: Butterfly Doubt

Hauser & Wirth, London
5 June – 25 July 2015

“The world is wasted on the young. Youth is my oyster.” The walls of Hauser & Wirth London’s north galleries are currently plastered with such statements: inverted idioms, pickled proverbs, experimental poetry of a surreal nature. Roni Horn (b1955) uses words as her motifs, moving them about to suit her canvas, engendering new forms of expression, sometimes speaking with a greater clarity than the original material.

Her exhibition, which spans both north and south galleries, is made up of three recent series: the just described Hack Wit (2013-14), Or (2014) and Remembered Words (2013). Each is made using her surgical method of cutting up two original drawings and splicing them together, carefully tessellating the pieces. The results are at first seemingly random, creating nonsensical jigsaws but, on closer inspection, there are threads and links running through the works. Nothing is arbitrary.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/roni-horn-butterfly-doubt-review-hauser-and-wirth-london

GI’s Anatomy: Drawing Sex, Drawing Gender, Drawing Bodies

GI’s Anatomy: Drawing Sex, Drawing Gender, Drawing Bodies

Anna McNay and Jay Stewart

Anna McNay is a freelance art writer and editor, based in London. She is Arts Editor for DIVA magazine and Deputy Editor for State Media.  Anna has reviewed many LGBT exhibitions, including those in which this review’s case studies have participated and has authored the review elements in this piece.

Jay Stewart is co-founder of Gendered Intelligence. He holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, University of London.  Jay convened the GI Anatomy project and is author of the factual project information.

GI’s Anatomy: Introduction

In spring 2013, thirty transgender and intersex people participated in a series of practical life drawing workshops in London programmed by arts based organisation, Gendered Intelligence, in collaboration with life drawing tutors from London Drawing.[i] What made these art classes distinct was the fact that the models posing also identified as transgender and/or as having an intersex condition. The models had a range of body types, some of which were visibly identifiable as transgender or intersex, some not. The project aimed to engage the participants with complex ideas around sexed and gendered bodies that pertained to their own life experience. Throughout the project, the participants interrogated the ways in which scientific discourses and practices have come to shape our understanding of non-normatively sexed and gendered bodies.

To read this article in full, please see: http://tsq.dukejournals.org/content/2/2/330.abstract

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[i] See genderedintelligence.co.uk and http://www.londondrawing.com/. This project was funded by the Wellcome Trust as part of their arts award.

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 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