Most Recent: Art View Archive

1. Art

   Jason Murphy’s characters struggle through life, while his drawings soar

   Billie Muraben • 23 January 2015

   Me nut nut nut was one of Jason Murphy’s daughter’s first utterances, and is now the name for his drawings of awkward stories of fear and incompetence. Inspired by the physical comedy of The Young Ones and The Ren & Stimpy Show, Jason’s drawings rely on comic intuition and references to real-life moments, like dropping a potato on his cat.

2. Art

   Is it art? Is it performance? Or is it just PJ Harvey being ace, in a box?

   Emily Gosling • 23 January 2015

   While we wait to take our turn to become a sort of strangely sanctioned voyeur as PJ Harvey records her ninth album, thinking about what’s ahead feels peculiar. Essentially, we’re going to see PJ (Polly Jean) Harvey, her band, producers Flood and John Parish, a photographer and two engineers making an album in a Something & Son-designed box, formed of glass that allows visitors to see in, while the musicians can’t see out.

3. Art

   Atelier Bingo are back with an abstract conversation between two aliens

   Maisie Skidmore • 22 January 2015

   Up to the point when I opened Atelier Bingo’s new zine Wogoo Zoogi I’d never wondered what two aliens in heated conversation might look like. Having had a read I can now confirm that the answer is “they are speaking, singing very strangely, and they have a hair on their tongues." The newest bout of work from French illustration and surface design duo Adèle Favreau and Maxime Prou is a wonderful celebration of playful, dynamic, abstract art; blending shapes, colours and patterns in a glorious puddle of chaos thinly disguised as alien chat. In fact, it’s everything we’ve been led to expect from the pair, who we’ve dolloped praise on in the past.

4. Art

   Artist Faig Ahmed on his "cold heart," carpets and subverting tradition

   Maisie Skidmore • 21 January 2015

   Faig Ahmed is an Azerbaijani artist doing remarkable things with carpets. He takes traditional Azerbaijani rugs – enormous, beautiful intricate creations – un-weaves them, and reconstructs them to create new patterns and shapes, subverting traditional usage of rugs as domestic objects to be walked all over, and rejuvenating them with optical illusions and techniques reminiscent of contemporary internet art. 

5. Art

   Art collective Slavs & Tatars on their "bazaar" approach

   Billie Muraben • 21 January 2015

   The work of Slavs & Tatars is awash with unlikely cultural references, balloons, archives and carpets. Identifying “the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China” as the focus of their work, their projects are generous, engaging and genre-crossing. Starting as a reading group before shifting into making their own work, Slavs & Tatars have recently been working on a continuation of their Long Legged Linguistics project, a multi-faceted study of language as a source of emancipation. The somewhat secretive collective were kind enough to tell us more about this and their “bazaar” approach to making work.

6. Art

   David Batchelor defaces esteemed art journal October with colour and flair

   Maisie Skidmore • 21 January 2015

   If you go down to the Whitechapel Gallery anytime between now and early April you’ll be sure to come across a huge breadth of work chronicling the adventures of the black square, from 1915 all the way up to the present day. It’s fairly monochromatic, as you might expect. Upstairs, however, things get drastically more colourful – especially once you come to David Batchelor’s specially “disrupted” issue of October, one of the most respected art journals out there, first published in 1976 and edited by esteemed writers Michel Foucault, Richard Foreman and Noël Burch.

7. Art

   Bizarre telenovelas and garish installations from Alex Da Corte

   James Cartwright • 20 January 2015

   Perennial student artist Alex Da Corte has qualifications, residencies and awards coming up to his eyeballs having studied Film, Animation and Fine Arts at New York’s School of Visual Arts, Printmaking and Fine Arts at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia and then a cheeky MFA in Sculpture at Yale. Busy guy!

8. Art

   Duane Hanson's bronze flea market ladies star in surreal new catalogue

   Billie Muraben • 19 January 2015

   Karma Books have just published a catalogue of Duane Hanson’s post-humous exhibition Flea Market Lady. Shown at New York’s Gagosian Gallery, Duane’s flea market ladies are taken from real-life characters and cast in bronze. An incredible feat of observation and skill, his work captures the character of his models and creates a very real atmosphere of flea-ing. Karma have kindly let us publish an extract from the imaginary conversation Maurizio Cattelan has with the artist in the foreword to the book:

9. Art

   We talk to Hubert de Lartigue about muses and doing your best

   Billie Muraben • 16 January 2015

   Hubert de Lartigue paints photo-realistic portraits that “serve the beauty” of his models, and his muse. He considers “emotion and soul” the most important part of a painting and spoke to us about his working process, inspiration and the impact of his muse, Octavie.

10. Art

    Enormous, illustrative works by American painter Jonas Wood

    Liv Siddall • 14 January 2015

    If I won the lottery I’d open a gallery, and when I opened my gallery I’d totally rip off everything that David Kordansky Gallery does. From the big stuff like the very well-curated, cool list of artists they represent, to the impeccable printed matter they produce, to the matter of their easily navigable and well designed website – these guys are celebrating people’s work in the best way possible.

11. Art

    We chat to Jens Wolf about his intriguingly imperfect abstractions

    Emily Gosling • 13 January 2015

    For all its simplicity – the limited use of colour, the seemingly straightforward shapes – there’s something about the work of Jens Wolf that’s undeniably intriguing and complex. Bringing to mind the likes of Josef Albers and Frank Stella, his abstract pieces set off their precise geometry with deliberate imperfections that add a human element to its formality. With his first London show opening in March, we had a chat with him about the creative process, the evolution of his work and why his London is forever foggy.

12. Art

    Mathis Pfäffli's spontaneous drawings are free, as free as the wind blows

    Billie Muraben • 12 January 2015

    We interviewed Mathis Pfäffli back in 2012 about his design practice and working day. The Swiss-born graphic designer has segued from the playful and considered printed matter that we’re used to and produced a series of large-scale pencil drawings.

13. Art

    Serene but disquieting paintings by Sarah Schneider

    Emily Gosling • 09 January 2015

    While there’s nothing especially unusual or out of place in the still, unpeopled scenes of Sarah Schneider’s paintings, there’s undoubtedly something intriguing, disquieting even. Rendered in eerie stillness, it feels almost like the calm before the storm, each little soap dispenser, tissue or chair sitting idle, waiting for something to happen to it.