Here in our Studio we’re really looking forward to “Pick me up” exhibition, starting next thursday (18th April) until 28th April in Somerset house, London. Last year’s event was really inspiring and gave us the opportunity to buy screen printed art direct from the artists.
Well worth a visit if you’re in the area!
Wow! How you seen Pae White’s colourful typographic exhibition at the South London Gallery?
A mesmerising installation in which vast quantities of coloured yarn span and criss-cross the room to create supergraphics spelling out words that can only be deciphered by navigating the space. (South London Gallery)
Edmund de Waal unveils his largest and most complex installation to date, a thousand hours, as the focal point of a new solo exhibition of the same name at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London. Eleven major new works are showcased across both of the gallery’s spaces at 31 & 34 Cork Street, W1, until 10 November, including a total of 2202 hand-thrown vessels.
Edmund de Waal was apprenticed as a potter in Canterbury, studied ceramics in Japan and then read English at Cambridge. His porcelain is in over forty international museum collections and his installation signs and wonders is permanently on view in the dome of the ceramics galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is currently working on exhibitions for museums in the UK and America. Twelve site-specific pieces are on public display at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, and de Waal’s work was on display at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2012. De Waal is an award-winning writer, whose publications include the bestselling The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, published by Chatto & Windus, which received immense critical acclaim and won the Costa Book Award (Biography 2010) and the Ondaatje Prize (2011). He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours List for services to art.
If you haven’t had enough of Britain’s amazingly wet summer, you can catch some more rain indoors at the Barbican’s Curve this winter!
A stunningly ambitious installation by Random International has just opened. According to the Barbican:
“In this daring new commission, contemporary art studioRandom International invites you to experience what it’s like to control the rain. Visitors can choose to simply watch the spectacle or find their way carefully through the rain, putting their trust in the work to the test.
More than the technical virtuosity necessary for its success, the piece relies on a sculptural rigour, with the entire Curve transformed by the monumental proportions of this carefully choreographed downpour and the sound of water.
Random International are known for their distinctive approach to digital-based contemporary art. Their experimental artworks come alive through audience interaction and staged performance. ”
Random International: Rain Room
4 October 2012 - 3 March 2013
The Curve
The Modern Art of Chess
“From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” - Marcel Duchamp, 1952.
The Saatchi Gallery is about to open an exhibition of 16 chess sets designed by leading artists - Maurizio Cattelan, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Oliver Clegg, Tracey Emin, Tom Friedman, Paul Fryer, Damien Hirst, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Paul McCarthy, Alastair Mackie, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Matthew Ronay, Tunga, Gavin Turk and Rachel Whiteread. Each set is individually crafted in a wide variety of different materials including wood, porcelain, glass, amber and silver.
The Art of Chess began life with five sets commissioned by RS&A and exhibited at Somerset House in 2003. Since then the exhibition has grown in size and toured the world showing in leading museums and galleries in the USA, Russian Federation, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Czech Republic, Australia and Switzerland.
The exhibition, The Art of Chess, will run from the 8th September to 3rd October 2012.
bdonline has an interesting survey of all the Olympic cauldrons since the tradition was initiated at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam (free site, registration required). The first cauldron in 1928 was a pretty spectacular tower in the Netherlands which still stands today; by contrast the infamous Nazi cauldron in 1936 appears relatively modest. Los Angeles reused its beautiful art deco 1932 cauldron (with amends) for the 1984 Olympics; thank goodness London didn’t do the same with its slightly underwhelming 1948 austerity cauldron. Thomas Heatherwick’s 2012 cauldron certainly stands out as a fitting climax to this tradition.
The logo for the London 2012 Olympics was hugely controversial on its launch a few years ago - do you think people have become used to it and is it working in the context of the games? The website linked above has a collection of all the logos for the summer and winter games since 1924 - a fascinating journey through the development of contemporary graphic design.
The Royal Opera House Covent garden is staging a free exhibition of Olympic posters, torches and memorabilia until the 12th August (with the opportunity to be photographed with the London 2012 torch). Meanwhile, models and drawings for Thomas Heatherwick’s extraordinary Olympic cauldron have gone on show in the V&A’s Thomas Heatherwick exhibition.
Appropriately in this Jubilee and Olympics year, Tate Britain opens an exhibition of 150 photographs of London life by some of the biggest names in photography, dating from 1930 to 1960. This period of immense change was documented by photographers from all over the world – a familiar haunt to some, an exotic challenge to others.
Artists represented in the show include Bill Brandt, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Frank, Marketa Luskacova, Dora Maar, Irving Penn and Willy Ronis. Above is Milon Novotny’s shot of Middlesex Market. The exhibition runs at Tate Britain from 27th July - 16th September.
From prehistory right up to the present day - the fabric wrap for the Olympic Stadium is finally being unveiled, just a few days before the Games begin. The stadium by itself is a tad underwhelming, so we look forward to seeing how artist Sophie Smallhorn’s colourful wrap will transform the Populus-designed Olympic stadium.
The wrap is formed of canvas banners that run from the top to the bottom of the stadium’s exterior, creating 300 smaller ‘doorways’. Each banner is assigned a different colour from a palette of 56 colours in total to create an undulating effect.
Amazing - 6,000 years ago someone threw this magnificent flint ax head into the river Lea deliberately, perhaps as an offering to the river gods. It was unearthed by archeologists ahead of the construction of the Olympic Park and is now coming home to the Museum of London.
Pre-construction archeological work led by Museum of London archeologists started in 2004. The site is the largest redevelopment in London in modern history - an area almost the size of the City of London was reworked. The archeologists’ finds are amazingly diverse, including Neolithic ritual activity; ancient Roman riverbank revetments and Bronze Age field systems; 19th-century railways and canals; medieval mills and WW2 defensive structures. Without the construction of the Olympic Park all this history would lie undiscovered.
