Tag: painting
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Open call: Rhythm
*** Rhythm is currently closed for submissions. We will reopen again soon. You can sign up to our newsletter for updates. *** From the impact of clocks on notions of time, to the effects of computers, trains and planes on experiences of modern life, rhythm – in various forms and ways – determines,…
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Unsent Letter to an Old Art Teacher
Dear Adrian, I’m not drawing anymore. There, I’ve said it. I didn’t become an artist like you always said I could. I write stories now instead. I have always wanted to write a story for you in fact, but no matter how many times I try, or think of trying, I never seem to strike…
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Keep the Ink Moving
The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…
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Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns
Unknown Knowns is Gordon Cheung’s third exhibition at Edel Assanti, London. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Slavoj Zizek’s observation that Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge omitted a crucial fourth category: unknown knowns – the things we don’t realise we know; the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine our perceptions and actions. Unknown Knowns continues…
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The World Without Us
Deborah Westmancoat is a British contemporary painter based in Somerset, UK. She has a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand landscape and our place within it, particularly how the traditionally held metaphysical stages of alchemy: nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowing) and rubredo (redness) might…
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LEAD
If, as Rebecca Solnit has argued, “science is how capitalism knows the world”, then it should not be surprising that, as new auction records are broken seemingly every week, it is to technology that the business of authentication must increasingly turn. The studied perusal of the expert is no longer enough; now it is the…
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Duelling Hagiographies: Mao and Modernism
The world is yours as well as ours: a statement in which ancestry maintains a dialectic with reconstruction; engineered to mobilise disjunctions with the past over a period spanning sixty years. An exploration of abstraction within contemporary Chinese painting, the exhibition shares its title with a work by Jiang Zhi, one of nine artists commanding…
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Workers Hammer
The following is an edited extract from the conversation between artist John Stark and anthropologist David Graeber, author of Debt, the first 5000 years and The Utopia of Rules. The conversation was originally published in the catalogue that accompanies DoL Po, Stark’s solo show at Charlie Smith London, 20th May – 26th June 2016. …
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HOUSEWORK
In November 2015, eleven artists took on a Victorian ruin. I was one of them. The resulting exhibition, HOUSEWORK, set out to re-inhabit the stripped-out terrace. In it, paintbrushes and brooms became interchangeable as artworks spilled out into architecture or architecture seeped into art. Words were regarded and discarded; sound waves scribbled in haste; phrases…
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Bench
A little over eight years ago Jeppe Hein, the Danish installation artist, gave a presentation at the Barbican at which he talked about his Modified Social Bench series. His installation of outdoor benches, each of which was playfully altered to impair its functionality (one with exaggeratedly short or long legs, one apparently broken in two,…
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Reliquiae
If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a text is therefore as much a result of material history – and chance – as it is of any inherent truth or beauty. Nonetheless, the…