Michael Rakowitz – Whitechapel Gallery Survey Show 2019
Unlike so much contemporary art, offering moralising social commentary from a safe distance, Rakowitz leverages his artistic practice to probe uncomfortable questions and incite change. . . ‘I make work at the intersection of problem solving and trouble making,’ he says lightly. These inflated, amorphous miniature homes served not only to shield their incumbents from the elements – but to draw attention from passers-by, and on occasion, the cops. In this complex process of simultaneously solving and problematising, Rakowitz isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.
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REVIEW: Jordy Kerwick's Diary of an Introvert at Delphian Gallery
Kerwick’s still lifes are the perfect foil to the quixotic ideals of the artist. He only started painting in 2015, but has risen in truly meteoric fashion and has now exhibited internationally. His paintings seem to prevaricate on the ‘artist’ as a figment of our imaginations. He isn’t scared of utilising old tropes, but makes for some fine self-exposition amid his own painterly equivocation. For by engaging in these tropes, the artist reflexively reveals himself.
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John Virtue at Fortnum's X Frank (FXF18) at Fortnum and Mason
Collector Frank Cohen brings the works of John Virtue to Fortnum and Mason, Piccadilly. Virtue paints landscapes on the boundary of the figurative and the abstract.
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REVIEW: RA Summer Exhibition
Art Aesthetics goes for an impromptu game of ‘The Price Is Right’ at the RA Summer Exhibition, 2018. Pavan Chaggar suggests £12,000 on approaching Ben Johnson’s Dome of the Rock, Façade (2017). I’d already flicked through the ‘List of Works’ and found the price tag. ‘Good guess, but you’re a zero off... Actually, £12,000 wouldn’t even get you close to the ‘deposit payable today’ of £36,000.’
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REVIEW: All Too Human at the Tate Britain
Disjointed, but with some show stoppers. You can’t miss seeing Bacon and Freud supported by Kossof, Spencer, Saville, Paul (and one lonesome Giacometti) at the Tate Britain. Curator Elena Crippa has got some marvellous paintings, but arranged rather oddly—might that be the point?
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REVIEW: Picasso 1932 - Love, Fame, Tragedy at the Tate Modern
The Tate Modern’s PR team write that the ‘myths around Picasso will be stripped away to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness. You will see him as never before.’ And yet, you don’t see so much of Picasso ‘stripped away’ than his young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was only 17 when she met Picasso, then aged 46. For Aistè Ga, my gallery partner for the day, this turned Picasso into less of a genius and more of a flailing, finite man
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REVIEW: John Copeland's Your Heaven Looks Just Like My Hell
The Times' Waldemar Januszczak notes that Hirst is playing the kingmaker. Copeland, then, is one of the first to be coronated. His works featured alongside the likes of Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, and Richard Hamilton in Selected works from the Muderme collection in Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery. He has returned to the venue for his first solo UK exhibition, Your Heaven Looks Just Like My Hell which explores the ‘act of looking’ through obstruction, tricks of perspective, and hidden imagery. It is a natural starting point for an artist who views realistic painting as ‘too straight’.
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