Justin Hammond is an independent curator, art writer and publisher. In 2007 he devised the Catlin Art Prize, an annual showcase for the most talented new artists in the UK and later went on to compile The Catlin Guide, widely recognised as the essential reference for collectors of emerging artists. In 2010 he published An Unspoken Arrangement to coincide with Alex Ball’s debut solo exhibition, and as part of The Makers' Union curated Mike Ballard's Whose Coat is that Jacket You’re Wearing?, h... [more]
Guns & Cameras by Alex Field Sylvia Ballhause, Niki de Saint Phalle, Agnès Geoffray, Jean-François Lecourt, Christian Marclay, Steven Pippin, Émilie Pitoiset, Rudolf Steiner, Ria van Dijk, Patrick Zachmann at The Photographers' Gallery
October 12th, 2012 - January 6th
Posted
11/18/12
Shoot! Existential Photography has at its origins a fairground game that rose to popularity in the post-First World War years. The Photographic Shooting Gallery encouraged participants to shoot a gun at a target with the aim of hitting the bullseye, but whereas usually they would win a prize, in this variant at the centre of the target activated a camera and took a photograph of the shooter, capturing the moment the shot fired. The reward was a photograph of yourself in a situation in which you wo... [more]
The Serpentine Gallery—which at times can feel like a summer pavilion, a cabin, a conservatory or a private chapel—always seems to attain its most sacred air in the autumn, when the light is failing and the mist rises to blur the view to the road. There is of course a certain degree of standard-issue white-cube-ness to the interior; however, this is offset by architectural hangovers from the building's past life as a 1930s tea house, and the gallery's most successful exhibitions tend to be th... [more]
Seductive Immersion by Daniel Barnes Hannah Sawtell at Institute of Contemporary Arts
October 9th, 2012 - November 18th, 2012
Posted
11/2/12
Hannah Sawtell’s Osculator sublimely communicates, with more than a little uneasiness, one of the amazing and frustrating things about the internet: its inconceivable infinity, and its mixture of the useful and trivial.
The title – Osculator – has a deliciously futuristic ring to it. It sounds like a mythical device, derived from some 1960s science fiction vision of how the 21st Century would be, characterised by a high-tech apparatus that allows every human being to see everything all t... [more]
Charlotte Jansen
Last night was really fun.
Let's not talk about champagne, for once, and try and be serious about the work.
35 minutes ago
Philippa Snow
Alright, I'm immediately seeing the phrase "urban spirituality," which fits quite well from what I gathered from the visuals
(This is the winner, Samara Scott, with the carpet installation)
I was quite surprised not to see any painters shortlisted - painters outright, anyway. I keep hearing that we're making the move back to painting being The New A... [more]
On opening night, in a gallery filled with Frieze visiting art collectors, it was hard to appreciate the subtlety of Kapoor's new work. Surrounded by pouting people pondering over £80,000 price tags, the playfulness of the organic sculptures easily got lost. It was almost tempting to dismiss the works as things seen before, and to brush over the novelties and head for the bar.
But Anish Kapoor's work inevitably evokes a desire to explore; his new works, like his larger scale installations in the p... [more]
Frieze Art Fair is back, and this time it's got company: the inaugural Frieze Masters, bringing an art-historical dimension and additional blue-chip buying options to the London art circuit's flashiest and most notoriously cashed-up event of the year.
The fair's tenth anniversary promises to be just as messy and glamorous and overcrowded as usual. Don't be deterred by the inevitable queues: for the non-rich, Frieze is worth visiting for the absurd overheard conversations, the prima gallerina fash... [more]
Food is pretty hot right now. Art is also pretty hot right now, perhaps hotter than it's ever been. And both appear to be crisis resistant. The fiscal point isn't however where the similarities end as, if we examine it, food production and artistic production seem to be intertwined in a strangely symbiotic, and occasionally dysfunctional, relationship.
It is not as simple as stating that artists like restaurants and chefs like art, although these things seem to be true; there appears to be an aspir... [more]
Frieze has become synonymous with "modern and cool" – or so says The Guardian. Whoever is saying it, it is true that there will be fashion magazines snapping street style shots of the COS-clad (COS in fact being one of the partners of Frame this year, Frieze’s embyronic sibling) visitors. Frieze has built a brand that has made contemporary art "covetable", fashionable, and, the corollary would be, uninviting. So, what do London’s maverick art types really get up to during what is touted as... [more]
Private views encourage drinking, and make you feel slightly smarter for doing it. That, as they say, is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know: stop yourself a moment short of sloshing champagne up your sleeve, and slurring about “contemporaneity” – blah blah yabber Spartacus Chetwynd – and you are golden, absolutely, at least with the other half-cut Big Talkers. Frieze, in particular, is a platform for this dopey-drunken talk; negotiating the thing requires a certain level of t... [more]
Wandering through Parasol unit—which currently hosts Bharti Kher’s solo exhibition—making my way from the first to the second floor and into the courtyard, feels like flipping the pages of a memoir: the musings of a woman strung between Britain and India. These pieces blend elements of contemporary Western art—the result, no doubt, of Kher’s UK-based art training—with the rich flavours of India. East and West combine in the shapes of her objects as well as in the narratives they projec... [more]
The Alchemy of Iconography by Marianne Templeton William Crump, Elena Damiani, Phillip Estlund, Ruth Proctor, John Stezaker, William Turner at Fold Gallery
September 8th, 2012 - October 6th, 2012
Posted
9/23/12
Collage is a mechanism for quietly splitting apart the world and putting it back together again. As a disturbance of the existing order of things, it is at core a political act; yet in today's era of cultural fragmentation, its minor disruptions lack the shock value or biting satire characteristic of the medium in its Modernist heyday. Collage is now a defining condition of our sensory realm, and although we can still at times be taken unawares by its violent undercurrents, they no longer have the... [more]
A month or so ago, I had been clearing out my Dictaphone and come across a recording of an anecdote of Thomas Houseago’s; I’d taped it while at Lismore castle, working out there with Hauser and Wirth, and the general gist of it was about a corpse found just outside his studio. Either the head was missing the body, or the body was missing the head. I can’t quite recall, but either way, Houseago makes the incident vital – a tragicomic allegory for some facet of the artist; that weird proximit... [more]
Having been overshadowed by its omnipotent cultural kin – sport – this summer, this autumn should be a phlegmatic return for visual art forms in London. The vestiges of a turbulent few years, socially, economically and culturally, still remain in the city, however, it seems to have inspired a new spate of exhibitions that consider environments and space – from the contemplative, to the laconic and the humourous.
Assessing the physical space around us, how it moulds us, and the way in which we... [more]
A Higher Purpose by Laura Bushell Arthur Bispo do Rosário at Victoria and Albert Museum
August 13th, 2012 - October 28th, 2012
Posted
9/5/12
Around Christmastime in 1938, Arthur Bispo do Rosário was confronted by a dazzling vision of Jesus surrounded by angels bathed in blue light. It was an episode that would define him: either, as he believed, as a messenger from God or, as he was diagnosed, as a paranoid schizophrenic who would spend the next fifty years as a resident of the psychiatric ward of Rio de Janiero’s Colônia Juliano Moreira.
Bispo do Rosario believed it was his spiritual task to represent the universe through the obj... [more]
The Impossible Heap by Georgia Haagsma Ewa Axelrad, Hang-Up Pictures Contemporary Art Gallery, Edward Coyle, Kieron Dennis, Zavier Ellis, Asgar/ Gabriel, Chris Andrew Jones, Alexis Milne, sarah pager, Lucas Price, Daniele Villa at GALERIE8
July 18th, 2012 - August 26th, 2012
Posted
8/20/12
Tucked away between a newly opened restaurant and some new-built studio apartments in a block of flats in Hackney, Galerie 8 is situated in the lobby of the building, struggling to mask the fact it is a transitory space with the unappealing characteristics of an airport or a doctor’s waiting room.
It is difficult not to let this geographical discomfort affect one’s experience of the exhibition, especially because the concept and the setting of the show are in many ways each other’s polar op... [more]
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