Posts Tagged Sculpture
London walking tour: Glancey’s art | Interactive
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 15, 2010
Architecture critic Jonathan Glancey reveals the hidden gems around Oxford Circus that exist above the shop windows
Dulwich Picture Gallery’s gothic birth
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 14, 2010
The exhibition celebrating Sir John Soane's grandest monument matches deathly obsession with romantic ambition, mirroring the intellectual world in which the gallery was created 200 years ago
Dulwich Picture Gallery is 200 years old, and it could hardly have picked a better way to celebrate its history than its exhibition of Salvator Rosa, which I will be reviewing shortly. It has also rehung its collection, moved its shop, and generally spruced up its already beautiful space – while in the grounds, a new abstract sculpture by Peter Randall-Page has been commissioned by the Art Fund to mark the bicentenary. This zen-like form on the lawn is engraved with interfolding patterns, taken from the frieze on the exterior of Sir John Soane's neoclassical building, which, like the collection it houses, dates from the early 1800s, the age of Napoleon. In paying homage to the distinctive architecture of Soane, the Art Fund reminds us that this is one of the oldest purpose-built museums in the world. And in fact, the Salvator Rosa show also takes us back to Soane.
John Soane is one of Britain's greatest architects, a radical visionary who belongs in the company of Hawksmoor and Pugin. His house at Lincoln's Inn Fields, created as both a dwelling and a museum, is rightly one of London's best-loved artistic attractions. But Soane's grandest monument is Dulwich Picture Gallery, and its most captivating corner is the mausoleum he built right at the heart of what is now the gallery's temporary exhibition space, illuminated by tinted glass, transporting you into a Georgian gothic novel.
Salvator Rosa was huge in the age when Soane was building Dulwich. This Italian landscape painter was avidly collected by English art lovers and his images were seen as the essence of the spooky. Eighteenth-century British writers found inspiration in Rosa for their strangest invention, the gothic novel. Now, Soane was the architect of the gothic: he himself saw the analogy between his buildings and the gothic novel, and his house-museum has a "monk's parlour" designed as the perfect setting to read such stories, complete with skull on the table.
In the Rosa show at Dulwich, you contemplate the very paintings that so excited 18th-century and Regency novelists: the original landscapes of horror. Then, at the heart of the exhibition, you come across Soane's ghostly mausoleum, and the dark images of Rosa connect up with the sublime ambitions of this museum's architect. It is a terrific moment of living, or dying, history, as the intellectual world that created this gallery two centuries ago rushes into your imagination.
Exhibitions picks of the week
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 2, 2010
Simon Roberts, Bradford
In 2007 Simon Roberts set off in a motor home with his old and unwieldy 5x4 field camera to travel through England and record the natives' leisure pursuits. Collectively titled We English, the large-scale prints form a series of petrified tableaux in which grouped figures, set against local landscapes, appear as stills from a theatre of the absurd. There's the Mad Maldon Mud Race, a birthday picnic in some Grantchester scrubland, and golfers dwarfed by the cooling towers of Ratcliffe on Soar power station. The images are compositionally still and appear almost spooky. It is Roberts's contention that what we do in our leisure hours says more about our national identity than what we do at work.
National Media Museum, to 5 Sep
Robert Clark
Leighton House, London
The Victorian artist Frederic Lord Leighton made his name mixing classicism with a swoonsome, pre-Raphaelite sensuality; an aesthetic that reached luscious perfection in his painting Flaming June. Perhaps the most outlandish example of his Romantic opulence, however, is Leighton House, created for the painter by the architect George Aitchison as a palace for art. Reopening after a multimillion-pound facelift, this bijou Holland Park pad features 22-carat gold-leaf domes, a silk-lined picture gallery, and the Arab Hall, designed to flaunt Leighton's priceless Arab tiles. Though his art collection was auctioned off on his death, an exhibition including works by Delacroix, Corot, Constable and Tintoretto helps mark the occasion.
Leighton House, W1, from today
Skye Sherwin
Paul Rooney, Leeds
Filmed at Harewood House, Paul Rooney's Bellevue follows the disorientated ramblings of a character who, while attending an ad company's focus group, becomes possessed by the spirit of a 1930s failed jazz musician voluntarily incarcerated in a New York psychiatric institution due to his history of chronic alcoholism. The piece, also alluding to the novelist Malcolm Lowry's alcoholism treatment at New York's Bellevue Hospital in 1935, deals with themes of addictive indulgence and inspired escapism. As per usual, Rooney displays a knack for combining workaday banalities with hints of poignant psychological undertow.
Harewood House, to 20 Jun
Robert Clark
Mark Wilsher, Norwich
You might say Mark Wilsher is all about team spirit. For his current project, The Yesable Proposition at the artist-run space Outpost, the artist, curator and writer has taken his exhibition budget and used it to make minor gallery improvements: a new toilet seat, a kettle, a magazine subscription for the staff. Meanwhile he'll be printing a book of essays, doing a gallery talk and organising an artist discussion group to spread the word. It's what he calls a win-win situation: he gets a show and the gallery gets new door handles. But there's a steelier critical edge to Wilsher's sense of fair play. This continues the artist's interest in applying business plans to art, a model all too familiar one might think, from arts-based regeneration schemes, where culture is forced to take the place of real government investment.
Outpost, to 21 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Raqs Media Collective, Gateshead
The Things That Happen When Falling In Love is a photo, film and text installation by the New Delhi-based, three-person collaborative group Raqs Media Collective. The collective – writers, researchers and curators as well as artists – are known for their evocative way of juxtaposing found and newly filmed footage, of combining the prosaic with the poetic, of assembling together photographs and text for free-association reverie. Matters of industrial global displacement are overlaid on intimations of emotional vulnerability. This installation – while dealing with love and loss, of ships-passing-in-the-night nocturnes – takes as its thematic anchor a series of photographs documenting the massive Swan Hunter shipbuilding cranes being transported down the River Tyne to be reused along the west coast of India.
Baltic, to 20 Jun
Robert Clark
Martin Honert, London
Visitors to Frieze art fair a few years back might remember Martin Honert's towering polyurethane bearded giants. Based on his recollections of sideshow attractions, they were realised with an exacting, cool-headed attention to detail. Clearly, while the reclusive German artist's subject matter is rooted in his childhood, his concerns are far from mushy self-absorption or confession. Instead, he works a complex riff on formal questions such as scale and realism, treating memories as if they were readymades. Yet Honert fashions his painstaking works in his studio: a time-consuming business that makes his shows scarce. His first UK outing in a decade includes an installation of his school dormitory bedroom.
Bloomberg Space, EC2, Fri to 15 May
Skye Sherwin
Sunil Gupta, Aberdeen
Until July 2009, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, originally constituted by the colonial British in 1860, criminalised same-sex relationships. This political fact, alongside the personal fact of being diagnosed as HIV positive in 1995, has set the context for Sunil Gupta's brave and pioneering photographic work. Gupta titles his exhibition The New Pre-Raphaelites, after the British Victorian artistic brotherhood of like-minded romantic souls. The necessarily closeted history of Gupta's gay life encouraged a camp photographic theatricality comparable with scenes of so many pre-Raphaelite paintings. There's the same posed intimacy, the same exquisite attention to detail, the same air of almost painful sensitivity and aesthetic elegance. But ultimately, there's also the underlying atmosphere of illness and mortality, to set all that posing in a quite touching perspective.
Aberdeen Art Gallery, to 15 May
Robert Clark
Distance and Sensibility, London
In our lightfooted globalised times, the effect of migration on artistic sensibility can be a tricky thing to map. Featuring the work of five UK-based artists – Pavel Büchler, Ergin Cavusoglu, Margarita Gluzberg, Marysia Lewandowska and Lily Markiewicz – originally hailing from eastern Europe, this show moves between cultural pinpoints, universal references and personal concerns. Büchler's light projection of a situationist slogan harks back to his rebellious art student days in Prague. Gluzberg's old '78 recordings of birdsong, communist speech and capitalist-minded lessons in Russian warn of traps laid by cultural convention. As Cavusoglu's moody video installation depicting a foggy border zone between France and Spain suggests, displacement is an ambivalent experience.
Calvert 22, E2, Fri to 13 Jun
Skye Sherwin
Anish Kapoor’s tangled tower at the heart of London 2012
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 1, 2010
Artistic centrepiece of the 2012 Olympic Park will be slightly taller than Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty
It will be slightly taller than Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty, just short of the Great Pyramid of Giza and considerably shorter than the structure to which it is being compared – the Eiffel Tower. And even though it is still just a computer-generated model, it is already gathering nicknames: the Colossus of Stratford, perhaps, or the Hubble Bubble.
The official title, however, will be the ArcelorMittal Orbit and it was yesterday unveiled as the £19.1m artistic centrepiece of the 2012 Olympic Park. Designed by artist Anish Kapoor and structural engineer Cecil Balmond, the 115 metre-tall red steel tower will dominate the east London landscape and become, it is hoped, a permanent visitor attraction for generations to come.
Most of the money for it – £16m – is being provided by the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, Europe's richest man, while the remainder will come from the Greater London Authority.
Boris Johnson conceded that some people would say that "we are nuts, we are barmy in the depths of a recession to be building Britain's biggest ever piece of public art". But the mayor said the Olympic park had needed something extra to arouse "the curiosity and wonder" of Londoners and visitors.
The idea is that 700 people an hour will be able to use lifts to reach a viewing platform offering spectacular views over London. If they wish, they can then walk back to the ground on a looping stairway.
Kapoor and Balmond's Orbit, which will be placed between the aquatics centre and the main stadium, was chosen from a shortlist of three, beating tower-based bids by the artist Antony Gormley and the architects Caruso St John.
Johnson said he got Mittal on board as a result of a chance meeting in a cloakroom at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He spent 40 seconds outlining the concept and Mittal immediately said he would provide the steel. In total, 1,400 tonnes will be required for a build that will begin soon and is due for completion in November 2011.
Johnson is well aware that the public may baptise it differently to its given name. "Some may choose to think of it as a Colossus of Stratford, some eyes may detect a giant treble clef, a helter-skelter, a supersized mutant trombone. Some may even see the world's biggest ever representation of a shisha pipe and call it the Hubble Bubble. But I know it is the ArcelorMittal Orbit and it represents the dynamism of a city coming out of recession, the embodiment of the cross-fertilisation of cultures and styles that makes London the world capital of arts and culture."
Big symbolic London visitor attractions have a mixed history. The Brunels' Victorian Thames Tunnel was a big hit but never made money and is now used by tube trains. The Festival of Britain Skylon was toppled on the orders of Winston Churchill and made into ashtrays. The London Eye has had much more success.
It is yet to be decided whether people will be charged to go up the tower butthere will be revenue-generating opportunities for the GLA and Mittal from a restaurant on the viewing platform.
Kapoor called it "the commission of a lifetime". He said he and Balmond were referencing the Tower of Babel and trying to convey a sense of instability and a tower that could be viewed differently from different parts of the city. "It is an object that needs a journey, a journey around the object but also up and through the object. It needs real participation and engagement."
Video: Artists take over London’s doomed Market Estate
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 9, 2010
Tour the condemned housing block in north London, where more than 75 artists have transformed its empty rooms and flaking walls into colourful works of temporary art
Ron Arad finally gets major UK retrospective at the Barbican
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 18, 2010
Exhibition by trailblazing Israeli-born designer, architect and artist opens in London, his hometown for more than 35 years
There are bookshelves that bounce and roll, cutlery that pirouettes, a chandelier that you can text and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs. In what may be one of the most comfortable exhibitions of recent years, Britain's first major Ron Arad retrospective opens tomorrow.
The Barbican's art gallery in London is following up major shows it has held on Corbusier and Alvar Aalto by devoting three months to a designer, architect and artist still very much alive and working. Arad, who was born in Israel but has been based in London for more than 35 years, said he hoped anyone "interested in things" would visit.
The head of art galleries at the Barbican, Kate Bush, said: "We want to pay tribute to Ron Arad's very special place in the world of design. He is an incredibly important figure and this exhibition lays out his vision and his process as it has evolved over 30 years."
The show is divided into sections with names such as Volumising, Rolling, Superforming and Scavenging, where one of Arad's most celebrated chairs – the Rover chair, which uses a car seat salvaged from a scrap yard – is exhibited.
Then there is the Failing section, displaying designs that weren't taken up, or were misconceived. That includes the "table that eats chairs" in which chairs can be folded underneath the table top. "I think it was too complicated for the manufacturer," said the show's curator Lydia Yee, "but Ron's still confident that someone will come along."
There have been recent Arad shows at the Pompidou in Paris and Moma in New York, but the one in London was completely different, said its curator, Lydia Yee. "Ron wanted to do something new in his home town and we wanted … to show his interest in new materials and in new technologies."
There is a crystal chandelier called Lolita which has more than a thousand embedded LED lights and its own mobile number to which one can send texts, which are then displayed.
Arad and his studio have also created mechanical tricks to show off some of the pieces such as a long moving platform for bookshelves called "reinventing the wheel". The idea is that you can roll your bookshelves where you would like them – perfect for the indecisive – but there is a wheel within the wheel so the books remain upright.
For many, Arad will be best known for his chairs, many of which are on display and which are most definitely not for sitting on. A large section of the gallery will, however, contain chairs where visitors can take the weight off their feet and – should they wish – play table tennis on a stainless steel ping pong table designed by Arad to suit his game.
V&A Medieval and Renaissance Galleries | Architecture review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 7, 2009
V&A, London
At one point in last week's party to celebrate the V&A's new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, I slipped the roaring champagne-chugging throng and visited the (refurbished) loo for relief and reflection, each of a profound nature. Lavatories are always revealing of any civilisation's achievements. Here I found some of ours. There was a Duravit urinal with a trompe l'oeil fly in the target area and a Dyson hand-drier. I'm not one to repudiate the modern world, but compared to upstairs, these made me a bit sad.
For the first time, the museum's astonishing treasures from these defining moments of European civilisation are rationally and beautifully displayed. And the effect is exalting, transcendental. It is an entirely new museum-within-a-museum. If these galleries were a standalone in any other country, it would immediately become one of the world's great museums. Whole institutions have been built around less than Leonardo's Codex Forster, but this is only one of nearly 2,000 superlative objects on display. That these new galleries are only a portion of the whole V&A is bewilderingly wonderful. Here is a resource of incalculable value and meaning.
Architecturally, bright new space has been created within the dark, eclectic chaos of the old museum. What we think of as the V&A is, in fact, mostly an Edwardian facade by Sir Aston Webb, disguising confused layers of different buildings behind it. The unifying effect is illusory: it has always been difficult for even the keenest visitors to make sense of the V&A's collections. Until now.
The new galleries have been designed by McInnes Usher McKnight Architects (Muma) who won the commission in 2003, just three years after the practice was founded. It is their first substantial work. Essentially, Muma ingeniously recovered dark, neglected space in the old museum and fused it with existing cavernous galleries to create three levels bound by a "central orientation hub".
The recovered space is roofed by heroic structural glass, making natural top-lighting a feature of what had hitherto been Stygian gloom. The new volumes are so accommodating that one exhibit is the entire front elevation of Sir Paul Pindar's house. Pindar was the ambassador to the Ottoman court and consul at Aleppo. His house, once on the site of what is now Liverpool Street station was one of the few survivors of the Great Fire. It has not looked so good since 1666.
To describe the individual treasures, mesmerising as a list may be, does nothing to indicate the whole magic of what is now available. Still, it would be negligent not to record that you can see the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries and the Thomas à Becket enamelled casket from Limoges, a superlative object which once contained relics of the martyr. There is the chapel of Santa Chiara, built in Florence in 1494, which the V&A claims to be the only Italian renaissance building outside Italy. Indeed, the museum's collection of Italian sculpture is rivalled only by Florence and Rome. Now it is properly accessible.
Indeed, accessibility is our new best friend. When I was at the V&A in the 80s, the great Giambologna sculpture, Samson and a Philistine (an audacious design since its vast substance is anchored at only five slender points) was in the gloom and once carelessly thwacked by a contractor's scaffolding pole. A Michelangelo drawing had been lost and the hapless director posed for photographers holding a postcard of it. Now, Giambologna is available in all his dramatic swagger in a courtyard garden with tinkling fountain while Leonardo's great Codex is interactively digitised. The modern display cases have fabulously sophisticated mitred glass by Hahn of Frankfurt allowing perfect visual access, works of art in their own right.
On any basis this would all be marvellous, but I sensed something special in the air on the opening night. There was quite extraordinary passion in the crowd. Why was this? Because the exhibits offer rare access to the sense of wonder. They satisfy appetites for physical quality and moral substance which have, by and large, been ignored in the exploitative lightweight crapola served up by, shall we say, the Turner prize. Of course, no one bright enough to walk around unaided needed to be persuaded that Donatello is an artist of the very highest rank, but to have the manipulated enterprise and care that is the Chellini Madonna presented with such immediacy is an epiphany. And not one available in Italy.
In these troubled times, there was a mood of near-religious enthusiasm among the guests. Not that the hedge-funded crowds were dressed in Primark, but the sight of Opus anglicanum needlework does remove you from the comings and goings of shopping. It was extraordinary to see great art enhancing moods: for those who find the Duravit fly and the Dyson Airblade fail fully to address the enigmas of existence, there are object lessons in the objects on display here.
So it is melancholy to note that among the crowds on the opening night, I did not see any leading representatives of the architecture or design professions. So much for Renaissance man. Cue Dark Ages?