MASLEN & MEHRA in collaboration with street artists, Shuby and Delete Maslen & Mehra consider their more recent work to be ‘micro’. By that, they mean they are honing in on very specific political and environmental dilemmas. This requires a completely different methodology to previous work in order to explore detailed narratives. The sculptures in…
He fêted his sixtieth birthday earlier this week, but you can help give legendary Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei another reason to celebrate. His new public art project, perhaps his most ambitious to date, needs funding to speckle New York City with testaments to the equality of all human rights and the strange hypocrisies…
Beautility Exhibition London Design Festival 2017 Sala Brasil, Brazilian Embassy,14-16 Cockspur St, London SW1Y 5BL 18th-28th September 2017 Open to the public: Weekdays 11am-6pm (Private View: Friday 15th September 6-9pm) Two designers and two artists from Brazil have come together to celebrate the fusion of the beautiful and the useful. The result is…
BY TORRANCE WHELKS / Go on and add one hundred more items to the list of things I don’t wish to lick. But goodness knows I was tempted for a second there. Just as beauty can be deceiving, knowledge equals power to curb your appetites and habits, as demonstrated by these ice lollies made of tangy-looking…
Happy centuries-belated birthday to my guy George Stubbs. The Liverpudlian Romantic painter was born on 25 August 1724, and went on to acquire a keen eye for the equine physique. He received only the tiniest modicum of formal training, but Stubbs was able to hack out a living as a provincial portraitist. At the green age…
The success of a self-taught artist can be a particularly beautiful thing, a reminder that talent can find the recognition it deserves even when an ivy league MFA isn’t part of the picture. That’s why it’s pleasing to briefly bring up Humberto Poidomani, who was born in Argentina in August of 1942. Yes, he’s been totally self-taught,…
Sometimes a colour by any other name sounds not as sweet, but astonishingly better. Novelist Ingrid Sundberg, who’s developed a liking for collecting the finest words the English lexicon offers, has proved just that point with her handiest of visual aids. Adjectives aren’t just for amplifying average persons, places and things; they’re especially apt at…
There’s something about a novelty calendar that makes the rapidly fleeting nature of time a little less morose. What does it matter if yet another August is screaming by if you get to flip the page to a fat baby dressed as a bushel of apples on the 31st? To cheer us as the days dribble…
Don’t let that halo fool you. Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin may have mastered the art of primitivism, been a key influence in the symbolist movement and paved the way for the Synthetist style in modern art… yet this predominant painter’s road to presumably calculated artistic legend was paved with controversy. It seems Gauguin’s art will always…
It is always a privilege to view a gathering of artworks created by the same hand that hail from different eras, because through them you can admire how much an artist has grown and changed. Sometimes, you see a marked improvement in style, how sensibilities and awareness got sharper. Such is the case of Catalan…