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Mike Tuck
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Postmodernism: Style and Subversion at the Victoria and Albert Museum
by Mike Tuck
Ron Arad, Jean-Paul Goude, Hans Hollein, Robert Longo, Antonio Lopez, Andy Warhol at Victoria and Albert Museum
September 24th, 2011 - January 15th, 2012
Posted
10/10/11
According to Charles Jencks modernism died at 3.30pm on March 15, 1972, when a failed, crime-riddled housing project in Missouri was dynamited. An act that on the one hand concluded the failed project of modernism’s social aspirations, and on the other hand opened up a vacuum of design and ideology that we have come to call PoMo. So starts the tale of how design pondered what to do after modernism. The new show at the V&A tells the early story of postmodernism beautifully, as it develops from Rob... [more]
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Mike Kelley at Gagosian Britannia Street
by Mike Tuck
Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery - Britannia Street
September 8th, 2011 - October 22nd, 2011
Posted
10/10/11
In the current exhibition at the Brittania Street Gagosian we are told that Mike Kelley expands on two previous major projects—the Kandor series and the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR) – combining them into one mega installation.
Lost? Well so was I! It turns out that this bizarrely titled installation is based on a rather arcane conceit and may need a little explanation: the Kandors, apparently, are representations of Superman’s city of birth, the only remaining... [more]
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Pablo Bronstein at ICA
by Mike Tuck
Pablo Bronstein at Institute of Contemporary Arts
June 9th, 2011 - September 25th, 2011
Posted
6/20/11
For some time now Bronstein’s work has been of interest to a broad cross-section of the visual arts – part draftsman, part architect, part surrealist, part choreographer, part classicist – his work occupies a unique position. On paper the show should be a bitty series of works distributed throughout the ICA and the mall, moving between installation and paper works, performances and paintings, but with an elegant irreverence for convention Bronstein manages to make a coherent narrative from his... [more]
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Richard Long at the Haunch of Venison
by Mike Tuck
Richard Long at Haunch of Venison
May 27th, 2011 - August 20th, 2011
Posted
6/20/11
What is it about land art that gives it such an enduring appeal? Since its heyday in the 1960s and 70s as a new marker in the expanded field of sculpture, land art has continued to subsist with few fundamental changes. Artists like Richard Long have continued to take walks, arrange stone circles and make expansive marks in the landscape. In the museum-like surroundings of Haunch of Venison, Long has assembled a collection of works that display a remarkable consistency throughout the forty-y... [more]
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Visual Rewards
by Mike Tuck
Callum Innes at Frith Street Gallery
May 13th, 2011 - July 1st, 2011
Posted
5/15/11
I first came across Callum Innes' work by accident during a chance visit to Ingleby gallery in Edinburgh in 2009. I say 'by accident' because the work was so at home in the gallery that I almost missed it completely. Amongst the refurbished semi industrial spaces of the Ingleby gallery the many layers of stripped and reapplied oil paint on the surface of Innes' paintings happily resonated with the paint and plaster of the warehouse walls upon which it lay.
In the current I... [more]
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Pino Pascali
by Mike Tuck
Pino Pascali at Camden Arts Centre
March 4th, 2011 - May 1st, 2011
Posted
3/27/11
The exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre is the first dedicated to Pino Pascali in the UK and focuses on works from the years in which Pascali became associated with Arte Povera between 1967 and 1968. This radical trend in Italian art where everyday materials were used in resonant combinations and in which events in art and life appeared to converge had a defining role in the question of what can be considered sculpture.
Rather like scholars who argue that much of the symbolism of... [more]
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The Downtown Scene
by Mike Tuck
Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark at Barbican Art Gallery
March 3rd, 2011 - May 22nd, 2011
Posted
3/27/11
Recreating the vibrant arts scene of 1970s New York, the Barbican Art Gallery invites you to explore the work of three artists who (amongst many) helped form the Downtown Scene.
The early 1970s was time when art was moving off the plinth, anti-form art was establishing itself and Richard Serra was hurling lead into the corners of rooms. New York as a city was broke, busted and frequently threatening – a set of circumstances which made it ideal to foster the next generation of Americ... [more]
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Richard Moon
by Mike Tuck
Richard Moon at Madder139
February 4th, 2011 - March 20th, 2011
Posted
2/6/11
When one first sees a painting by Richard Moon one is not so much perturbed by the deformities and uneasiness within the image, but by a nasty feeling that you as the viewer are complicit in creating these disturbing qualities. For all that Moon’s paintings take photography as their subject they are decidedly not photorealistic - an important distinction, and one which opens up a space within the painting to question whether the disturbing qualities lie in the source imagery or wi... [more]
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Modern British Sculpture
by Mike Tuck
Anthony Caro, Jacob Epstein, Alfred Gilbert, Barbara Hepworth, Damien Hirst, Phillip King, Richard Long, Henry Moore, Julian Opie, Leon Underwood at Royal Academy of Arts
January 22nd, 2011 - April 7th, 2011
Posted
2/6/11
Modern British Sculpture at the RA is a show that has been discussed heavily in the weekend press from the point of view of who is included and who is left out. Hepworth, we are told is hot, and Kapoor and Gormley are decidedly not. From the off we are left in no doubt about the overarching importance of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore in the story of British sculpture. When one first enters the exhibition one could be forgiven for thinking you were in a gallery at the British Muse... [more]
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Possible Futures, Probable Pasts
by Mike Tuck
Francis Alÿs, Francis Bacon, Christian Boltanski, ISOKON / Marcel Breuer, Matthew Buckingham, Harry Burton, Tony Carter, William Morris / Liberty & Co., Keith Coventry, Andrea Fisher, Stefan Gec, Ernö Goldfinger, Graham Gussin, Susan Hiller, Douglas Huebler, Des Hughes, Patrick Keiller, Hilma af Klint, David Lamelas, Sean Lynch, Mary Martin, Jeremy Millar, Jacques Monory, Henry Moore, Mike Nelson, John Riddy, Michael Stevenson, Katja Strunz, Paul Thek, Francis Upritchard at Camden Arts Centre
December 16th, 2010 - February 20th, 2011
Posted
12/20/10
The works on show at the Camden Arts Centre are the latest in their series of artist-selected shows at the North London gallery. Somewhere between a curatorial exercise and art-by-proxy, these shows have revealed both the personal and vicarious aspects of artist curation/selection. The work selected by Simon Starling comprises works by 30 artists and designers, revisiting the history of the Camden Art Centres programmes over the last 50 years. By-and-large the works occupy the positio... [more]
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Lamentations
by Mike Tuck
Rachel Kneebone at White Cube, Hoxton Square
November 19th, 2010 - January 22nd, 2011
Posted
12/20/10
White Cube presents a selection of Rachel Kneebone’s new works as a play in two acts: Lamentations, a group of plinth based works on the ground floor, counter positioned against Shields in the first floor gallery. In both parts Kneebone has continued her reworking fragments of human anatomy into compositions in porcelain.
Reminiscent of the contortions present in a Hieronymus Bosch painting or a Goya etching the imagery is curiously more uneasy than horrifying. The shock of seeing mu... [more]
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Between Authority and Victimhood
by Mike Tuck
at FUEL Design & Publishing
October 29th, 2010 - November 28th, 2010
Posted
11/21/10
The extensive lexicon of drawings on display at 4 Wilkes street represent the life’s work of the late Danzig Baldaev. The son of an ethnographer, Baldaev was encouraged by his father that if someone didn’t capture the folklore of Russian criminal life then the understanding of this art would go with the prisoners to the grave. The result is an extensive and lexicographic hand drawn document which rigorously records the history of the prison tattoo. Alongside the simple pen drawings... [more]
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The Museum of Everything
by Mike Tuck
Sir Peter Blake at The Museum of Everything
October 13th, 2010 - December 25th, 2010
Posted
11/21/10
The Museum of Everything’s third exhibition plays host to the collected paraphernalia and curatorial musings of the godfather of British art, Sir Peter Blake. Long before Pop art was about shopping and commercialism, it was about collecting and curiosity born out of the development of mass spectacle in the 19th Century. Institutions such as the circus, music hall and private museums present a type of pre-history of this type of popular entertainment which provide a rich seam fo... [more]
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If It Ain’t Broke Why Fix It?
by Mike Tuck
at Frieze Art Fair
October 19th, 2010 - October 19th, 2010
Posted
10/20/10
The endless canyons of art that make up the annual Frieze art fair in Regents Park can be a baffling place to be. Like a cross between a museum and a retail shopping outlet, seldom is art devoured by so many visitors on such a large scale.
This year’s offerings have all the hallmarks of the big names and big expense which made Freize the pre-eiminent British art fair, but scratch the surface and there are indications of the recession at work. Many galleries have adopted the “if... [more]
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Genericity
by Mike Tuck
at The Crypt Gallery
September 16th, 2010 - September 19th, 2010
Posted
9/20/10
Like most Londoners I have long been acquainted with St Pancras Church. Its curious caryatids (carved stone ladies to you and me) are a familiar sight to anyone who regularly ventures along the Euston Road. What I am less familiar with is the crypt that lies beneath and the rolling programmes of exhibitions and events that take place there on a regular basis. As part of Artslant’s month-long focus on alternative spaces in the city I went to take a look at this most unique of galleries... [more]
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Testbed 1
by Mike Tuck
Michael Curran, Anthony Gross, Lucy Gunning, Lilli Hartmann, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Dafna Talmor, Joseph Walsh at Beaconsfield
September 18th, 2010 - October 17th, 2010
Posted
9/20/10
Over the summer Beaconsfield suspended its usual rolling programme and made itself available for a set of consecutive residencies. Renaming itself TestBed 1 for the occasion, the centre transformed its numerous galleries and spaces into a site for the production of 6 new digital screen-based commissions. Working within the limited means that TestBed offered, the organisers describe the scheme as a “curatorial mentoring scheme for emerging artists”, a choice of words which sounds... [more]
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The Chapman Brother's Children's Art Commission
by Mike Tuck
Jake and Dinos Chapman at Whitechapel Gallery
August 7th, 2010 - October 31st, 2010
Posted
8/15/10
Who better to take on the Whitechapel Children’s Commission than the “brothers Grimm” of contemporary art Jake and Dinos Chapman? As every young child knows, there is nothing better than a truly grim and gory tale, and nothing more delightful than the macabre. Thankfully for them there is little more disturbing in the art world than the visions conjured up by these former YBAs.
Drawing on their forthcoming book Bedtime Tales for Sleepless Nights the commission includes original etchings of moder... [more]
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Alex Katz Retrospective
by Mike Tuck
Alex Katz at National Portrait Gallery
May 15th, 2010 - September 21st, 2010
Posted
8/15/10
Alex Katz has been the darling of the New York painting world since his work first emerged in the 1960s. His early, matter-of-fact, painting of American life captured the transient, floating scenes of East coast bohemian, creative and intellectual life; a project that Katz continues to this day. The National Portrait Gallery presents a small and intimate retrospective of Katz’s portrait work to date.
Upon entering the galleries one mingles with Katz’s three-dimensional work One Flight Up... [more]
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Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deceptions
by Mike Tuck
Francis Alÿs at Tate Modern
June 15th, 2010 - September 5th, 2010
Posted
6/27/10
Francis Alÿs’ works are like rumours. Few people have ever seen them first hand, not many people recall their exact details, but they persist in informing, antagonising and provoking us. The extensive show at the Tate Modern presents a body of work or “evidence” which unpacks Alÿs’ work over the last 20 years in a series of roughly chronological rooms. The curators have taken great pains to present the rooms as a series of didactic presentations. Somewhere between an exhibitio... [more]
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Jim Hodges: A Matter of Matter
by Mike Tuck
Jim Hodges at Camden Arts Centre
June 11th, 2010 - September 5th, 2010
Posted
6/27/10
It has been both a curse and a blessing for Jim Hodges that his work has almost always been discussed in relation to Andy Warhol. The parallels are clear and demonstrable but the relationship is one of influence rather than contemporaneousness. The show at the Camden Arts Centre breaks this mold and frames Hodges in relation to his late friend and contemporary, Felix Gonzalez Torres. Torres had shown in the same galleries at the Camden Arts Centre in 2000 and the installation of Hodge... [more]
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The Slant on Ged Quinn
by Mike Tuck
2010-06-16
London, June 2010: Known for paintings that "interweave contemporary themes and extravagant environments" (taken from http://www.gedquinn.info/index.htm), Ged Quinn presents a darkly romantic and visionary landscape that both disquiets and captivates the viewer. ArtSlant's writer, Mike Tuck, had the occasion to discuss Quinn's new body of work at the Wilkinson Gallery in London. The following comes from that discussion.
Ged Quinn, I Am a Dream of My Soul, 2010, Oil on canvas, 61.5x49.5 cm... [more]
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Springtime for Art Schools
by Mike Tuck
Posted
5/23/10
DEGREE SHOW SEASON
For most of the population the warming of the air and pollen in the breeze signals the coming of summer, but for London’s art students it means only one thing: degree shows. Sweaty palms and tired faces await the critical feedback of their peers as they display the accumulated production of their last year.
Although not many students each year end up selling their work to Saatchi or being signed by the Gagosian, there is a much more subtle, stable an... [more]
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Common Ground: Nairy Bagramian and Phyllida Barlow
by Mike Tuck
Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow at Serpentine Gallery
May 8th, 2010 - June 13th, 2010
Posted
5/23/10
The sculptors Nairy Bagramain and Phyllida Barlow have been brought together for a joint show at the Serpentine this season. The two sculptural positions explored in this pairing of work are not instantly graspable: the materiality of the pair is strikingly different from one another and the scale, delicacy and formal sensitivities are not instantly reconciled either. It is when one considers questions concerning context and spatial relations that a firm common (or uncommon... [more]
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Janice Kerbel – Art Now Space
by Mike Tuck
Janice Kerbel at Tate Britain
May 7th, 2010 - August 15th, 2010
Posted
5/23/10
For her show at Art Now, Janice Kerbel presents the full series of prints from the Remarkable series. The earlier pieces in the series were originally commissioned by Freize projects in 2007. The plain, simply set, monochrome appearance of the typographical prints belies the descriptions of fantastical acts and extraordinary human behavior which the phrases and language explore. Each work presents something akin to a circus, fairground, or freak show act, described in... [more]
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The Art of Kickass
by Mike Tuck
Posted
4/25/10
KICK ASS
Now playing in Theatres everywhere
Forget a day out at the Tate Modern and go and see Kickass. You will see more Hirsts, Warhols and Rothkos than you can shake a superhero at. Precisely what made the makers of Kick-ass – a beguiling film about a teenage would-be super hero who bites off more than he can chew – structure the final fight scene around a collection of some of the most valuable 20th century artworks known to man, is frankly beyond me. But they d... [more]
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From The Abject To The Sublime (And Back Again)
by Mike Tuck
Richard Billingham at Anthony Reynolds Gallery
April 8th, 2010 - May 22nd, 2010
Posted
4/25/10
Richard Billingham's touching and troubling photographs of his family were a runaway success as soon as they were exhibited in the mid-90s. They stood as a stark counterpoint to the glitzy, moneyed and London-centric world of Brit-art but also laid bare something about the complexities of Britishness expressed in “brit art”.
The (mostly) new works on show at Anthony Reynolds speak of a typical family life less bleak and perhaps less abject, but certainly no less be... [more]
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The Body Politic
by Mike Tuck
Lygia Clark, Disobedience, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, Sture Johannesson, Group Material, Ad Reinhardt at Raven Row
February 25th, 2010 - May 2nd, 2010
Posted
4/25/10
The show at Raven Row brings together a broad and nebulous collection of works to describe a largely invisible phenomenon – art’s relationship to politics. This is a show which requires effort to dissect, both conceptually and visually, but the effort does not go unrewarded. The curatorial voice at work is heavy with theory and occasionally the work borders on becoming merely “illustrations” of essentially intellectual or verbal argument (something which in... [more]
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Party--A Political Satire
by Mike Tuck
Posted
2/28/10
Party
by Tom Basden
Arts Theatre London, 1st-13th March
I was reminded recently by a friend that where the Americans produced West Wing, we produced Yes Minister and where the Americans have political sincerity, we have satire. As part of this proud tradition Tom Basden has recently brought his award-winning Edinburgh festival sell-out Party to the Arts Theatre, London. Featuring a cast of up-and-coming comic actors including the incomparable Tim Key (perhaps best known f... [more]
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The Man Who Would Be King
by Mike Tuck
John Stezaker at The Approach
January 29th, 2010 - March 7th, 2010
Posted
2/28/10
Sometimes repetition isn’t just repetition, it is the most emphatic form of insistence and John Stezaker has something very important to insist upon. His show at The Approach is the latest offering in a set of works which span over a quarter of a century. This body of collage works, which seem to have their roots in his “Masks” series, are superbly simple collages of postcards and found images which have an authority and quietness all of their own. One occasionally comes ac... [more]
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The Ancient Modernist
by Mike Tuck
Henry Moore at Tate Britain
February 24th, 2010 - August 8th, 2010
Posted
2/28/10
You know what a “Moore” looks like, I know what a Moore looks like and they are so ubiquitous that I wouldn’t be surprised if my cat knows what a Moore looks like. They occupy every courtyard, park, lobby and museum in the western world and are the very epitome of what it is to be “sculptural” and, unfortunately, what it is to be conservative in art. Yet for all that we are familiar with the works in question we often miss their point. The survey show at the Tate Britain gets b... [more]
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