Tag: London

Museum Exhibitions

Tracey Emin, triumphant survivor

Contributed by David Carrier / Now and again, I have second thoughts about my initial strong response in an art exhibition. That was the case, in a way that deserves discussion, with “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” at the Tate Modern. In Britain, Emin is an art star. Before I went to this full-scale retrospective, I knew about her two seminal works – My Bed, her famously motley and putatively sordid installation, as well as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, the tent incorporating the names of those thus described. With a life as eventful and stressed as Van Gogh’s, she has become a feminist hero. The subtitle of this show, “A Second Life,” alludes to her survival of devastating cancer surgery. In the wake of her friend David Hockney’s death, some are calling her the greatest living English painter. 

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Out of Town Solo Shows

Jihoon Cho: State and shadow

Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / Jihoon Cho, a South Korean-born artist-in-residence at WIP Space in Wandsworth, London, recently unveiled his latest spatial poem “Open Canopy” in the studio building’s gallery. It is above all an exhilarating environment. The four constituent works fall somewhere between Minimalist sculpture and architectural artifice, suggesting Cho’s preoccupation with his own rootlessness as an artist experiencing the unstable liminality of the immigration process.

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Group Shows

“Sonorous” in Hackney: Stairway to heaven?

Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / St. Augustine’s Tower, Hackney’s oldest building, is a late-medieval stone structure once connected to a long demolished church. At times used as a mortuary and tool shed, it’s now a museum, open once a month in this recently gentrified corner of East London. Inside the Tower are four floors for immersive art, connected by an agonizingly narrow set of stairs. Earlier this month, this improbable venue presented the group exhibition “Sonorous,” which concerned vibration as a means of communication. And it worked. The weathered crypts and headstones at the base of the tower echoed a somber song that the sound of the Tower bell magnified, rustling the cobwebs that rested in its eaves. 

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Hacked

I need a Gabo

In Flash Art online, Patricia Ellis recounts her visit with Gabo in his East London studio. “Though you�d never guess it from his demeanor, the […]

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