Joe Watling & Roswitha Weingrill: In view of…
In the stripped basement of a Knightsbridge house the Austrian Cultural Forum presents its Visual Arts Platform. ‘In View Of…’ is the second exhibition of a juxtaposition project. Curated by Eva Martischnig and Adriana Marques the scheme has a clear concept; two emerging artists; one working in Austria and one in England are asked to [...]
Rebecca Salter: Drawn
Hidden by its shop front exterior Beardsmore Gallery in north London is a new collection of works by English artist Rebecca Salter. Consisting mostly of drawings and including some sculptural experiments Salter’s work places emphasis on surfaces and mark making instead of traditional notions of perspective, maintaining that ‘Space is defined and separated by colour [...]
Fred Sandback at Whitechapel Gallery
‘I’d rather be in the middle of a situation than over on one side either looking in or looking out,’ reflects Sandback on his neglect of surface and solid forms in favour of minimalist lines. This idea could not be truer of the work recreated within the Victorian architecture of the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery. [...]
Walking Men
‘The pedestrian symbol was never intended to be painted,’ says Stephen Wragg, ‘it appeared on the road by mistake’. Over the last seven years, he has been photographing the walking men painted on our paths. The preoccupation began when Wragg was commissioned by Hertfordshire Highways to design a map for the growing number of cycle [...]
Maid of Bond Street
A sequence of 25 brass studs set in a polished concrete floor – metal casts of lipsticks, fake eyelashes and even a credit card seem arbitrary at first but they tell a tale of decadent luxury. Worldly Cares and Love Affairs is the brainchild of British conceptual artist Jonathan Ellery and directly inspired by David [...]
Inhabitable Sculpture
Inhabitable Sculpture, a walk-in architectural installation on show in Lisbon’s Architecture Triennale, is a radical rethink of the form of the future house. But its origins come from May 1968, when designer Miguel Arruda, freshly graduated from Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts, held his first sculptural exhibition. His curved volumes, echoing Henry Moore, included one [...]
Movement and Behaviour
The Hayward Gallery in London is developing a strong tradition of constructing immersive environments that explore the relationship between art and other creative disciplines. Psycho Buildings in 2008 and the more recent exhibition of Ernesto Neto with The New Décor in particular examined art’s acquaintance with architecture. The new show, Move: Choreographing You, tells the [...]
Between Earth and Sky
The ancient Viking capital of Norway, Trondheim, is big on public art. City authorities have allocated a generous 1.25 per cent of their capital budget to it and 72 artworks, mainly by Norwegians, have been installed in the city’s public spaces and buildings since 2003. Killi Olsen’s Salamandernatten, a disturbing gauntlet of 72 looming, naked, [...]
From Drawing to Sculpture
Rachel Whiteread states in a video that plays on a loop in the Tate Britain café that she ‘has wanted to do a drawing show for ages’. Eighty of her drawings comprise this exhibition and it is a rare opportunity to see the process behind her work. The exhibition also includes models of some her [...]
Architecture of Almost Nothing
In the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, at the Venice Biennale, Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) unveiled its plans to develop the Libyan Sahara for tourism. The project, titled Almost Nothing, showed that Koolhaas has not been commissioned to build a thing: ‘It’s preservation,’ he explains, if one begins to imagine mechanized buildings [...]
Building Site Specific Art
‘Absurd’ reads the foot-high spray-painted letters emblazoned across the side of the grey transit van sitting on a dusty building site behind King’s Cross station in central-north London. ‘It wasn’t me,’ insists its owner. The slogan, he says, is a surreal scar from his days in Hackney. Even so, it seems appropriate that this should [...]
What is to be done?
‘We’re tired of old junk! Build us a skyscraper!’ They could almost be the words of Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, who repudiated ancient Venice in his Futurist appeal from the Piazza San Marco in 1910. In fact, they are sung a century later by three slightly silly young ladies in The Tower: A Songspiel, a film [...]
Traditional Arts and Digital Crafts
This year’s LDF programme has just got underway with a exciting programme of events that is mirroring the geographical extent of the city. For the second year, the main hub to the festival will be hosted at the V&A. This year, the museum is contributing with 11 design cutting edge projects, some of which celebrate [...]
The Solo by Andrew Cross
‘The Solo’, is the latest film by artist Andrew Cross to celebrate the subject without resorting to seemingly literal visual metaphors. In much of Cross’s work the subject is omni-present by it’s absence, it’s deliberate omission literally burns the retina. In Cross’s own words, ‘if people are looking at something over here, then I choose [...]
Kings Cross Stories
Artist and photographer Minnie Weisz’ most recent exhibition explores London’s Kings Cross, in collaboration with costume and set designer Caroline Collinge. The show is at Minnie Weisz’ studio, which is situated under a Victorian Arch on Pancras Road.
The work focuses on the architecture of Kings Cross, photographing the abandoned and derelict remains of Victorian buildings [...]
Eileen Gray’s Haunted House
Is there anybody there, asks a traveller, passing through the E.1027 door… The odd name belongs to a key Modernist house at Cap Martin, France, designed by Eileen Gray, and the traveller is the Canadian artist Paulette Phillips. In her current show Shaky Legs at Danielle Arnaud’s gallery, she explores not just the house, but a [...]
Museum of Innocence
When I heard that the novel The Museum of Innocence had spawned a real museum, opening in Istanbul later this year to coincide with the city’s Capital of Culture celebrations, I was disappointed. I pictured an intellectual theme park to which fans of Orhan Pamuk’s novels, now translated into more than 50 languages, would make [...]
Kinetic Art of the Future
Like Time Lords, the boffins have regenerated… and this time, they’re artists! That’s one conclusion to draw from the Kinetica Art Fair , (4 – 7 February), dedicated to kinetic, cybernetic, electronic and light art in the P3 Gallery situated deep in the concrete underbelly of the University of Westminster campus in London. The first [...]
Ghostvillage
In the January issue of Blueprint, we included graffiti artist collective Agents of Change in our list of 25 who will change architecture and design in 2010. For its Ghostvillage project in October 2009, the group created paintings on the walls throughout the abandoned village of Polphail in south-west Scotland. The project was carried out [...]
Search for a Condemned Building
Following on from the success of Seizure, Roger Hiorn’s Turner Prize nominated blue crystal cave in a one-bedroom council flat in Elephant & Castle, London-based arts producer Artangel is searching for a very particular type of building for its next project with an internationally acclaimed British artist.
The building Artangel needs is ideally a large – [...]
