ELMGREEN & DRAGSET – CHANGING SUBJECTS

Posted on 2016-11-21

Changing Subjects investigates the multiple meanings of the word “subject” as a noun. In grammatical terms, the subject can be a noun functioning as one of the main components of a clause, making it the element about which the rest of the clause is predicated. In turn, the predicate is the part of a sentence or clause that expresses what is said of the subject on its own. In the context of this exhibition, the subject of each work exists independently of the others, yet when viewed together, they shift positions, creating a complex interconnection between the autonomous works.

The works in the exhibition, ranging in date of creation from 1998 to 2016, collectively guide visitors on a non-linear journey through various life stages. However, the sculptures and installations do not mark momentous occasions; on the contrary, they show introspective, unspectacular moments, by way of a figurative representation, by the use of a minimalist symbolic language, or by employing the actual materials to which they refer. Even when a lifelike human form is not shown, presence is implied through absence. The repeated use of an antiseptic material like stainless steel underscores a sense of a clinical study and evokes solitary feelings of abandonment.

Opposite – Untitled, 2011

Exhibition runs through to December 17th, 2016

The FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor
New York
NY 10001

flagartfoundation.org

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RACHEL MACLEAN – WOT U :-) ABOUT ?

Posted on 2016-11-21

Rachel Maclean is a Glasgow-based multi-media artist who creates artificial visions using green-screen technology. Within her fantastical settings Maclean parodies fairy tales, children’s television programmes, beauty product advertising, internet videos, and pop culture playing all the extravagantly costumed characters herself. At once seductive and nightmarish, glossy and grotesque, her films destabilise power dynamics and consumer desires.

Opposite – We Want Data!, 2016

Exhibition runs through to April 2nd, 2017

Tate Britain
Millbank
London
SW1P 4RG

tate-britain

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GAVIN TURK – WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE HOW & WHY

Posted on 2016-11-21

This survey – the first major UK exhibition of the artist’s work to be presented since 2002 – features the iconic Cave, a commemorative blue plaque installation Turk exhibited in his 1991 Royal College of Art degree show. A series of ‘Signature’ works, in which Turk uses his own name as a form of ready-made in order to examine ideas surrounding origin and authenticity, are also included. The signature of the artist, traditionally the valued hallmark of authority and provenance, recurs throughout ‘Who What When Where How and Why’, emerging from the canvases of Turk’s Pollock paintings; the abstract expressionist artist’s paint splatters exchanged for innumerable ‘Gavin Turk’ signatures.

Turk’s deployment of his own image is similarly central to his oeuvre. Identity Crisis (1994), first shown in the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Young British Artist’ exhibition in 1995, imagines a Hello!magazine cover featuring the artist with his family. Pop (1993), meanwhile,sees a life-sized waxwork of Turk inhabiting the pose of Warhol’s Elvis in the guise of English punk musician Sid Vicious. This complex study of celebrity icons and the commodification of culture was included in the Royal Academy’s seminal ‘Sensation’ show in 1997.

Layers of art historical allusion and ‘recycled’ references inform Turk’s work elsewhere, as in his interpretations of Warhol’s ‘Elvis’ and ‘Disaster’print series, and with Pipe (1991), a liquorice version of the traditionally-male smoking instrument – cast in bronze – that plays on Magritte’s famous The Treachery of Images (1929), whilst simultaneously referencing van Gogh. Influenced by artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, Turk’s skillful manipulation of materials is evident throughout the show, for example in his exquisitely-cast bronze rubbish bags, and with the major sculptural work Ariadne (2006–2014). This large-scale bronze playfully casts the classical female figure, reimagined in Giorgio de Chirico’s surreal paintings, as if she is made of crudely carved polystyrene, further debunking the fetishized art historical form.

Opposite – Pop, 1993

Exhibition runs through to March 19th, 2017

Newport Street Gallery
Newport Street
London
SE11 6AJ

www.newportstreetgallery.com

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