TRACEY EMIN – I CRIED BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

Posted on 2016-03-21

Emin, who came to prominence as an artist in the 1990s, is internationally celebrated for her challenging, profound, and deeply poetic work across a wide range of media. A modern day ‘Expressionist’, Emin explores ideas of narrative disclosure, drawing on subjects that are intimately bound up with her own biography, recalling events, dreams or emotional states in works that are starkly honest and personal, yet familiar and universal.

For this major project, Emin has envisaged a continuous exhibition of painting, embroidery, and neon across two spaces that reflects the diversity of her practice. A narrative running through the exhibition focuses on a large stone located in an olive grove just outside Emin’s studio in the South of France. In a series of drawings Emin recollects a marriage ceremony that took place there last summer, where she wore a white shroud originally made to adorn her father’s body at his funeral. For Emin, her union with the stone–an immovable and solid form–becomes a metaphor for stability and enduring love. 


Opposite – I Love You, 2016

Exhibition runs through till May 21st, 2016

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

whitecube.com

  

THE DANCEHALL ART OF WILFRED LIMONIOUS

Posted on 2016-03-21

Wilfred Limonious (1949–99) was one of Jamaica’s most prolific graphic artists, producing a significant body of work for the island’s music industry as well as working as a cartoonist for the national newspapers. This exhibition celebrates a true Jamaican folk artist; a humble man who produced vibrant, hilarious and often outrageous art, but behind the pen was a quiet loner who simply loved to draw.

The show includes reproductions of work from three key phases in Limonious’ career: his newspaper comic strips, illustrations for the publications of the Jamaican Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) and his distinctive artwork for the burgeoning dancehall scene coming out of 1980s Jamaica.

Wilfred Limonious began his career producing comic strips for the Jamaican daily newspaper, The Star, with cartoon characters such as Amos and Chicken becoming particularly popular. During the 1970s he worked as in-house illustrator for Jamaica’s national literacy programme, JAMAL (Jamaican Movement for the Advancement of Literacy), before going on to produce a huge body of work for the Jamaican music industry, illustrating hundreds of LP jackets and record centres for labels such as Jammy’s, Power House, Studio One, Techniques, Ujama and Midnight Rock. Despite being widely recognised among reggae and dancehall circles, Limonious’ illustrations are relatively unknown in the wider art world.

Exhibition runs through till April 3rd, 2016

South London Gallery
65-67 Peckham Road
London
SE5 8UH

www.southlondongallery.org

  

JUSTINE FRISCHMANN

Posted on 2016-03-21

Frischmann straddles quite polarized worlds with the light she explores, having traversed the spotlight, the urban glare of media scrutiny, to the coastal light of the North Bay’s fog-mitigated ambience. Through the mix of oil paint, acrylic spray enamel, and repurposed photography, she balances urban and natural inferences, and captures an aura somewhere between limelight and inner light in the process.

Frischmann juxtaposes gesture and architecture, mass tone and translucence, improvisation and a considered physicality, all in the service of an art of threshold states. Rather than simply stacking the three media she employs, she shuffles them, with the fluorescent spray enamel acting as an arbitrator between the origami folds of her photo-based imagery and a fatty layer of high-valued oil paint. In the energy and immediacy of her gesture she achieves visual equivalencies for the punk ethic of London of the ‘90s, but she captures more than a simple equivalent of the tropes of an alternative social scene. The deep memory of painting as a medium pushes her work past fashion into the realm of what is perennial in the human condition, and mirror such basic building blocks as vulnerability and adaptation, loss and recovery, growth and discovery.

Opposite – Lambent #84 (cat. no. JUF021) 2016

Exhibition runs through till May 28th, 2016

George Lawson Gallery
315 Potrero Avenue (at 16th St.)
San Francisco
CA 94103

georgelawsongallery.com

  

STERLING RUBY – WORK WEAR

Posted on 2016-03-14

WORK WEAR: Garment and Textile Archive 2008-2016 will present for the very first time an eight year survey of the clothing and textile production made by Sterling Ruby.

The garments in the exhibition – coats, ponchos, bags, shirts, and pants – replay, recycle, and echo the remnants of fabrics used to create the artist’s quilts, collages, textiles and sculptures. A sense of recycling and breaking down utilitarian versus aesthetic hierarchies has evolved in the artist’s studio. Collages become quilts, quilts become soft sculptures, and sculptures become clothes. The Bauhaus movement, with its challenge to the design versus high art dichotomy, is an ever present touchstone for the artist and his seemingly inexhaustible forays into craft and design.

Exhibition runs through till April 9th, 2016

Sprüth Magers London
7A Grafton Street
London
W1S 4EJ

www.alminerech.com

  

BRIAN CALVIN – HOURS

Posted on 2016-03-14

“The vice called surrealism is the immoderate and passionate use of the drug which is the image.” (Louis Aragon)



Imagine an exhibition with paintings of Brian Calvin in Paris and during the opening one would follow bits of conversations between guests coming from different worlds. Philip Guston for instance, would explain to Louis Aragon how we inherited ‘back in the future’ the myth of abstract art: “There is something ridiculous and miserly in the fact that painting is autonomous, pure and for itself. Painting is ‘impure’. It is the adjustment of ‘impurities’ which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.” Aragon would agree with the last words, smile and walk further. A number of small paintings with lips, entitled Mouthfeel, caught his eye.

Opposite – Elsewhere, 2015

Exhibition runs through till April 12th, 2016

Almine Rech Gallery
64 Rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
France

www.alminerech.com

  

ALAN KITCHING – A LIFE IN LETTERPRESS

Posted on 2016-03-14

This long-awaited monograph documents the work of world-renowned typographer, designer and letterpress practitioner Alan Kitching.

Spanning over fifty years, this lavish volume leads us from Kitching’s first typographical experiments under the auspices of mentor Anthony Froshaug to his most iconic creations at The Typography Workshop. It covers his years designing alongside Derek Birdsall, as well as his time teaching letterpress at the Royal College of Art, and showcases his most colourful and expressive pieces, including his prolific work for The Guardian. Kitching’s work hangs in private collections and galleries but it has also featured on everything from magazine and book covers, postage stamps and theatre posters, to wine labels, billboards and signage.

Alan Kitching A Life in Letterpress will be published in three editions. The Collector’s Edition, is a limited edition, including a hand printed letterpress signed print, numbered and wrapped round the book to form the jacket. Only 200 limited editions of the Collector’s Edition will be printed, priced at £200. The second edition will be the Special Edition with a 3-piece binding, priced at £75. Both the Collector’s Edition and the Special Edition will be released on 7th April.

www.laurenceking.com