Between The Lines by British artist Ian Davenport currently on view at the Art Plural Gallery, is an exploration of the materiality of paint and the balance between chance and control where colours are submitted to a rigorous pouring system of densely packed vertical strips on canvases and aluminium panels. Davenport’s creative process thrives within the ambiguities of probability and chance: through the employment of[…..]
In The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss made a case for “the intrinsic value of a small-scale model” of art, legitimising the art of the miniature because it “compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions”. The miniature or the microcosmic representation is, as Lévi-Strauss rationalised, a schematic reduction permitting immediate intelligibility, because it essentially constitutes a bona fide experience[…..]
Gérard Rancinan’s thematic series of photographs – Metamorphoses, Hypotheses, Specimens, Wonderful World and Portraits – at the Opera Gallery Singapore are visually seductive and epically provocative representations of the contemporary issues that assail the twenty-first century. Exploring a complex web of interconnected issues – such as human rights, freedom, immigration, globalisation and capitalist culture – that would take more than bulletin news and politicians’s blustery[…..]
Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves is a nine-screen video installation interweaving three seemingly discrete narratives that explore the migratory journeys of people whose impetus for movement converges on the sole need to fulfil utopian desires for a better life. Set against the contrasting backgrounds of the blustery northwest coast of England, the rush hour in Shanghai and the misty bamboo forests and mountains of the[…..]
When Edward Kienholz died of a heart attack aged 65 in 1996, his burial arrangement could have been one of his own installations: his embalmed body was stuck into the front seat of an old brown Packard coupe; he drove off into the good night with a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, accompanied by the ashes of his dog in the[…..]
Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence. Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises[…..]
Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral. Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová[…..]
