CPS FRIEZE Art fair visit Oct 2013

My visit to Frieze was such an eye opener as to whats going on in the art world today. 

The place was simply amazing!

Art from all corners of the world was on display and I was really impressed by how much had already been sold and at BIG prices too.

I was absolutely blown away by some of the pieces.

This painting is by David Renggli, a swiss artist represented by the Peter Kilchman Galerie in Germany. It was by far my favourite in the whole show and i'd have taken it home if I had a spare 35000 Euro's. 

It was made by smearing thick printing ink onto the back of the clear panel then mounted an inch away from a steel sheet which gave it even more depth through the reflections on the glass and the reflections on the steel. It measured an impressive 8ftx5ft and was already sold. 

Wandering through the little gallery areas I tried to digest as much as possible in the 3 hours I had and each wall had something to impress.

This stunning view was actually charcoal on paper but was easily mistaken by a lot of people as a photograph. The depth and detail on the surface of the paper was just brilliant. Robert Longo was the artist and the piece was sold at a price of around 175000 Euro's. 

These 2 drawings also became my instant favourites. They were almost landscapes but in a very abstract way and were quite minimal in detail but there was a real sense of feeling in them both. Yehudit Sasportas, born in Israel, is based in Berlin and Tel Aviv and she creates these pieces using ink and paint and has just had a major exhibition in at the Ayal Zacks Abramov pavillion for art in Israel. 

Anne-Mie Vann Kerckhoven's digital photo prints onto PVC were gorgeous to look at and had so much going on in them with a female form being present in them all. Her works were already sold also. 

One of the highlights was without doubt the display of Jeff Koons pieces. I still found it hard to believe, along with everyone else at the show, that they were steel and not inflatable or squashy to touch but the heavy weight 'art guards' made sure I didn't get the opportunity to find out. It was great watching them fight off the gangs of small children climbing onto the platform and trying to grab the sculptures. 

I'd recommend the Frieze fair to anyone, artist or not, to sample not only the art on display but also the artworld and the people involved who are such an interesting range of characters. 

David Shrigley, 2013 Turner prize nominee. CPS Oct 2013.

45 year old David Shrigley is one of this years Turner prize nominees for his exhibition 'Brain Activity' at the Hayward gallery in London.

Looking at Shrigley's work it soon becomes clear that his passion is producing cartoons through a range of mediums including paintings drawings, sculpture, text, photography and animation. his deliberately badly drawn images play with the everyday and the obvious and present them to us in their simplest form, each laced with comedy subtitles or darker, sinister undertones. 

There's no doubt these images are entertaining to look at and a lot really make you laugh out loud but this can be said of thousands of comic strips in magazines and papers which begs the question:

Is this worthy of a Turner prize nomination?

I'm sure Shrigley would argue the fact that he is a trained artist and this in itself makes his work art, but scribbled stick men and witty text will not please everyone and Shrigley's work is far from unique. 

Shrigley's photographs are produced in the same simplistic, non-technical form as his drawings. 

'Severed Hand', a snapshot of a hand chopped at the wrist and laying on the floor seems pretty boring until you notice the two eyes stuck above the thumb making a small face. Suddenly the image becomes fun, but is it art? Does the image warrant a space on the gallery wall as part of a major show? 

In Shrigley's world it does and in one interview when asked how he would explain his work to someone who didn't understand it he simply stated "I wouldn't".

His exhibitions always pull a crowd and his work sells and is often featured in magazines & newspapers and he classes himself as a fine artist, making a living from his work. 

Shrigley's combination of image, text, visual jokes and animations are simple to look at and digest. He comes across as a sort of monty python/stand up comedian of the art world but from his comments you get the feeling he's not annoyed by not being taken too seriously. "I feel I'm taken far more serious than I should be anyway" he says in his Time out interview "my work is filed in the humour section of bookshops but also in the fine art section so i've got my feet in both camps. I'm very lucky".

Leaving art school with a very poor mark Shrigley says it was all due to his tutors not understanding what he was trying to do "I just don't think they knew anything about art!"he says " I think they thought I was doing something inappropriate". 

Regardless of this he went on to have work regularly featured in the Guardian, Harpers and Queen, Independant on Sunday and has made music videos for bands such as Blur. He has established himself as a working artist and someone to be watched in the future. Not bad for someone who almost failed art school.

David Shrigley makes us ask the all important question 'Do we like his work or not, Is it really art?' 

Personally I like it all, but I'm not sure whether its due to the comedy value or the artistic value?

Either way I think he's guaranteed himself a future in the art world. 

CPS Oct 2013 What is art?

What Is Art?

Art to me is a feeling, a situation, a thought, a time, a concept, an endless possibility but ultimately some sort of creation.

The creation can be minimal or huge, it doesn't matter.

What matters is the idea and how we express it. 

                                    Painting by josef Albers. 

As artists we should take what we see, be that visually or in our heads, and turn it into an experience.

The experience can be anything from a visual mark on a surface, a noise, a movement, an empty space, an occurrence, a period of time etc. 

The experience will hopefully convey a feeling to the viewer or produce a thought or an argument.

Art is ideas, freedom to produce works, development and growth. 

art is not rules, boundaries or endings.

Damien Hirst

Some will call it amazing, others will call it the biggest pile of crap ever, but...

Jonjo Elliott.

WE, as individuals should have the final decision as to WHAT IS ART.

Two Queens private view Oct 2013

       

Friday night was the private view of the Two Queens 'Sculpturing' exhibition in Leicester.

Work from 5 artists was scattered around the gallery in a seemingly random way with no title plaques or explanation of what the theme was.

Sometimes this is a good way to look at art, Giving your own idea as to what it all means.

The pieces were on the floor or wall mounted and i particularly liked the piece below which seemed to be a reverse painting? It looked like the paint had escaped from the frame and was spreading across the wall and expanding beyond the artists control. 

The idea that each object was 'discreet' definitely ran through this exhibition and i did find myself asking the question "Is this a piece of the show" a couple of times when viewing structures that seemed like they'd been delivered to the wrong gallery. 

All in all though I did enjoy the night and was pleased to see artists in the area making the effort to get their work into exhibition spaces in Leicester. 

Lens based project. Time. Oct 2013.

'Expressing time through photography'
Lens based project 1...
The idea of using an image to express time gave me a lot of options. I started with a set of images recording the death and rebirth of the old ceramics building on campus. The place is full of history and the lighting in there is excellent. I had 30 minutes and took about 100 shots before the place was locked up for the demolition team to take over.

All through the building are little reminders of what happened in there. Small pieces of work left there forever to be discarded when the builders start the demolition work. A layer of thin dust covers everything, built up over years of student ideas and projects. 

I think the next step for these images would have been to get the staff in there and shoot moody, lowlight portraits of them in the areas they worked in, but I think its too late now. They stand as a photographic document of a building and work space, once used to build peoples futures but now gone forever. 

The idea of freezing something in time before its gone lead me onto the next set of images. I wanted to record the fletcher building before they start ripping it to pieces and decided on a project called 'Of and from', the idea being I take images of the building and from the building. The Fletcher building is such a powerful imposing structure and I tried to capture this in each image along with details from the body of the building.

Exterior images frozen in time...

The idea was to collect a portrait of the building that works as a record of how it looks now, before it gets rebuilt.

I'm really pleased with how this project is going but really wanted to start on something more creative with the time idea. I decided to try and make a video based on a newspaper article about a man with mental health issues and the way he deals with it. He's really trying to get his life back but hears voices, noises, gets confused easily and has to deal with all these different issues on a daily basis. My idea was to use 10 second exposures in a darkened room with the only light being my mobile phone and a small green light above my head and make abstract images. As I moved around the area the light would trail through the image and create the spooky, alien-like feelings echoing the man mixed up, scary feelings and thoughts. I intend to use imported sounds which relate to what he said in a messed up, confused way and some text will be over-layed to add some narrative and cement some ideas into the viewers mind. Each image needed to capture something unique so they could stand alone as well as being used in a series. 

I really like the spooky feel of them and the colours have turned out amazing. I resisted using photoshop as I think it might give them an over finished look. 

I also think they would work well as a long print, tied together through photoshop and printed on a high gloss paper. the finished print could be straight or jagged, maybe breaking off into different directions and around corners giving an idea of the life the man leads.