A daring exhibition of Yayoi Kusama’s work at Victoria Miro Art Gallery.
installations
It’s testimony to the vibrant creativity and style of Sao Paulo that its international art festival – SP-Arte – can transform an object as potentially mundane and outdated as the tea trolley into a pinnacle of design.
Henry Moore enthusiasts could do worse on this rainy Easter Week than to head for Canary Wharf and see this exhibition, which tells the story of the creation of the Draped Seated Figure, now known as “Old Flo”, and her changing fortunes over the past fifty years.
A temporary installation in Bloomsbury Square is a powerful reminder of the work of exiled Russian poets in the last century
For an artist whose career is based on confronting the spaces we either ignore or deliberately avoid, the now-demolished BBC office that reputedly inspired Room 101 in George Orwell’s 1984 is perfect subject-matter.
Arp, The poetry of Forms is a major retrospective of an artist whose work seeks to captures abstract thought. This exhibition is contrasted by Tracey Emin’s My bed and her selection of Turner sea-scapes, that deal with a more visceral response to life.
Art is Comic, billed as a light-hearted response to terror, is the latest exhibition to embrace rough, industrial brickwork as the perfect backdrop for popular artists with hundreds of thousands of followers and an outwardly casual attitude towards failing politics and social injustice.
From stylised art nouveau temptresses to giant Tintin cartoons, Brussels has an established tradition of putting art on the outside of its buildings as well as inside. The capital’s newest gallery in a former brewery in Molenbeek – the neighbourhood notorious as a breeding ground of the Paris and Brussels terror attacks – captures that spirit.
Now fully restored, with its chequered Flemish floors, semi-circular gallery and portico inspired by a Roman triumphal arch, the Rubenshuis, Ruben’s home in Antwerp, is one of the most popular attractions in a vibrant city, just under an hour’s train journey from Brussels.
I first came across the work of Delhi born artist Dayanita Singh in an exhibition and book, Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a photo-essay about an aging eunuch transsexual (hijra) living in a graveyard in Old Delhi. In this extraordinary body of work – the book contains various different kinds of text alongside the photographs) – one sensed not only compassion, but a collaboration between the person in front of the camera, and the one looking through the lens.
It is always interesting to pinpoint the moment when one becomes conscious of a change of mood or orientation in contemporary artistic practices. Something has emerged that offers quite a different tonic. This ‘something’ might be termed ‘mindful matter’: it is materialism with a twist, or with a new twist.
Tokyo: a bridge between tradition and modernity, by Carla Scarano D’Antonio. Compared to Kyoto, Tokyo is bigger, busier and cosmopolitan. My friend Ornella and I had plenty of time by ourselves as my daughter was busy with her course at the Bunka Gakuen University where she is attending a Master in Fashion and Design.
By Carla Scarano • architecture, art, design, drawing, exhibitions, fashion, festivals, food, history, installations, painting, poetry, sculpture, society, travel, year 2019 • Tags: architecture, art, Carla Scarano, design, drawing, exhibitions, fashion, festivals, food, installations, painting, poetry, sculpture, society, travel