Old Persons Home

On summer visit to the Saatchi gallery, I experienced a peculiar installation within the gallery basement. 

Named 'Old Persons Home' by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, was a room full of old men in motorised wheelchairs. They looked sad, drained as if hanging on to every ounce of life dressed in greatcoats and military uniforms. One held a pair of scissors, another a can of beer.  The models were so lifelike I first thought they had to be actors. The physical detail and human resemblance was very uncanny. As I watched these remote controlled wheelchairs would come to life now and again, sometimes bumping into each other. 

Eerily amazing. 

Telling Tales: V&A

During my summer hols, I made my way to South Kensington for 

a stroll around the V&A. I had heard about this new exhibition:

Telling Tales and thought it looked interesting. 

Telling Tales explores fantasy and fear in contemporary design.

Each display showcases furniture, lighting and ceramics through

storytelling. Overall the exhibition was cosy and compact, consisting 

of three 'rooms': the forest glade, the enchanted castle and heaven/hell.Telling Tales allows reference to an inner child with a belief in make believe and fairy tales.

It was just intriguing to see this approach applied to a designers'

thinking.

Walking Through My Mind: Hayward Gallery

Yayoi Kusama

Is an expedition into the mysterious mental processes of creativity. The journey sees ten contemporary artists investigate the nature of ways of thinking and perception through drawing, video or sculpture. Each environment created can be explored by walking through the artists' mind. 

Thomas Hirschhorn

Chihara Shiota

I liked:

'My Drawing Room" by Yoshimoto Nara

Is part Wendy house, part shack, a recreation of Nara's student room which houses everything needed for a solitary life as an artist. This consists of doodles, drawings and sculptures. Apparently Nara spent many hours drawing alone, with quite an isolated childhood. But he was happy. His inspirations lie with Japanese anime, western pop culture and punk music. 

Overall I really found the exhibition intriguing, how the brain is pictured through dreams and hallucinations. Particularly the idea of a fabricated imagination, memory and childhood. 

Super Contempory: Design Museum

An exhibition celebrating a London!

"London is where the rest of the world looks to check the pulse of contemporary design. Many of the world's most exciting talents are based here. It has become a place to look for fresh thinking in fashion, architecture, communication and product design, as well as newly emerging ideas on installation and interaction. Companies seeking creative talent look to London for design graduates. What has turned London into this hotbed" (Design Museum)

Super Contemporary interprets London's creative diversity through timelines, maps and design commissions. The collaboration with Beefeater Gin (London born and bred) allowed the design museum to explore just what has made design in London special. 

I liked: 

London Rubbish Bin, Paul Smith 

placed in Covent Garden and Holland Park

Being a born and bred Londoner I felt privileged to understand that this was home to such creative greatness.

Jeff Koons: Serpentine Gallery

The Pop eye Series!

On a recent visit to the Serpentine Gallery, I experienced the showcasing of the celebrated American artist Jeff Koons, his first major exhibition in a public gallery in the UK.

I was particularly interested in how Koons explored notions of consumerism in the early 1980s that draw on a variety of objects and images from American and consumer culture.

This exhibition presents paintings and sculptures from his Popeye series, which he began in 2002.

I like how Koons's incorporates surreal elements into everyday objects, it seems to be one of this signature marks. The trip to the somewhat tiny Serpentine Gallery allowed me to understand Koons's thinking, from inflatable toy sculptures, juxtaposing the everyday and the use of complex and layered compositions.

Poetry and Dream: Tate Modern

I've been to the Tate on a number of occasions but on my last visit I was really fascinated with the display surrounding Poetry and Dream.

With  an interest in surrealism so this part of the exhibition was really insightful.

"The displays in Poetry and Dream show how contemporary art grows from, reconnects with, and can provide fresh insights into the art of the past. The large room at the heart of the wing is devoted to Surrealism, while the surrounding displays look at other artists who, in different ways, have responded to or diverged from Surrealism, or explored related themes such as the world of dreams, the unconscious and archetypal myth. These displays also show how characteristically Surrealist techniques such as free association, the use of chance, biomorphic form and bizarre symbolism have been reinvigorated in new contexts and through new media, often at far remove from the intentions of their pioneers." (Tate Modern)

Endless Forms: Fitz Cambridge

I saw a poster ad for this exhibition whilst on the train to Cambridge. Once there, I made a trip to the Fitzwilliam Museum to check out everything Charles Darwin. The exhibition named 'Endless Forms' interprets the previously unexplored relationship between Darwin's revolutionary theories and late 19th century art. 

One aspect of the display was the expression of the emotions in man and animals. Within this, one featured sculpture in particular that caught my eye was Degas's 'Little Dancer'. Apparently this bronze execution relates to Darwin's theories of man's animal ancestry and it was suggested that Degas even explored the darker side of evolution. 

Overall it was intriguing to see the juxtaposition between art and natural science, and most interestingly the links between the two. 

Classified: Tate Britain

"There is something at once uplifting and terrifying about the idea that  nothing in the world is so unique it cant be entered on a list"  (Georges Perec 1936-1982)

On a recent visit to the Tate Britain, I had a chance to explore one of their contemporary exhibitions entitled: Classified. The idea surrounding the exhibition looks at how we interpret and view things in our everyday lives. 

Some of my favourite pieces were:

'The Great Bear' Simon Patterson, 1992

"I like disrupting something people take as read'' (Patterson)

Adapting the official map of the London Underground, Patterson has replaced the names of stations with philosophers, actors, politicians and other celebrated figures. The title The Great Bear refers to the constellation Ursa Major, a punning reference to Patterson''s own arrangement of ''stars''. Patterson alters our belief that maps and diagrams provide a reliable source of information.

'The Pharmacy' Damien Hirst, 1992

A room-sized installation representing a real pharmacy with cabinets containing bottles and packages of presciption drugs. On the counter are four apothecary bottles, which represent the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Here Hirst attempts to link methods of ordering medicine with the display of art. He also has an interest in how minimal, colourful and clean package design can be untainted by commercial branding to convey confidence.

'Chapman Family Collection' Jake and Dino Chapman, 2002

The installation features 34 wooden carvings, all with references to the McDonalds restaurant chain. At first glance the display 

I really like how the collection aims to alter or twist our interpretation of the norm through art. It was really engaging in terms of an exhibition as there were some displays that were hard to understand, unless analysed very closely. Full of perception, 'Classified' almost creates an illusion of what we view as the real world. 

"How we see the world is how we understand it. Things are seen in relationship to other things and actions. Connections are made, naming takes place and meaning is formulated. We all engage with the world around us in diverse ways, both actively and passively. The meanings and names given to things are not fixed, but instead fluid. We classify and catalogue but over time these categories and attendant meanings change, as does the importance they hold for us. The medieval world view, or cosmology, bears little relationship to the way we understand our place in the world today. The works in this exhibition are drawn from Tate Collection. They adopt various forms, suggest diverse types of interpretation and provide a means of suggesting how the different types and arrangements of material culture inform our daily life. The exhibition also makes explicit the museum's role in collecting, classifying and displaying objects. It reveals how the arrangements of objects feed into museum systems of classification and interpretation bringing a sort of order to the world." (Tate Britain)

BP Portrait Award 2009

On a recent trip to the National Portrait Gallery I was able to admire the entries selected for the most prestigious portrait competition in the world. In this year's exhibition, 56 selected portraits were in for the chance of winning £25,000 as well as a launch pad into a potential career. I really liked the intimate and personal elements to those pieces surrounding family and friends.

First prize went to Changeling 2 by Peter Monkman, and even thought this is an amazing piece any of the other portraits were worthy so it must of been a tough decision. Perhaps it was the thinking behind this piece, that gave him the deciding vote. It's  part of a series of portraits of his daughter exploring the concept of the changeling, a child substituted for another by stealth, often with an elf. 

‘I challenge the fixed notion of an idealised image of childhood and substitute it for a more unsettling, complex, representation that exists in its own right as a painting.’ 

The initial ideas for this portrait came from photographic studies of his daughter playing in woods in Brittany where the light had a magical quality.

Second and third prizes went to Michael Gaskell for 'Tom' and Annalisa Avancini for 'Manuel.' The exhibition not only showcases the talent in portrait painting today but also captures the variety of styles and approaches that this entails. My favourite was 'Harry Patch' by Dan Llywelyn.