Shopping with the Tate

The Frieze art fair is London’s annual jamboree of buying and selling contemporary art – a spectacularly successful melding together of culture and commerce. Last year, £33m changed hands at a fair that four years ago did not exist. Even that dizzying figure will probably be surpassed over the next few days as the wealthy and the wacky are brought together for their yearly romp on the fringes of Regent’s Park.

The fair opened to the public on Thursday but certain collectors were allowed in a day early to get first pickings. Of course, there is early and there is early. The VIPs are allowed in from 2pm on preview day but the VVIPs, specially invited by sponsors Deutsche Bank and Frieze itself, were firmly ensconced from 11am. They were casting expert eyes on this year’s work, whipping out their credit cards to snatch the best material on offer. Among them is Charles Saatchi, whose sweet engagé with his wife Nigella Lawson belies his predatory demeanour, like a shark busted free from its formaldehyde prison.


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But even before the most prestigious collectors are allowed in, a small, select group of purchasers frantically combs the fair to pre-empt all who follow. These are not the richest, nor the most flamboyant, customers but a team from the Tate galleries, who arguably have the most important job of the day: deciding which of the younger, less well-known artists on display should be acquired for the national collection of contemporary art.

For this purpose, Tate receives an annual donation from Outset, a group of London collectors, which it can use as it wishes at the fair. The amount is not huge – £150,000 this year – but it enables the gallery to act fast and freely over the space of a few hours as it gives its imprimatur to the emerging artists it believes are making the most important work of their generation.

I walk around with Jessica Morgan, Tate’s contemporary art curator, and Eric Troncy, a guest curator from Dijon’s Le Consortium art centre, to get the feel of what it is like to shop with the Tate. It is nothing if not frantic. I ask Morgan if the five-person team has assembled a shortlist yet. “Actually, we are in a real hurry,” she replies and turns away swiftly. It is 10.40, 20 minutes before the VVIPs come charging in and there are purchases to be made – no time for small talk.

On the shop floor, the usual blend of purposeful bustle and casual surrealism pervades. It is difficult to describe the overall effect of Frieze to those who have never visited. Contemporary art has a playful, occasionally sinister, way of disorienting the viewer – that is arguably its most important cultural role. So, we have at one end of the fair a smoothly-honed plastic missile, a phone box containing a mirror instead of a telephone, a suit laid out carefully on three pieces of plywood. There is a tree, with brightly coloured anoraks hanging from each branch. A giant black chess piece is toppled over. A life-size model of a young woman is bent over double, skirt hitched up, knickers on view.

A lion’s costume drapes flaccidly from a beam with coloured spotlights coming out of its eyes. There is a giant text message, which begins: “You’re really brilliant, in fact you’re surrounded by zombies.” There are explicit photographs of female genitalia, a wheelchair nestled pointlessly inside a wardrobe, and a woman sitting on a lime green sofa reading a magazine, who is almost certainly part of the work but who really knows?

Amid this maelstrom of arresting images, the curators have a fixed gaze and a firm sense of purpose. Their first stop is to ask after a pleasing abstract painting at the Galerie Micheline Szwajcer. Negotiations are conducted bilingually, and misunderstandings have to be cleared up promptly. “No, not for the Pompidou. For the Tate.” There is some haggling over price, which somehow surprises me. It is easy to forget that this is a market and market rules apply. And if you are representing Tate, you have no little muscle. A discount is duly offered.

On we march. At the Friedrich Petzel gallery from New York, we linger over rows of postcard-sized images of abstract shapes. “They are programmed by computer, which allows every shape to be different,” says the gallery owner, talking up the work like it is a plump sea bass in a Sicilian fish market. But this is art. “In a way it is an endless piece,” says Troncy. “Endlessly unique, too,” says Morgan. The weird combination of haggling and theorising continues for a few seconds. They settle on a price, again discounted. Like all the works, the piece will be held in reserve for an hour, while the curators make their final decision.

At Cologne’s Galerie Gisela Capitain, we are taken into a backroom to see a series of three photographs of a woman’s head in rollers by Christopher Williams. The price for the three is $36,000, which is brought down to $32,000 and then, following some hand-wringing and special pleading, down to $30,000. I check the details with the gallery. “The price is $36,000,” says a woman, peering into my notebook. “Cross this out” – pointing to the figure of $30,000 – “cross it out!” and she all but forces the pen from my hand. Her sensitivity is surprising, for the offer of a 15 to 20 per cent discount to the Tate team seems routine wherever we go.

We zip over to Galerie Catherine Bastide from Brussels. We watch a video of people doing weird things in strange, jerky movements. The gallery is slightly surprised that Tate is interested. “I thought it might be a little extreme,” says one of the gallery team. “No, it is excellent,” says Morgan. The work by Catherine Sullivan is opaquely entitled “The Resuscitation of Uplifting”.

As we approach Berlin’s Esther Schipper gallery, Yana Peel, co-director of Outset who is also following the team around, japes with me. “Guess what they are interested in here?” she asks. I tell her I’m not falling for that one. Is it the drawings, the video, the small poodle constructed out of coloured light bulbs? “It’s the carpet!” I laugh uneasily, deciding it is probably a joke. It’s not a joke. The carpet, which itself contains a joke, in the form of the shadow of a “window”, is by the Parisian Philippe Parreno. Everyone likes it but worries about how hard-wearing it is. It suddenly feels like we are in Carpet Warehouse, keeping it real.

But our next stop is to watch a video of ants pushing small coloured discs around. I love this piece, David Attenborough meets Damien Hirst, at São Paulo’s Galeria Fortes Vilaça and Morgan asks to see the ending because she “missed it when I saw it in New York”. (For the record, nothing really happens.) I am getting bored listening to the haggling now but it continues, right to the last minute. And then the curators retire to consider their verdict. They will be back in an hour to tell the galleries who has made the cut.

I use the time to have coffee with Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate. I ask him how it is possible, in such a bewildering context, to make informed decisions in such a short space of time. “These are people,” he says of his team, “who spend their lives in artists’ studios, at various biennials. They are pretty quick on the draw. They know what they are looking at. We try to work quickly but not in a total state of frenzy.”

I say the degree of haggling surprised me. “We haggle and we bargain very hard, when we are working on a normal purchase too. We push as far as we can. There is usually a deal to be done.” It must mean a lot for a young, emerging artist to be bought by Tate. “There are probably collectors who are encouraged to buy artists endorsed by Tate,” he concedes. “That is one of the reasons we feel it is right to argue for a big discount.”

We start talking about the success of Frieze, and the contemporary art market in general, when an ebullient figure approaches our table. “Don’t take any advice from this man,” says Serota drily. “And you must never believe anything he tells you,” Charles Saatchi tells me with a hearty laugh. The two men, respectively the most important public and private art collectors in Britain, are reportedly sworn enemies but they will use the fair to make public the friendly relationship they have always insisted upon, posing for photographs later in the day.

Serota believes that those who talk of the contemporary art market as a bubble waiting to burst are misguided: first, because he genuinely believes in the quality of the work being produced and, second, because “there are plenty of very wealthy people in this city and they now buy art as part of their lives”. That doesn’t make his job any easier – his acquisitions budget for Tate, for all works, is just £1.5m a year – but it makes hypothecated sums such as the Outset donation all the more useful.

The curators have made their decisions. They rush round the fair to inform the galleries. They have bought a total of 28 works by 12 different artists: all but two are new names to Tate. Jessica Morgan says she is very pleased with the mix of works they have bought: the ants, the carpet, the weird video, the woman in rollers have all made the cut and will be shown at one of Tate’s galleries in the near future.

Morgan says she loves thinking about the effects the purchase will have on the artists. “I know all of them and it is great to support them in this way.” But what about the shopping, I ask. It must be fun, rampaging around like a kid in a sweet shop for a couple of hours. “Oh no,” she says improbably. “That is the worst part. The shopping is rather awful.”


http://www.friezeartfair.com/

Nightmare of the Cabbage Patch Queen

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

‘It’s a bad day, after Velazquez’


THE portrait of the Queen by Lucian Freud made her look as if she had swallowed a wasp. Rolf Harris admitted he nearly ended up painting the Queen as “a pork butcher from Norwich”. The latest attempt shows the monarch as a Cabbage Patch doll.
The new work by George Condo, the American artist, has been put on show at Tate Modern, a gallery that the Queen opened in May 2000. It has been hung — some will say appropriately — in the Wrong Gallery.



The Tate has been keeping diplomatically quiet about the oil painting, measuring about 18in by 15in. It appeared with no fanfare on the third floor next to a huge work by another American, Jackson Pollock.

Whether the Queen will be amused by her latest portrait is conjecture, although by now she must be used to enduring her unflattering likenesses.

Anthony Williams’s 1996 painting caused offence by ageing the Queen’s face and giving her “sausage fingers.” Justin Mortimer’s 1997 abstract appeared to have beheaded her, leaving her body floating on a bright yellow background.

In a more deferential age, Sir Herbert Gunn portrayed her in 1953 in her coronation robes as a regal mannequin. Two years later Pietro Annigoni produced the most enduring and popular image of her reign by depicting her as a beautiful young woman in flowing robes.

Besides a Cabbage Patch doll, the new version invites comparisons with Impedimenta, the wife of Chief Vitalstatistix in the Asterix books and a novelty confection in a cake shop.

Condo says he has modelled his portrait on the great Spanish artist Velazquez. “It’s the colour of her robes, which is Velazquez-like,” he said yesterday.

But how did it come out as it has? It is the Queen imagining herself having a bad day, he said: “Her puffed-out cheeks are the Queen’s nightmare. But she is smiling, too. I suppose it is a bit like a caricature or Cabbage Patch doll but that’s also because people like Cabbage Patch dolls.”

(Condo had not seen the new movie The Queen in which the monarch, portrayed by Helen Mirren, is called “cabbage”.) The idea for a portrait arose from a collaboration between Condo and Massimiliano Gioni, the Wrong Gallery’s curator. “The norm is, well, huge respect for your queen,” said Gioni. “This picture is not of course disrespectful.”

Condo, a noted New York artist whose works sell for six figures, was drawn to the project by “all that history and all that jewellery”, he said. “What I am trying to do is to get over how the Queen imagines herself.”

It could have been worse. Condo considered doing a nude portrait of the Queen in the style of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, displayed in the National Gallery. “I was told that you are not allowed to show members of the royal family nude in a public institution,” he said.

It has not deterred Condo. “I’ll be working on it next,” he said. He was not granted a sitting with the Queen, although he plans to send the portrait to the Prince of Wales in the hope that Charles will use his influence to secure a live session. “After all, she did it for Lucian Freud.”

Condo was inspired to paint nine pictures of the Queen. One had a carrot going through her head. Others saw her as a Picasso-style abstract and a skeletal face with a staring eye.

In hallowed tradition, the final result has attracted withering scorn. “It’s embarrassingly bad,” said Brendan Kelly, a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. “When you paint a portrait of anybody you should create a legend. This will just create a fuss.”

Andrew James, the society’s secretary, was not so dismissive. “It’s unsettling, but the picture speaks to you directly,” he said.

“There is a cartoon-like quality, certainly in the eyes, but I don’t mean ‘cartoon-like’ in the pejorative sense. She has a youthful and pretty neck in the portrait although her blown-out cheeks are very much a grandmother’s. And I like the spiky crown.”

The Tate said: “George Condo is a well respected artist and this is a very interesting imaginary work.” The gallery was not embarrassed by the portrait, it added.

Welcome to The Rockwell Hotel

The Rockwell is an independent hotel with an emphasis on understated contemporary style, impeccable levels of personal service and attention to detail. Each of the forty rooms has been crafted to create a relaxed atmosphere, whilst retaining an individual character which combines English tradition with contemporary styling. In addition to our well appointed bedrooms, we offer guests the use of generous spaces for eating, drinking and relaxing, including a large south facing landscaped garden.

Situated in Kensington, many of the capitals best attractions are on our doorstep - Earls Court Stadium, Earls Court Olympia, Harrods department store, the Royal Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum as well as the shopping areas of Knightsbridge and Chelsea are all within walking distance. The Rockwell is also close to the wide green expanses of Holland Park and Hyde Park.

Welcome to the The Hoxton hotel

London's innovative new business hotel

The Hoxton hotel, where urban living meets country lodge lounging, opened in London on Friday 1st September 2006. With roaring fires and cool cocktails, Frette linen and flat screen TVs, sumptuous duck down duvets and free Wi-Fi and amazing bar & restaurant the "Hoxton Grille". Even more amazing is the cheap rates.

Close to Old Street tube and the City of London, The Hoxton provides easy access to Moorgate, Finsbury Square and Liverpool Street and is staggering distance from some of London's best bars, restaurants and clubs. The Hoxton is a no smoking hotel.

GUIDES > London Eating

london-eating was launched in October 2001 as part of the city-eating group and has quickly become London's favourite online restaurant guide. The site offers the widest range of eateries from African to Vietnamese, from Aldgate to Wood Green, and most restaurants also include honest reviews (both good and bad!). We also have our softball team that plays in the London Publishing league, you can find us at The Ball Bangers.

Zaha Hadid’s ‘Forest of Towers’

The most banal of clichés is that an artist’s work is “pushing the boundaries of the possible, redefining space and form”. I read these words the other day, applied to a long list of (mostly) second-rate architects. But one name stood out: Zaha Hadid. If there is one architect in the world today for whom that cliché actually reads like a CV, it is Hadid.

She has been designing hugely dynamic, theatrical, fearlessly experimental buildings for about a quarter of a century. Now the world has finally caught up with her and, in an explosion of global activity, they are being built. Next month her first building in the UK, a small centre for cancer sufferers in Fife, will be opened by Gordon Brown. In London, meanwhile, a striking new show of her work has just opened at the Rove Gallery in an odd side-street in Kentish Town.

Forest of Towers features a 25m sculptural installation in which Hadid’s relentlessly dynamic structures burst free of the ground in swooshing curves and twisting, folding and splitting geometries. If science has now settled on a view of the world as an 11- dimensional realm of busily vibrating strings, this is its architecture. Restless, energetic, fluid and strange, Hadid’s buildings are the nemesis of the brick box. After years of seeing her work on paper and in models, it is odd to see an architecture so inventive and fresh, so successful in manipulating space: it is like walking on to a film set that you are strangely, subconsciously familiar with.

Hadid’s work is as successful as furniture, art or sculpture as it is as architecture, and it is bought and sold avidly. That is a fascinating achievement because computer rendering has almost killed the art of architectural representation. Hyper-real images now attempt to emulate architectural photography, using the same tricks and tropes. The idea of character, of atmosphere, of intelligence being injected into the architect’s projection has disappeared. Architectural drawing used to have a language of its own, communicating something beyond the object, an idealised, rather than a realised, world. Hadid’s powerful studies and models, even if rendered by sophisticated software, represent a last vestige of that visionary tradition and have developed an internal language of consistency and great beauty that both reflects on and informs the architecture itself. In a snatched conversation between events on the eve of the show’s opening, I ask her whether she sees her work as art.

“The boundaries are very blurred now,” she says. “None of this work was ever conceived as art but at the time a lot of the stuff I was doing was being demeaned as art rather than architecture, as unbuildable . . . the only way we could promote this work was through publications, through illustrations – the magazines were the only place where we could initiate a dialogue about the architecture.”

That is no longer the case. From Cincinnati to Guangzhou (via Marseille and Dubai) there has been a simultaneous sprouting of these new forms – these are now objects that exist in real cities. So radical and odd are they that one could argue that they have been simply placed there without regard to context and culture. But at an extra-ordinary lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects last week, Hadid showed that this is not the case: the proposals and designs she discussed – tangles of webs and nets overlayed on complex urban forms, forests of structure extruded from an abstracted street grid – had full regard to context to knit together disparate urban quarters.

Hadid is light on theory, the intellectual exposition often being left to Patrik Schumacher, her right-hand man, and executed in his fearsome brand of concentrated architect-speak. But Hadid’s rather unpretentious manner, allowing the forms to speak for themselves rather than over-explaining them, belies an approach that is far more sophisticated than the often wilful, always expressionistic forms may indicate.

“The towers in the Rove Gallery show all have strange connections to the ground,” she tells me, “but the ambition was always to create fluid space, to allow the ground-plane to continue around and beneath the buildings, to see how we could create an event space under the architecture. In a way every one of our projects is about how the building meets the ground.”

Nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the phenomenal Phaeno Centre, a science museum in Wolfsburg, Germany. A contender for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize (finally won by Richard Rogers, for his new Madrid airport), the building is the most complete demonstration yet of the way in which Hadid’s architecture melds landscape and building, interior and exterior, and space and structure. It is proof that her science-fiction architecture can help to tie together disparate parts of a city rather than merely exist as an object for its own sake. The ground around it swoops and swerves to meet the concrete structure like some manic skateboarder’s dream.

Although in only a small way, Britain is about to be exposed to Hadid’s theatrical architecture in the form of a Maggie’s Centre in Kirkcaldy, in Scotland. Designed as a place for cancer patients to get some relief from the rigours of healthcare architecture, it is a simple, folded structure, a series of origami surfaces wrapped around a plain space, its inspiration partly drawn from its position atop a steep slope.

“I went to Edinburgh and I was very moved by the Maggie’s Centre there,” Hadid says. “Maggie [wife of the architecture critic Charles Jencks, who died of cancer] had been a friend and I wanted to do this building as an architecture to make people feel good, where they can talk and chill out, to feel human. It’s a very humble building with no architectural gymnastics and I feel privileged to be able to contribute to society with something like this.”

With a building for London’s Architecture Foundation in Southwark, the aquatic centre for the 2012 Olympics and the new Rove Gallery show, Hadid is finally about to make her mark on her adopted home city (she was born in Baghdad) after a long period of being fêted everywhere but there. So with this explosion of work (and bearing in mind her comment during the lecture that, after the long drought, she would have to start learning how to say “no” to some jobs), what comes next?

“I still think that the idea of a masterplan, an urban design in which we can adopt all these ideas about porosity and fluidity would be interesting,” she says, “bits of cities, embankments, adjacencies, the possibilities of making connections . . . The Maggie’s Centre has also opened up the idea of healthcare, of an architecture that can make people feel better.”

This is a crucial time for an architect who has spent years preparing. Her moment comes at precisely the right time, when Hadid is at her peak, when her Clerkenwell office is well staffed with architectural talent, and when the world is both technically able and aesthetically ready to build these structures. A city composed of these expressionistic towers might be a bit much – but a few scattered around the skyline could do much to remind us of architecture’s visceral, visionary potential.

Zaha Hadid’s ‘Forest of Towers’ is at the Rove Gallery, London NW5, until November 14. Tel 07979 408 914

ZAHA HADID - Silver Paintings

22 October - 26 November
Private view Saturday 22 October

Kenny Schachter ROVE presents for the first time in the UK: Zaha Hadid’s 'Silver Paintings'.

Zaha Hadid has consistently pushed the boundaries of architecture and urban design. Her work experiments with new spatial concepts, intensifying existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design; from the urban scale to products, interiors and furniture. Best known for her seminal built works (Vitra Fire Station, Bergisel Ski Jump, Strasbourg Tram Station, the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati) Zaha has recently added to her portfolio with the newly opened BMW Central Building in Leipzig, an extension to the Ordrupgaard museum in Copenhagen, and sensuous interiors for the Hotel Puerta America, in Madrid. Her central concerns are pushed through a simultaneous engagement in practice, teaching and research.

‘Silver Paintings’ showcases Hadid’s discipline in a new light and medium. The title of the series refers to the surface of the works, which in their raw state resemble polished metal or mirrors, an effect created with a polyester skin treated with chrome and gelatine and then di-bonded.

Initially, the images are digitally generated, then photographed in their virtual state. Once the images are printed they are hand-painted in a medium that complements the subject. This might be stained glass paint (which creates the transparent and cathedral like feel), acrylic and Chinese lacquer (Opaque and POP qualities) or UV resistant ink combined with Vinyl (highly reflective). These techniques combine to suggest a gradual intersection between reflectivity and opacity, from one architectural feature to the next.

The ‘Silver Paintings’ also act as a ‘real-time’ report, a page in the diary of Zaha Hadid's exquisite architecture as they are updated every time the design of a project changes and evolves.

14 paintings will be shown. Each work is 2000 x 900mm.

Zaha Hadid is currently expanding her presence in the UK with projects including the 2012 London Olympics Aquatic Centre, the Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport, the London Headquarters for the Architectural Foundation, and a Maggies Cancer Centre in Fife, Scotland.

For press enquiries or further information please contact Simon Parris
+44 (0)7789 348 584 / simon@rovetv.net

KENNY SCHACHTER ROVE 17 Britannia Street London WC1X 9JN UK
Opening hours: Mon-Sat 10am-6pm and by appointment.
+44 (0)7979 408 914 schachter@mindspring.com www.rovetv.net

Basics first for a better urban life in London

By Tyler Brûlé

Published: October 20 2006 17:26 | Last updated: October 20 2006 17:26

I know this is going to come as a shock but I love a microphone. It doesn’t matter what it looks like or who makes it (though I do have a liking for Sennheisers), so long as the sound quality is crystal and the reach is both wide and deep. Clip on a TV mic and I can play interviewer or interviewee, load me up with shochu and me and my karaoke mate Rob will belt out “From Russia With Love” – or leave me unsupervised near the door of an aircraft and I’ll happily rattle off my own in-flight rules, which I’ve been rehearsing for years. “For those passengers who are hygienically challenged, please refrain from using the washrooms altogether as you’re likely to pee all over the floor, not wipe down the basin, splatter toothpaste over the mirror and render all four lavatories on this aircraft environmental hazards. For those gentlemen tempted to don a sleeper suit – don’t! You can take one and give it to your wife or girlfriend to prove you flew first class but under no circumstance are you allowed to put it on, as you have 95 per cent chance of looking like a 120 kilo four year old.”

Last week was a busy one for microphones. Personal assistant Gaby, who’s been with me for just over nine years now, is in charge of brokering all public speaking engagements. No-fee American magazine conference in Arizona that can only afford economy class – no. Handsome fee for a conference on media and design in Sweden – yes. Any engagement that involves a head of state or CEO sending a plane – yes. No-fee conference on retail in London but Mr Brûlé can say whatever he wants about the state of the West End and he’ll speak before Mayor Ken Livingstone – what time do you want him there?

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Restaurant review: 3 Monkeys

3 Monkeys
136/140 Herne Hill,
London SE24 9QH
020 7738 5500
A three-course meal for two with house wine and service: £70


When an Indian restaurant offers dishes “personally appreciated by Lady Diana and Prince Charles at the Maharaja of Jaipur’s palace”, you expect something a little more refined than chicken tikka masala washed down with a flat pint of Cobra. While fans of our “new national dish” may be pleased to find it on offer at 3 Monkeys, the menu does indeed aim higher than the average curry house.

Parked at the bottom of Herne Hill, 3 Monkeys doesn’t look like your standard local Indian either. It’s huge, and has clearly had a fair bit of cash thrown at its fixtures and fittings. You have to cross a drawbridge-like gallery to enter the brightly-lit dining room, which is soothingly decorated in cream and splashes of purple. The decor works well: it’s slick enough to engender a sense of occasion, but is unobtrusive.

Though the menu does a sub-continental tour, northern Indian dishes predominate among the surprisingly delicate choices on offer.

There are, of course, some hot dishes, but the subtle spicing and rich but restrained flavours here might disappoint someone who dropped by hoping for a gut-burning Balti. I enjoyed my order of Chaamp Taazdaar, a substantial portion of rack of lamb braised with cloves, cardamon and pathar ke phool (whatever that is). The meat tasted almost perfumed and was flakingly tender. The green mangoes with lentils and burnt garlic I also tried. However, it was slightly too self-effacing for me, the lentils disguising the mango.

My friend’s Murgh e Firdaus – the aforementioned favourite of our warring royals – turned out to be tender chicken paupiettes stuffed with cumin and chicken mousse, swimming in a rich sauce sharpened up with whole pomegranate seeds.

It’s sophisticated, unusual offerings like this that make 3 Monkeys well worth a visit.

Erol Alkan plays Bugged Out! The Birthday Party at The End

Indie kids do it with heart

Erol Alkan plays Bugged Out! The Birthday Party at The End on 21 October; www.erolalkan.co.uk, www.myspace.com/erolalkan The End, 16a West Central Street, WC1, 020 7419 9199

Archway-born Erol Alkan is the founder of the legendary club night Trash, an eclectic evening of electronica, indie, punk and pop that has a history of staging live shows from unknown bands who hit the big time, including Scissor Sisters, Bloc Party, The Rapture and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. A pioneer of the bootlegging scene, the 6ft 4in DJ has remixed tracks by Franz Ferdinand, Mylo and The Chemical Brothers. He is a resident at Bugged Out! at The End.

How did you start DJing?

A mixture of fluke, boredom and cockiness. I went up to a promoter at the club The Automatic in Leicester Square and asked him if I could play. He paid me five pints of beer, later raising it to £5 to include travel, which was probably fair at the time. I was so bored of what was being played in clubs. My mates and I were listening to such different stuff.


What did you listen to?

Pearl Jam, Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, music from the indie scene. I loved Manic Street Preachers, but you’d certainly never hear that in a club. When I started DJing, I remember playing Radiohead’s Creep for the first time and getting chastised by ­everyone. They said, “You can’t play that, it’s too slow”. But the point is that you don’t have to play testosterone-charged music non-stop. Anyway, ­indie kids dance with their hearts and not their feet.


Are you still an indie kid?

I always have been. Everyone wants to make the ­distinction between dance music and indie, but there’s no reason why they can’t sit side by side. And, of course, there was that beautiful ­moment in British music when the two came together with the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.


What’s the idea behind Trash?

Playing great old and new music on a s**t-hot sound ­system. Also, keeping it as cheap as possible. It’s still only a fiver, the same as it was nine years ago.

How does your Trash set differ to Bugged Out!?

It differs wildly. Bugged Out! is on a Saturday, a kind of reach-for-the-laser-stars night of celebration. Trash is more of an alternative disco, playing a lot of music I couldn’t play anywhere else. It’s on a Monday, so there are a good deal of students at Trash as well. It’s a difference of tempo, really.

How much technology do you embrace with DJing?

I always have done. When I started DJing, I used to use vinyl, CDs, cassettes, even VHS – I used to record episodes of The Word and project them on to the wall. Now, I use iChat a lot. I’m often online talking to other DJs such as Felix da Housecat. Quite often we email each other tunes. Or other producers will email me tunes – they’ll finish the tunes at 8pm, email me at 8.30pm and they’ll be spun in one of my sets at 12am.


Do bedroom producers email you their music?

They do and I always listen to it. It varies quite a lot in its quality; a lot of it does sound like bedroom production stuff, but a lot of it is good. It’s like listening to records in a record shop: half of it’s good, the other half rubbish.


What remix work have you been doing?

I recently remixed Scissor Sisters’ I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’, which came off pretty nice. I also remixed Hot Chip’s Boy From School and Daft Punk’s The Brainwasher.


Who are acts to watch?

The Long Blondes are a great rock band from Sheffield. Keep your eyes peeled.


What other genres have you been discovering?

I’ve been getting into a lot of krautrock from the late Sixties, as well as Turkish progressive rock. I’m also really into psychedelia. Under the moniker Beyond the Wizard Sleeve, I and another DJ often rock up to pubs and play ten -hour sets of psychedelia.

Welcome to the Mandeville Hotel

The Mandeville Hotel is based in the ever-fashionable Marylebone Village, within a few minutes walk of some of London’s most exciting shops, art galleries and antique shops of Mayfair.

The hotel is perfectly located near some of the world famous auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christies and renowned Harley Street clinics, making this hotel an excellent choice for your leisure, cultural and corporate stay in London.

The Mandeville Hotel prides itself on offering a highly personalised service under the direction of its expert management team. Great design is the key to the hotel, providing guests with a sophisticated and stylish environment at accessible prices.

David Hockney Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery

12 October 2006 - 21 January 2007
Wolfson and Ground Floor Galleries

Exhibition organised with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

'What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing: you wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.'
David Hockney

Adults: £9.00 (advanced booking recommended - Call 0870 013 0703)
Concessions: £6.00
Children under 12: Free
Adult groups of 10 or more: £8 each (minimum 2 weeks advanced booking required - Call 020 7312 2483)
Students in organised groups of 10 or more with lecturers, £6.00/£3.00 Monday to Wednesday before 1pm (minimum 2 weeks advanced booking required - Call 020 7312 2483)
Become a member and see the exhibition for free. Supported by Burberry.

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this is the first exhibition devoted to David Hockney's portraits spanning over fifty years. This celebrated artist has been engaged with portraiture since his teenage years. Self-portraits and portraits of family, lovers, friends and well-known subjects represent an intimate visual diary of his life and artistic preoccupations.

Featuring over 150 works across different media from the now iconic early double portraits to recent paintings produced especially for the exhibition, David Hockney Portraits reveals how the artist's creative development and concerns about representation can be traced through his portrait work.

A catalogue, with over 300 illustrations, by curator Sarah Howgate accompanies the exhibition, including essays by Marco Livingstone, Mark Glazebrook, Edmund White and Barbara Stern Shapiro. £35 hardback and Gallery exclusive £25 paperback.

PRESS RELEASE
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/preldavidhockney.asp

IMAGES

In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century

From the First World War to the Cold War, the sexual revolution to the Velvet Revolution, communism to capitalism, the 20th Century was marked by sweeping historical events and changes. In the Face of History brings together the work of many of the greatest photographers of this period, whose works collectively map out a century of European experience.

One of the first major exhibitions to chart European photography from 1900 to the present day, In the Face of History features classic photographers such as Eugène Atget, Josef Sudek and Brassaï , alongside contemporary artists such as Boris Mikhailov, Jitka Hanzlová and Wolfgang Tillmans. The exhibition includes a number of photographers from the former Eastern bloc, with many works shown in the UK for the first time.

All of the photographers are distinguished by a closeness to their subject matter, sometimes depicting these subjects during times of great conflict. André Kertész documented the realities of a soldier’s life while serving in the Austro Hungarian army in the Great War. Henryk Ross, meanwhile, is represented by a series of shocking images which he took in secret while imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto in Poland during World War Two.

Other photographers depict subtler currents of social and cultural change. Christer Strömholm lived amongst, and documented, a community of transsexuals in Paris in the 1960s. Annelies Štrba shows photographs of her children’s lives taken over a thirty year period.

In the Face of History contains many powerful works, images distinguished by the emotional bond between photographer and subject, offers a unique perspective on a century, as seen through the eyes of some of Europe’s greatest photographers.

Catalogue
A colour catalogue of the exhibition is available now to buy from the gallery shop, priced £29.95. For more details contact Alyson Rolington on 020 7382 7006 or visit https://www.barbican.org.uk/eticketing/shop.asp

Limited edition print
As part of In the Face of History, a limited edition Jitka Hanzlová print will be available to buy. For more details, contact Alyson Rolington on 020 7382 7006 or visit https://www.barbican.org.uk/eticketing/shop.asp

Edition of 42, priced £352.50 (inc. VAT)

PRESS RELEASE.

London Film Festival: "Shortbus"

To an effortless cool soundtrack, a camera swoops and sweeps through a charmingly animated New York cityscape, before introducing us to the in flagrante characters at the heart of John Cameron Mitchell's playful pansexual study of modern relationships. Shortbus is 'a salon for the challenged and gifted', presided over by Mistress Justin Bond. Louche and lively, it's the place where characters come together (pun intended) to join in all manner of erotic acts, or simply to share in the music and campy chat. At the heart of the film is the conundrum of why modern city folk have such difficulty opening up emotionally, even when physical barriers are broken down. There's Sofia, the pre-orgasmic couples counsellor who's faking it with her husband; Severin, the unhappy dominatrix who can't let anyone get close; the Jamies, a long-term gay couple considering opening up their relationship; as well a motley assortment of more minor characters (the former Mayor of New York is a particular favourite). Their dilemmas and encounters are woven together with great warmth and wit, and whilst the film concentrates on the characters' sexuality, it does pack real emotional force. Whatever your take on its polymorphous pleasures, Shortbus (both movie and club) has great lines, great music, a joyful feel, and a rendition of 'The Star Spangled Banner' in a league of its own.

The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival

Discover over 300 films from more than 50 countries, screening at 14 venues across London. Booking is open to all from Friday 29 September.

Tips:
The Bridge
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Shortbus
Stranger Than Fiction

Christian Jankowski @ Lisson Gallery

The Frankenstein Set 08/09/2006 - 30/09/2006

Location: 52-54 Bell Street

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of three new film works, photographs and sculpture by Christian Jankowski opening Friday September 8th. The product of a generation that grew up with the ubiquity of film and television, its inherently populist influence is evident throughout Jankowski's work. Using various media formats, he involves a range of professionals as collaborators who often (sometimes inadvertently) participate in the very conceptualisation of the work. With Jankowski, there is as much emphasis on the journey as the destination, and the risks and chances inherent in his collaborations ultimately give surprising shape to the final works. In this exhibition, Jankowski looks specifically at the horror film genre in relation to the academic theory it inspires, the fantasies of its audience, and the possibilities and limitations that he encounters as a visual artist working within it. In Angels of Revenge 2006, Jankowski attended “Weekend of Horrors,” a horror convention in Chicago, to cast the participants of a costume contest for his own project. He set up a renegade film studio in a conference room neighbouring the convention and led the contenders one-by-one into the darkened set where he asked them the question: “How were you most wronged in your life, and what is your revenge fantasy against the person responsible?” Inviting each to recollect whom in their lives had most betrayed, harmed or offended them, he asks that they consider a form of retribution most appropriate to the crime. From the safety and anonymity afforded by the costumes and makeup, the responses varied: a grisly butcher wielding body parts proposed blackmail, a demonic clown who lost a large sum of borrowed money envisioned actual violence, and a dejected lover dressed as a Victorian occult leader felt that simply 'living well' was the ultimate revenge. The video is accompanied by a set of photographic diptychs portraying the costumed participants alongside the personal notes used to rehearse their performance. For the creation of Violence of Theory [working title], 2006, Jankowski set out to find a horror production interested in collaboration and discovered filmmakers in the early stages of filming a straight-to-DVD werewolf movie. By bringing professional CGI studio effects and custom-made horror prosthetics to the bargaining table, Jankowski negotiated a new film project within their production. Jankowski scoured the film's script and located the pivotal moments in which the characters, in the vernacular typical of the genre, undergo fantastic transformations or meet their untimely demise. He then intervened into the script with quoted observations on the philosophy and nature of horror generated from conversations with high-profile academics and cultural historians working in the field. Each actor was paired with a theorist “alter-ego,” and while their character's actions remain identical to the original script, surprising phrases emerge without warning: seconds before being devoured, one victim protests, “Cannibalism is not attractive, it is repulsive… but there may be an attraction to that repulsion. I once lost a piece of skin from my big toe and roasted it to see what it tastes like. It didn't taste good, but I was curious.” (Linda Williams, Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley) In another scene the werewolf wonders aloud, “If the horror film looks dead, horror is alive and well. It is precisely the seemingly tired genre elements that, when combined in new configurations, like bits of DNA, produce new and powerful monsters, which, much like Frankenstein's monster, acquire a life of their own and develop in ways that no-one can predict.” (Marc Jancovich, Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia) Jankowski has also fabricated prosthetic body parts from the same theorists and critical thinkers who supplied the quotations. While these lines will most likely only make it in the art piece, the prosthetics will also remain in the final version that is distributed to 9,000 Blockbuster Video stores. The decapitated head of Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, will roll across countless television screens throughout the United States. In both the film and the accompanying sculptures shown in the exhibition, the surreal intervention of the theorists destabilises the viewer's sense of reality and adds a macabre comic dimension while simultaneously presenting philosophical discourses relating to the horror genre. “Violence of Theory” [working title] works in that place between loving the visceral experience of horror and trying to make sense of it through words. For 'Playing Frankenstein', 2006 Jankowski ran across Conor Timmis, a young actor convinced that he is the ultimate doppelganger of Boris Karloff. While Timmis was working on a demo reel to sell himself to producers, Jankowski came to the shoot and challenged The Monster to a game of chess on the Frankenstein set. Who wins the game? The short film captures Jankowski again granting his collaborators creative agency in determining the final message of his artwork. Jankowski continues to delightedly erase the boundaries between high and low art by inviting the ordinary and everyday into the process of creating an artwork, thus blurring any separation between art and everyday life. This will be his second one-person show at Lisson Gallery. Any enquiries please contact Mariska Nietzman, mariska@lisson.co.uk Christian Jankowski was born in 1968 in Göttingen Germany and lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include: 'Living Sculptures', Centre de Art Santa Monica, Barcelona (upcoming, Fall 2006); The Kitchen, New York (upcoming, Fall 2006); 'Everything Fell Together,' Des Moines Art Center, Iowa 2005, (toured to MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge Massachusetts and FACT Liverpool); MACRO, Rome, 2003; Swiss Institute, New York, 2001; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 2000; Group exhibitions include: Turin Triennial, 2005; 'State of Play' Serpentine Gallery, London 2004; Whitney Biennial, New York 2002; Venice Biennale 1999

artist information

contact Mariska Nietzman

Go West @ Spectrum

THE FIRST MAJOR STUCKIST SHOW SINCE THE WALKER MUSEUM

Stuckism has gained so much fame from its demonstrations and media campaigns that its real purpose is in some danger of being overshadowed. That purpose is perfectly obvious– to make art, and to have it seen and discussed without preconceptions, in a perfectly normal and rational fashion.


In one way this misunderstanding is the Stuckists own fault. Like the Gorilla Girls, the campaigning feminist art group founded in New York in the mid-1980s, the Stuckists have been extremely adept in gaining media attention. Their most recent, and perhaps most resounding triumph of this sort was their use of the Freedom of Information Act to garner details about the Tate’s purchase of an expensive work by one of its own trustees, Chris Ofili. As a result of this disclosure, the Tate found itself at serious odds with the Charity Commission, and its director, Sir Nicholas Serota, was forced into a groveling public apology


6th October 2006. The show runs until 4th November 2006




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Please contact the Gallery for more information.

Glenn Ligon @ Thomas Dane

11 October - 18 November

Thomas Dane Gallery are pleased to announce the first ever solo exhibition in the UK of American artist Glenn Ligon.

The exhibition - entitled Brilliant Corners after the classic album by Thelonious Monk - will consist of a series of new works - all using text as their central element. This use of text has been recurrent in the last fifteen years of Ligon's work, - most prominently in his painting. He borrows from diverse sources in literature, politics and popular culture to address issues of gender, race, history and sexuality.

Two coal-dust paintings - one with black text on a white ground and its larger black-on-black counterpart - incorporate passages of text stenciled in coal-dust and oil paint. The source of the text is the African American novelist James Baldwin's 1953 essay 'Stranger in the Village', in which he recounts the experience of being the first black man ever seen in a small town in the Swiss Alps. The themes in the essay - racial and ethnic identity, fear of and fascination with the "other" and the density and weight of language - find a conceptual and formal echo in Ligon's manipulations.

The build-up of paint and coaldust on the surface of the paintings render the text almost illegible, which suggests that the struggle to decipher the text is an integral part of their meaning. With precedence in the paintings of Ad Reinhardt and Jasper Johns, their reductive backgrounds, sensual text-appropriations and restricted palette are in dialogue with various strategies of modern and contemporary art history.

A group of eight smaller paintings, each with a lustrous silver background, feature the literal transcript of jokes by the late stand-up comedian Richard Pryor. In the past, this ongoing series has included text in strident colours, reminiscent of the awkward tonal arrangements of Andy Warhol's s silkscreen paintings. Here, the silver colour that so obsessed Warhol--symbolizing the color of the future, celebrity and movie culture is joined with Pryor's pointed social and political critiques. The syntax of the jokes, which is transcribed as is, retaining all the pauses and interjections of the spoken language, is reinforced by the smudging and marking that is the result of the process of stenciling the text.

Although regarded primarily as a painter, Ligon is wide-ranging in his practice, which includes printmaking, photography, neon, installation and video.

Along with painting, Brilliant Corners will also feature two of Ligon's neon-sculptures. Neon has been used extensively in the last forty years as a medium for either writing in light or 'expanding' the notion of sculpture. Here Ligon shows the unique expressive potential of the medium by painting the exposed side of the glass tubes with black paint. The works glow from behind, against the wall, becoming 'eclipsed' fragments of text borrowed from the likes of Gertrude Stein or Sojourner Truth, the 19th century activist and former slave. The appropriated phrases, "Negro Sunshine" or "I sell the shadow to support the substance", become resonant metaphors made from simple matter.


Glenn Ligon - Some Changes

The third leg of Ligon' major touring exhibition opens at the end of September 2006 at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Some Changes was organised and originally hosted by the Power Plant in Toronto. The exhibition is co-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, former Director of the Power Plant, and Thelma Golden, Deputy Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, it has already travelled to Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, at the beginning of 2006, and will next travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (January-April 2007), and the Musee d'Art Moderne of Luxembourg (October-December 2007).

Glenn Ligon was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 2006.

CHRISTOPH BÜCHEL Simply Botiful @ Hauser & Wirth Coppermill

11 October 2006 – 18 March, 2007, Hauser & Wirth Coppermill
Opening: Tuesday 10 October, 6 – 10 pm

Christoph Büchel’s major installation at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill transforms the East End gallery into a sprawling recycling camp. A seedy hotel reception and makeshift shop front lead into a space that appears to have been hurriedly abandoned. Benches are piled high with electronic innards: refrigerator parts, dismantled televisions, endless cables and computer components. Cluttered temporary workstations indicate an illicit workforce, housed until recently in the squalid conditions of the empty cargo containers that make up this grim urban village. The oppressive and confined rooms tell of the unsavoury living conditions and lurid exploitation that are mediated through endlessly repeated newsreels. This once bustling centre of a black market economy embodies the uneasy relationship between housing and internment, placing the visitor in the brutally contradictory role of intruder and voyeur.

Venturing further into the space, we are confronted by an apparently unauthorised archaeological dig. The vast shape of a mammoth rises from a huge gaping hole in the gallery floor, its tusks emerging from a freshly excavated earth block. This complex installation refuses easy interpretation. It offers instead a cacophony of contradictory histories that endlessly replay acts of dismantling, uncovering, reuse and reinterpretation. Büchel forces viewers of his work to participate in scenarios that are both physically demanding and psychologically unsettling. Cramped corridors, claustrophobic chambers and frequent dead-ends induce feelings of panic and paranoia. His work is informed by an explicit political awareness of events in the aftermath of 9/11, reflecting a global social and political disruption. Experiencing such charged spaces is usually a solitary task, though this private experience becomes the means by which collective tensions and traumas might be unearthed.

Christoph Büchel (born Basel 1966) studied at the University of Art and Design, Basel, from 1986-89, at Cooper Union School of Art, New York in 1989-90, and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1992-1997. In 2000-2001, he was awarded a scholarship at PS1, New York. Recent solo exhibitions included: 'Shelter' at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2002); ‘Private Territories’ at the Swiss Institute, New York (2004); 'Close Quarters' at Kunstverein Freiburg (2004); and 'Hole' at Kunsthalle Basel (2005). In 2005, he collaborated with Gianni Motti at the Venice Biennale. Christoph Büchel lives and works in Basel.

For further information and artwork material, please contact
HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON Phone +44 (0)20 7287 2300, london@hauserwirth.com, or Laura Elgar at Idea Generation Phone +44 (0)20 7428 4949, laura@ideageneration.co.uk
GALLERY HOURS Thursday to Sunday 12 – 7pm

FRANCIS PICABIA The Nudes @ Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi

Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi
15 Old Bond Street
London W1S 4AX
10th - 28th October, 2006

Hauser & Wirth’s inaugural exhibition at its new premises within the Colnaghi building on Old Bond Street will be paintings by FRANCIS PICABIA. The exhibition will focus on Picabia’s shocking nudes from the 1940s.

Picabia’s career was characterised by his irreverent wit and his iconoclastic attitude towards tradition and high art. He famously declared his intention to change his ideas "as often as one would change one’s shirt". He embraced numerous artistic styles - including Dadaist mechanomorphism, realism and abstraction - in quick succession. Irony, humour and a distrust of artistic movements informed his work throughout his career. Picabia's interest in the subversive power of eroticism was illustrated by the sexual connotations of his early machine works, then climaxed in the late nudes.

These paintings were created during an intense period in the early 1940s while Picabia was living in the South of France. Embarking once again on a new aesthetic direction, he began to create strikingly colourful paintings that used imagery copied from commercial illustrations. His sources included raunchy magazines, mass-produced erotica, tacky postcards, and trashy photo-novels. The resulting images undermine the prevailing taste for classical elegance. Picabia's appropriation and reuse of images in different and unexpected combinations resulted in paintings that are highly suggestive. Works such as La brune et la blonde (1941-42) make reference to the tradition of the classical nude in painters such as Corbet or Ingres, ironically reducing it to the level of the vulgar pin-up. Such irony is made explicit by glowing skin, rich red lips, coy glances and suggestively placed poppies. The bright colours, exagerrated glossiness and strong tonal contrasts of these paintings represent an attack on what Picabia saw as the pretensiousness of good taste.

Picabia's ironic adoption of a superbly kitsch aesthetic for the Nudes also lampoons the seriousness of modern artistic movements. For Picabia, the heroic experimental styles of the early decades of the twentieth century were stale and commonplace. After Dada, Cubist, Surrealist and geometric experimentation, the return to aggressively commercial figuration was intended as a shock and a challenge. Picabia’s work continues to exert a powerful influence on a number of aritsts working today.

For further information and artwork material, please contact
HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON Phone +44 (0)20 7287 2300, london@hauserwirth.com, or
Laura Elgar at Idea Generation Phone +44 (0)20 7428 4949, laura@ideageneration.co.uk

JAKUB JULIAN ZIOLKOWSKI @ Hauser & Wirth

22 September - 28 October, 2006, Hauser & Wirth London
Opening: Thursday 21 September, 6 – 8 pm

The first UK exhibition of works by young Polish painter JAKUB JULIAN ZIOLKOWSKI takes place at Hauser & Wirth London. Ziolkowski's paintings and watercolours present a dynamic and surreal visual vocabulary, encompassing landscapes, architectural and figurative subjects, still life and portraiture.

Ziolkowski creates hallucinatory worlds that are inhabited by strange and dynamic forms that recall the language of surrealists such as Henri Rousseau. His early works frequently depicted an idealised artist's studio, teeming with abundant plant life and peculiar insects. It's contents are mutated into monstrous biomorphic forms that threaten to swarm off the canvas. Objects are distorted, reflected and replicated, imbued with frantic biological impulses. Household pot plants sprout hairy limbs and gaping eyes that recall the eclectic and personal symbolism of American painter Philip Guston. This private botanical landscape of excess becomes slowly overcome as these energetic lines increasingly fill the canvas and obscure its subjects.

Ziolkowski's recent works are articulated by bold lines and vivid colours. Truncated torsos and their organs are depicted in vibrant hues, disembodied by a tangle of multicoloured veins and pulsating arteries that crisscross his canvases. The paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration. They reflect the influence of the painter Andrzej Wroblewski (1927-1957), whose experimental style of figuration inspired contemporary Polish painters. Ziolkowski has spoken of the "emotional ventilation" that drives his compulsion to paint. "Painting," he states, "is a crazy machine that propels itself, and the faster it goes, the less predictable the decisions and unconventional the outcomes become."

At Hauser & Wirth London Ziolkowski presents several large colourful canvases and groups of paintings, as well as numerous works on paper. In the basement vault of the gallery, a suite of twenty-five drawings of nudes hints at an intense and secret psychological realm.

JAKUB JULIAN ZIOLKOWSKI (born Zamosc, Poland, 1980) trained at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty for Painting and Drawing, Krakow. He was recently included in the exhibition Skulptur, Installation und Malerei aus Polen at the Kunstverein Bielefeld. Ziolkowski has had solo exhibitions in Warsaw (Foksal Gallery Foundation, 2005) and Krakow (Academy of Fine Arts, 2004). JAKUB JULIAN ZIOLKOWSKI lives and works in Krakow.

For further information and artwork material, please contact
HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON Phone +44 (0)20 7287 2300, london@hauserwirth.com, or Laura Elgar at Idea Generation Phone +44 (0)20 7428 4949, laura@ideageneration.co.uk

GALLERY HOURS Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 6pm

The Unilever Series: Carsten Höller @ Tate Modern

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?

Höller has undertaken many projects that invite visitor interaction, such as Flying Machine (1996) that hoists the user through the air, Upside-Down Goggles (1994/2001) that modify vision, and Frisbee House (2000) - a room full of Frisbees. The slides, like these earlier works, question human behaviour, perception and logic, offering the possibility for self-exploration in the process.

INTERVIEW.
PRESS RELEASE.

Fischli & Weiss: Flowers & Questions. A Retrospective

This is the first UK retrospective to explore the collaborative art practice of Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b1952) and David Weiss (b1946).

Since the late 1970s the artists have consistently captivated and amused audiences with their extraordinary transformations of the commonplace. Fischli and Weiss work across a wide range of media and this exhibition presents their sculpture, installation, moving image and photography. Underlying all of their work is a childlike spirit of discovery which encourages the viewer to look afresh at their surroundings. In Fischli and Weiss’s world everyday objects take on an unexpectedly lifelike quality; they balance on each other, play off each other and collide into one another with a witty intelligence infused by the artists.

Displayed works include a history of the world told through the medium of hand-modelled clay figures and a multiple slide projection installation which asks hundreds of big and small philosophical questions such as ‘Will happiness find me?’ Visitors also have the chance to see two outstanding films. The Right Way 1983, features the artists, dressed in rat and bear costumes, scaling Alpine slopes and crossing rivers as they seek the right way. In The Way Things Go 1987, a mesmerising array of household objects, including teapots, tyres, buckets and balloons, crash into one another in an absurd chain reaction powered by home-made explosions and collisions.

This intriguing exhibition also presents the photographic series Quiet Afternoon 1984–5, which documents precariously balanced household utensils on the verge of collapse, and painstakingly hand-crafted polyurethane sculptures which simulate the myriad of everyday objects to be found in Fischli and Weiss’s studio.

PRESS RELEASE.

USA Today

6 October—4 November 2006

New American Art from The Saatchi Gallery
Supported by Christie’s and a consortium of corporate donors
Tickets £2.80—£10

Norman Rosenthal, Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy, introduces USA TODAY

Despite the rise of China and other nations the USA is still the only superpower. It determines the world’s political and economic agenda, both for better and for worse: its policies and judgements, not to mention its cultural influence, are still decisive. ‘The Iron Curtain’ has disappeared to be replaced by ‘The War on Terror’ with horrendous and divisive consequences. What has young America’s reaction been to this moment? In this selection of the work of young American artists, each confronts not only their own fundamental questions, but also global poverty, inequality and population migration, not to mention the gigantic environmental problems that confront the world as a whole. Gay politics, women’s politics, Islamic politics and black politics all have their echo here.

An artist is, of course, only a singular being who has to find his or her personal myth and language, grounded perhaps in politics, or in contemporary sexual mores. Each artist must have a sense of time and place rooted in recent art history as well as the ubiquitous ambience of contemporary popular music, film and the endlessly proliferating forms of new media. Yet it is interesting to find that the old-fashioned worlds of painting and sculpture refuse to go away.

‘Mapping America’ might have been another title for this exhibition. Just as Jasper Johns transformed the American flag into an art icon of particular immediacy, we see these young artists investing the Stars and Stripes with their own agendas, re-reading it and turning it upside down or evoking moments in their country’s history, such as the draft, the baby boom, the space race, the bicentennial, or the wonderful world of flower power. Can values in both art and society be regarded as relative? Certainly the younger artists in America today seem to be asking questions about society to which there are no straight answers. It may be, of course, that there were no straight answers to these questions in the past, but now the questions tend to be more directly put.

As in each generation, every artist of note remains in his or her work an individual. The best of them are highly innovative but also aware of the past and the culture all around them. If today’s world sometimes has cause to despair of America, it still remains a great country in which the arts of all kinds are flourishing. Hope for the future of any culture must lie in its young people’s potential for creativity, as I believe is made manifest USA TODAY.

Some of the images in the exhibition could be disturbing and parental guidance may be required.

Visit www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk to read more about the artists featured in USA TODAY.

READ MORE.

ART > Modigliani and His Models @ Royal Academy of Arts

Amedeo Modigliani painted people. In many ways this concise statement sums up the artist’s entire output during his short career in Paris in the first two decades of the twentieth century. No other modern artist concentrated so absolutely on the representation of people. Moreover, in a period when avant-garde art was experimenting with the breakdown of forms, Modigliani steadfastly retained their integrity. Always individual and idiosyncratic, he drew on a variety of sources – Renaissance to Rococo painting, the art of Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne and Brancusi, ancient Greek, African and Asian sculpture – to create his own highly original and modern signature style.

Modigliani’s life story, as told by his contemporaries and biographers since his premature death at the age of 35 in 1920, has tended to overshadow his achievement as an artist. Born into a cultivated Sephardic Jewish family from Livorno in Tuscany, Modigliani studied in his native town and in Florence and Venice, before moving to Paris in 1906. The riveting story of the handsome and dissolute young bohemian’s life in the French capital, brought to an end by a combination of ill health, alcohol consumption and drug abuse, has acquired legendary status. His restlessness was not, however, reflected in his art, which, if sometimes poignant, has none of the nervous expressionistic energy of that of many of his contemporaries. Apart from a handful of landscapes painted in the south of France in 1918, Modigliani’s paintings are restricted to portraits and nudes, most of which were painted in the last six years of his career, between 1913 and 1919.

Modigliani’s friend, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, said: ‘The legend of the debauched artist is just a legend. What legend gives us is an implausible caricature of a man, a painter who left behind only a body of legends. Amedeo Modigliani left behind a life’s work in art.’

HOTELS > The Franklin (Summer 2007)

London’s Knightsbridge is brought up to date in a luxurious, bespoke take on the English inn. Designer Reardon Smith, London’s premier hotel “refinisher”, has taken the four townhouses spanned by the hotel to create an open, airy space. The lobby looks onto a tree-lined garden and features a solid, proper London aesthetic lightened by liberal use of glass and modern touches. The gardens are present in more ways than one: guests have exclusive access to the hotel’s stylish bar and restaurant, the Dining Room, both sitting atop the greenery. Further facilities include two meeting rooms and a new workout centre with the most recent Technogym facilities as well as a spa. Guestrooms sport fired-oak floors and abundant use of luxurious materials including Bellora linens; many bathrooms feature separate tiled areas with rain showers. All of this discreet luxury lies within a stone’s throw of Harrods and a host of London’s old- and new-school restaurants and entertainment.

ART > Photography from The UBS Art Collection

In March 2006, Robert Adams won a prestigious international photography prize for his black-and-white images of the American northwest. This accolade didnt simply reflect the taste of the judges. His deadpan approach, seemingly devoid of artistic personality, lets a deforested hillside or a sprawling industrial estate speak for itself, and Adams has influenced a whole generation of European artists.

Adams, now 69, came from the generation of American photographers after Walker Evans. Evans was employed by the governments Farm Security Administration (FSA), whose staff took more than 150,000 photographs in the 1930s and 1940s as they documented the fast-changing environment and population. The FSA pictures were in marked contrast to the ambitions of the more formal work made by Alfred Stieglitz and his circle, who showed at Stieglitzs 291 Gallery in New York and campaigned for photography to be taken seriously as an art form. Today, the realist tradition of Evans and Adams increasingly dominates contemporary photography, and feeds into the work of such artists as Andreas Gursky, Massimo Vitali and Beat Streuli.

In his 1970-74 series, What We Bought: The New World (Scenes From the Denver Metropolitan Area), Adams photographed vast factory floors filled with anonymous workers, retail mall architecture that dominated suburban vistas, dozens of different brands of bread crammed on unending supermarket shelves. The series offered a stark and yet non-judgemental view of Americas growing love of mass consumption. Fast forward twenty-five years, and Gursky - making use of the latest technology to create giant colour-saturated prints - similarly focuses on societys rampant need to consume. Hundreds of types of chocolate bars and biscuits rhythmically fill the shelves in 99 Cent (1999). The vastness of the print (over three metres long) emphasises the obscene scale of todays shopping experience, where the brightly coloured packets of processed foods threaten to overwhelm the faceless consumers only just visible in the aisles.

In other works, Gursky highlights the bland and repetitive architecture of our everyday lives, from a Toys R Us store in a retail park to the central atrium of a vast hotel in Shanghai. These places, or rather non-places, could be anywhere. Nothing about them relates to their immediate environment and we feel lost, rootless, engulfed, just looking at them.

When people do feature in Gurskys work - as in Autosalon, Paris (1993) - they are massed together, not presented as individuals but as a faceless populace, shopping, consuming. Italian photographers Luigi Ghirri, Massimo Vitali and Olivo Barbieri also remove any sense of the individual from their work. Following in the realist tradition, they photograph the world as built by humans with straightforward honesty, devoid of any romanticism. There are no flattering angles here, no airbrushing of unwanted elements. What they see is what you get, however distasteful. In Vitalis large-format beach scenes, such as Riccione (1998), people mill around long rows of sunbeds, the uncompromising geometry of the loungers matched by the high-rise apartment blocks that tower over the narrow strip of beach. By imposing manmade order on nature, the simple beauty of the beach has been obliterated by our desire to occupy it. Barbieri uses a helicopter to give him an aerial perspective on each city he photographs, and in his photographs of Siena people appear in anonymous crowds, no bigger than map-pins.

While the influence of the American realist tradition on contemporary European photography is strong, the importance of German artistic duo Bernd and Hilla Becher must not be overlooked. Bernd and Hilla Becher taught a whole generation of German photographers including Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff. Working together for over 40 years, the Bechers have systematically photographed the overlooked industrial heartland of both Europe and America, classifying their work by subject or shape or end product, giving gas tanks and water towers a timeless gravity through very rigorous and symmetrical framing. Their work has a precision emphasized by its display in typological formations, a method of presentation also favoured by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, whether of flowers from municipal gardens, street signs in the snow or iconic tourist sights. Candida Höfer studied under Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy, and her large-scale architectural photographs of public buildings echo the clean lines and geometries of the Bechers work. But Höfer concentrates on architecture designed for one purpose but used for another - a swagged hall becomes a makeshift lecture theatre, a grand central atrium is hijacked by a temporary café - and uses an asymmetric framing process to heighten the sense of discord between intent and actuality.

The influence of Bernd and Hilla Becher is also evident in Thomas Ruffs large-scale portraits, a series he began in 1981 while studying at the D�sseldorf Academy. He uses the bland format of a passport photo - head and shoulders against a flat monochrome ground, the subject looking blankly at the camera - scaled up to larger than life-size to imply that little can be read of a person in this way. We are officially identified by our passport photos, but how much do they really reveal about us? He photographs the surface of each person, as he says, not their character, and despite their notable physiognomic differences - a riotous hairstyle, furrowed brow, scarred lip, glasses - we soon lose track of them when presented with a homogenous installation of dozens of human faces.

Swiss artist Beat Streuli takes his camera on to the street, but the people he encounters there are no more revealed to us than those in Ruffs photographs. If a painted portrait is designed to reveal something of the identity of the sitter - their emotions, the essence of their character - in Streulis work we are presented with the opposite. Captured by the distant gaze of his telephoto lens, the subject is always an unwitting participant. In the late 1930s, Walker Evans used a hidden camera to take similar clandestine portraits on the New York subway, and in both Evans and Streulis work we see the participant exposed. They are not posing for the photographer or for a group of friends. They are grimacing or pensive, squinting or smiling, but we will never know what thoughts are causing these emotions to fleetingly appear on their faces and be captured for perpetuity by these secretive photographers. Each person exists in their own private world, as they negotiate a packed city made up of strangers. We dont know them, and we never will.

Charlotte Mullins

Tez Humpreys @ Dazed & Confused Gallery