Muraclay » Installation

Exhibitionist: This week’s art shows in pictures

Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:55:24 +0000

Gary Hume explores his dark side in Manchester, while in London Tate Britain gives Henry Moore a radical twist. Find out what's happening in art around the country

Robert Clark

Skye Sherwin

Franz Ackermann, a cubist for our time | Jonathan Jones

Jonathan Jones — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:21:36 +0000

Ackermann's exhibition at White Cube references century-old techniques but feels thrillingly contemporary

Recently I moaned about the abuse of the term "modern art" to describe the art of today. The joy of working as a critic is that every theoretical notion you may have is going to be contradicted by empirical reality. And lo and behold, I walked into an exhibition yesterday afternoon that proves art is still able to rise in an ambitious and intelligent way to the challenges posed by modern life.

Franz Ackermann (born 1963) lives and works in Berlin. His current exhibition at White Cube, Mason's Yard in London is a whirligig of ideas and impressions. If cinema director Michael Haneke tries to trace the connections of a globalised world in fractured narratives, Ackermann captures the fissions and fusions of our unmoored age through an art of kaleidoscopic energy.

At first glance, his paintings and the playground-like installations in which they are displayed are so bright and hard you begin to dismiss them as just another pop contrivance. But stay a moment. The gallery upstairs is given over to a spectacular, fizzingly theatrical installation where your mind finds it hard to settle on anything: to register the subtlety behind it you need to go downstairs where his paintings are more conventionally displayed and there's enough quiet to assimilate their complexity.

Pulses of colour that resemble computer graphics are interrupted by drawn perspectives; broken images of buildings and city squares judder across storms of energetic random marks. The aesthetic is new and yet it has a history: it responds to the confusions and liberations of contemporary urban life with techniques of fragmentation, explosion and juxtaposition that go back a century, to cubism.

Go back upstairs after taking in his paintings and you can properly appreciate the power and excitement of his installation called Wait. Its hybridisation of painting, sculpture and kinetic art amounts to a street-cultural grotto containing the possibility and menace of modern life: the modern life that we are living, now.

Ackermann's dynamism and colour capture something about the contemporary. Is the exhilaration he depicts that of a new democracy or an impenetrable chaos? It's a great place to visit, Franz Ackermann's 21st century. But would we want to live there?

Jonathan Jones

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Ron Arad finally gets major UK retrospective at the Barbican

Mark Brown — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:43:21 +0000

Exhibition by trailblazing Israeli-born designer, architect and artist opens in London, his hometown for more than 35 years

There are bookshelves that bounce and roll, cutlery that pirouettes, a chandelier that you can text and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs. In what may be one of the most comfortable exhibitions of recent years, Britain's first major Ron Arad retrospective opens tomorrow.

The Barbican's art gallery in London is following up major shows it has held on Corbusier and Alvar Aalto by devoting three months to a designer, architect and artist still very much alive and working. Arad, who was born in Israel but has been based in London for more than 35 years, said he hoped anyone "interested in things" would visit.

The head of art galleries at the Barbican, Kate Bush, said: "We want to pay tribute to Ron Arad's very special place in the world of design. He is an incredibly important figure and this exhibition lays out his vision and his process as it has evolved over 30 years."

The show is divided into sections with names such as Volumising, Rolling, Superforming and Scavenging, where one of Arad's most celebrated chairs – the Rover chair, which uses a car seat salvaged from a scrap yard – is exhibited.

Then there is the Failing section, displaying designs that weren't taken up, or were misconceived. That includes the "table that eats chairs" in which chairs can be folded underneath the table top. "I think it was too complicated for the manufacturer," said the show's curator Lydia Yee, "but Ron's still confident that someone will come along."

There have been recent Arad shows at the Pompidou in Paris and Moma in New York, but the one in London was completely different, said its curator, Lydia Yee. "Ron wanted to do something new in his home town and we wanted … to show his interest in new materials and in new technologies."

There is a crystal chandelier called Lolita which has more than a thousand embedded LED lights and its own mobile number to which one can send texts, which are then displayed.

Arad and his studio have also created mechanical tricks to show off some of the pieces such as a long moving platform for bookshelves called "reinventing the wheel". The idea is that you can roll your bookshelves where you would like them – perfect for the indecisive – but there is a wheel within the wheel so the books remain upright.

For many, Arad will be best known for his chairs, many of which are on display and which are most definitely not for sitting on. A large section of the gallery will, however, contain chairs where visitors can take the weight off their feet and – should they wish – play table tennis on a stainless steel ping pong table designed by Arad to suit his game.

Mark Brown

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Crash: art and JG Ballard collide at the Gagosian gallery

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:56:59 +0000

A new London exhibition brings together works by artists tuned into JG Ballard's surreal, dystopian universe

Exhibitionist: This week’s art shows in pictures

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:29:21 +0000

From fleshy tableaux in Manchester to Derby's pursuit of happiness, Robert Clark and Skye Sherwin tell us what's happening in the arts around the country

Artist of the week 74: AK Dolven

Skye Sherwin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:22:54 +0000

Cool and emotionally stark, Norwegian AK Dolven's portraits of lives and landscapes nonetheless reveal extraordinary depths

AK Dolven's current exhibition is enough to make you shiver. In her scratchy 16mm film The Day the Sky Became My Ground (2009), a nude young woman is captured spinning around, with the Arctic sky behind her. But as the camera scans up and down, the image somehow turns upside down: the sky beneath her, she hangs from the precarious ice. Watch long enough and the image seems to abstract into fractured white landscape and pink skin. Another recent work, Ahead (2008) projects a high-definition static shot of a white mountainside on to a six-metre-high screen. Buried to their waists in snow, a small group of people slowly attempt to drag a young woman up the slope, on some inscrutable pilgrimage to the mountaintop.

One of Norway's best-known artists, Dolven divides her time between London and the Lofoten islands in the north of the country, where both of these works were shot. She settled in this scarcely inhabited landscape in 1975, in her early 20s, and though she has since lived all over Europe, Lofoten has been the place she consistently returns to. It wasn't until 1995 that she made her first work there. Her film installation, Saturday Night, depicting curtained windows behind which a house party is in full swing, was a challenge to cliched ideas about Norway's isolated, dour north.

Indeed, Dolven's camera is as often trained on urban life as it is on nature. A celebrated series of video portraits in 2001 featured her own interpretations of work by Edvard Munch, still influential for Norwegian artists. She reimagined Munch's famous painting, Puberty (1894–95), as a self-confident teenager, wearing nothing but headphones. Conversely, the assured composition of Munch's Self-Portrait With Cigarette (1895) is recreated in the image of a restless young woman, whose left hand toys with a remote control while a cigarette burns down in her right. In place of Munch's agony and ecstasy, Dolven's videos seem emotionally minimalistic. Yet, as with her paintings, they strip back representation in favour of bleached-out layers of paint. Her work is full of depth, revealing extraordinary moments in seemingly everyday scenes.

Why we like her: Dolven's 2005 film Amazon updates the myth of the hunter who cut off her own breast the better to shoot her bow. Her archer might have had a mastectomy, but her body positively gleams with strength and beauty.

Borderline: In 1989, Dolven lived in an apartment block directly on the border between West Berlin and the DDR. She recounts how border patrols watched her through binoculars as, one wintry day, she stood naked on her balcony with her film camera, taking self-portraits. (The out-of-focus, stylised image she filmed makes up part of a portrait in her current exhibition.)

Where can I see her? Dolven's solo exhibition is at London's Wilkinson Gallery, and her public art project, Untuned Bell, has just been unveiled in Oslo, Norway.

Skye Sherwin

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Artist of the week 73: Michael Rakowitz

Skye Sherwin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:34:43 +0000

From homeless shelters to Iraqi heirlooms, Rakowitz's political art tackles the cultural erasure brought about by poverty and war

Rather than stand on the sidelines, Michael Rakowitz takes a can-do approach to political art. An American of Iraqi-Jewish descent currently based in Chicago, his interest in the west's relationship with Iraq has consistently defined his work.

Often he has devised practical, creative ways to get discussion going at ground level: public art projects that directly involve people. Begun in 2004, a project he called Return saw Rakowitz relaunch in Brooklyn a version of his grandfather's import/export business; the local Iraqi community were invited to send items to Iraq for free, testing channels of communication at a time when there was almost no postal infrastructure. For another of Rakowitz's projects, Enemy Kitchen (2006), cooking classes became a way to broach cultural boundaries, teaching school kids family recipes with the help of his mother in workshops staged in California and New York.

Rakowitz's political conscience was awoken early on. As a teen growing up in Long Island, he glimpsed his family's homeland through CNN's green night-vision images of anonymous sites bombed in the first Gulf war. The country his grandparents had fled in the 1940s was now at war with the place they fled to. Rakowitz became conscious of a process of cultural dislocation and erasure that he would later explore in his work.

Political and art-political themes come together in one of his most impressive works to date, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007), an extraordinary attempt to tell the story behind the National Museum of Iraq, which was famously looted during the second Gulf war. This complex narrative explores the history of the ancient Babylonian Ishtar Gate, taken from Iraq to Berlin's Pergamon Museum in the early 20th century and rebuilt by Saddam Hussein (it later became the site most photographed by US soldiers), alongside the plight of the embattled former director of the museum, Dr Donny George. Most astonishingly, it sought to recreate 7,000 missing objects – friezes, intricate ceramics and votive statues – with materials fashioned from Arab newspapers and food packaging sourced from Middle Eastern neighbourhoods in the US.

Why we like him: For paraSITE, begun in 1998 when Rakowitz was still studying, which demonstrates his inventively hands-on approach to social issues. Following discussions with local homeless people, he developed custom-built inflatable shelters, which can be heated via the air vents of existing buildings. Rakowitz has since recreated these nomadic dwellings, somewhat like silvery space-age tents, for homeless people in Massachusetts, New York City and even Ljubljana in Slovenia.

Truth and fiction: The artist found the inspiration for his current show, linking science-fiction fantasies and the art of war, on eBay. An American soldier was auctioning what looked like a helmet out of a Star Wars film, actually part of the uniform of Saddam Hussein's paramilitary group as designed by his son Uday, a long-time fan of the movie.

Where can I see him? The Worst Condition Is to Pass Under a Sword Which Is Not One's Own is at Tate Modern until 3 May 2010.

• This article was amended on Monday 8 February. The second sentence of the penultimate paragraph stated that Saddam Hussein's paramilitary helmets were modelled on those of Star Wars stormtroopers, when in fact they were inspired by the headgear of Darth Vadar himself.

Skye Sherwin

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Exhibitionist: This week’s art shows in pictures

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:07:27 +0000

From talking walls in Manchester to an Arshile Gorky retrospective in London, here's what's happening in art around the country

Art and Language: Portraits and a Dream at the Lisson Gallery

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:33:17 +0000

From patterns to posters, paintings to paper chains, a major new exhibition in London explores the works of modernist art collaborators Art & Language

Galleries galore: a tour of Tokyo’s teeming art scene

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:18:42 +0000

There's more to Japanese art than calligraphy. Robin Powell uncovers the capital's edgiest contemporary culture – from bathhouse paintings to an exhibition in a public loo

Like any world-class capital, Tokyo has its fair share of major galleries. The largest national and private collections, such as the National Museum of Modern Art or the Mori Art Museum, are up there with the best. But plenty of smaller Japanese gallerists, collectors and artists also manage to find a foothold here. From venerable buildings that have survived earthquakes and bombings to the boutique art houses where every inch of wall is a potential display space, Tokyo is a haven for art lovers in search of something a little different. So why not take an improvised tour of the city's lesser-known galleries, to find out what makes them tick? And how do they manage to survive in a crowded city where space is the most precious commodity of all?

I start my tour, perhaps surprisingly, slap-bang in the middle of the city's main shopping area, the Ginza district. But the sober, brown-brick structure I'm standing in front of couldn't be more different from the neon-clad consumer paradise just a stone's throw away. This is the Okuno building, constructed in 1932, one of the first sets of flats in the city to have mod cons such as a lift and telephones. It's now a rabbit warren for Tokyo's art scene, hosting everything from established galleries and antique dealers to first-time solo displays and design firms. No fewer than 20 galleries are based here – many in what were once small bedrooms, and even, in one case, a former communal bathroom in the basement. This last is occupied by Gallery Serikawa, a cosy space whose ancient plumbing betrays its origins.

Gallery Serikawa is currently showing works by the Japanese artist Kiyoto Maruyama, appropriately enough because he is one of the last surviving painters of so-called "hot spring pictures", large-scale landscape paintings often found on the walls of Japan's public baths. These tranquil, generic nature scenes are designed to put the mind at rest as the body soaks in the hot spring. Upstairs, though, things are far less serene. In room 511, high up in the building, I locate the tiny gallery A Piece of Space, displaying a sculpture by the Swiss artist Susanna Niederer – an elegant, dusted-bronze windchime with five bell-shaped chimes suspended from the ceiling. Elsewhere, lacquerware artist Tamaki exhibits decorative boxes and trays imprinted with gold leaf. A few steps down the corridor, I find the Y's Arts gallery, covered wall-to-wall in British and European antiques.

Next stop is yet another public bath enjoying a second lease of life as an art gallery: Scai the Bathhouse. Bordering one of Tokyo's most famous cemeteries, it's an elegant building with high ceilings and windows, flooded with natural light. The gallery specialises in Japanese and international contemporary artists; Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois have shown here. I find myself hooked by a subversive animation by the Korean multimedia artist and sculptor Jeon Joonho, his first solo show in Japan. The 13-minute piece, entitled Welcome, shows the serene landscape depicted on a North Korean 50 won note being disturbed by a flotilla of helicopters, one of which crashes, turning the olive-green fields into a raging bushfire. As in a previous piece of political satire by Jeon – an animation of a US $20 note, during which a workman gradually paints over the windows of the White House – the artist seems to be attacking the symbols of statehood as well as satirising the fallout from military intervention.

Next, I wander over to the Takahashi Collection, art bought by possibly Japan's most important private collectors, which has popped up at a variety of temporary spaces over the last few years, and is currently appearing in Hibiya, a faintly nondescript business district close to the imperial palace. A practising psychiatrist most of the week, Takahashi reserves Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons for his hobby, and has amassed more than 1,000 works since 1997, shuttling them between different temporary spaces across Tokyo. The current space – open since April 2009 – will only be available until this December.

Takahashi tells me that he started buying work by contemporary Japanese artists such as Makoto Aida after hanging out at Ota Fine Arts, one of the most highly-respected private galleries in Tokyo. At that time, the work of Yayoi Kusama – a Japanese artist known for her multi-coloured, polka-dot designs – was a particular favourite. Takahashi concentrates on younger artists now, he says, but denies that he has ambitions to become the Japanese Charles Saatchi. "I don't have enough money to build a gallery," he smiles. "I spend it all on the art."

Perhaps he should follow the example of Tokyo's younger gallerists, who several years ago set up shop well off the beaten track, in the industrial Kiyosumi district to the east of the city. This nameless group – made up of gallerists and art dealers who made their name in the mid-1990s – brought their businesses under one roof in 2005 to create one of the largest gallery spaces in Tokyo. ShugoArts is here, one of the key forces behind the gallerists' collective, as is the groundbreaking Taka Ishii gallery. But the real heavyweight is the Tomio Koyama Gallery, which introduced the world to Takashi Murakami, probably the best-known Japanese artist working today.

But getting there isn't as easy as it sounds, as I discover. You take the metro to a rundown industrial area surrounded by warehouses; the galleries themselves – I have to ask directions – lie down a quiet road, opposite a cement factory. Once inside the building, improvised paper signs sticky-taped to the walls lead you to an industrial elevator. It feels rather like trespassing on criminal gang territory. And when I get inside, the galleries are largely deserted. The clean walls and bright lighting make for a flexible exhibition space – one of the largest in Tokyo – and there's a wonderful variety of work here, but the lack of visitors does nothing to improve the atmosphere. Tomio Koyama's current show is devoted to painter Atsushi Fukui and has the English title I See in You. Fukui has British connections, from an ongoing artistic collaboration with the musician David Sylvian, formerly of the 1970s rock group Japan. Fukui's mystical nature scenes, reminiscent of fairytales, hang alongside framed cartoon pages.

Impressive though Tomio Koyama is, however, when it comes to one-off galleries or bizarre spaces, few can compete with Design Festa in the trendy Harajuku district. Once a drab block of flats, four stories high, it is now a riot of pink scaffolding and garish murals. Every inch has been painted and decorated – and practically every inch can be rented out as well. It hosts the freshest art in the capital and attracts a young, international crowd. As I walk through, I find more than enough to catch the eye on the colourful walls: in one corner a manic cartoon, in another hundreds of painted cat designs. In another, a huge human face sculpted from concrete. Inside the gallery, students – who, drawn by the cheap rates, make up more than half of the artists exhibiting here – show off their latest creations: everything from video installations to cutesy knitware and keyrings, from portrait photography to manga-inspired sketches. I can't say that I love everything on display, but it's exciting nonetheless.

Design Festa is in fact two buildings merged to form one art complex, complete with restaurant and cafe. Its director, Takeshi Araki, shows me around. "Our smallest space is an 80cm square on the wall, which costs 525 yen [around £4] for a day," he says. "We also have a gallery in the toilet." Who could resist? I head downstairs for a closer look: it is indeed there, its walls crammed with small paintings, postcard-size pictures and sketches, all for sale. For one of the most crammed cities in the world, it's somehow fitting. "We like to have all genres, all ages, all kind of artists," says Araki. "We don't have any limits." You can say that again.

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