February 13th, 2010 Huma Qureshi
The painter and sculptor on skipping breakfast, working through the night and a forthcoming trip to paint in Antarctica
My day is split in two: the creative part and the administrative part. I'll be working on my admin from 9am, but I'll be painting during the night – I'm lucky if I get more than four hours sleep. I live and work from my studio in north London. I've been here for four years; it's an old printing press conversion with a glass roof. It's like a loft apartment – except for the fact that I'm on the ground floor.
My fridge is usually empty. I never have breakfast but I do drink about 20 cups of tea or coffee a day. I end up eating one meal a day. I never exercise, but then again, when I'm painting, I'm on my feet all day.
I've just finished my time as artist-in-residence at the County Hall Gallery after two and a half years. It was tremendous to be given the artistic freedom to exhibit what I wanted to. Most of my paintings are allegorical and my inspiration is all personal. Painting is a private relationship between me and the canvas, and the only time I can do that uninterrupted is during the night. There have been times when the creative juices are flowing that I really can't stop – once I stayed awake all weekend and produced a dozen paintings.
I worked in banking for Merrill Lynch for 20 years. I travelled extensively and worked long hours. That routine of working until late has really stuck with me. I don't miss office life though.
The BlackBerry habit from Merrill's hasn't changed – I'm still always checking my emails and often in front of the computer. I'll liaise with galleries, and I'm a patron of several art societies and charities so there are always emails to go through.
I'm heading to Antarctica for five days to paint; I'll literally be painting nine foot canvases standing on the snow in sub-zero conditions. The aim is to explore the creative limitations of the environment, something really raw in a wild, strange landscape. It'll be light 24 hours round the clock, which I'm not used to at all, so I'll be sleeping even less. The snow we had in London made me realise I don't have enough of the appropriate clothing at all – I've been doing a few practice runs of painting in extreme cold in a huge heavy duty refrigerator. The application of paint while wearing gloves is yet to be determined, but I've been exploring the use of anti-freeze paint.
I'm divorced, and my ex-wife and teenage children live outside of London. My daughter and son sometimes come down on the weekends, although it's less now that they have their studies. When they are here, I don't paint – I never paint in front of anybody. I'm probably not an easy person to live with.
When I paint, I usually put trance music on in the background. I used to live in Tokyo and DJed with Paul van Dyke and Nick Warren who were just starting out then. I still have the mixes. I love to watch cricket while I paint too – it's usually on in the background. Maybe my love for cricket is part of my Pakistani roots, although I've been here for most of my life.
I don't really have a five-day working week set up; I don't really have a concept of a weekend. But I do try and take Sundays lightly, which means no evening appointments with gallery owners – I'll see my children or my parents, relax and chill out.
Nasser Azam (azam.com) will be travelling to Antarctica to complete a series of performance paintings from 18-27 February.
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February 12th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
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
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February 12th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Both serious and surprising, this new retrospective looks at the work of an artist famous for his swirls of colour and spectral shapes
This is the kind of exhibition Tate Modern should put on all the time – a serious, sensitive and eye-opening encounter with a great modern artist.
Arshile Gorky was one of a generation of artists in 1930s New York who were fed by Roosevelt's New Deal while they studied the works of the European modern movement in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. By the 1940s, these painters were opening themselves to a Jungian unconscious of mythic forms; by around 1950, they were becoming famous for abstract, wall-filling visions of sublime mystery.
But by the time Jackson Pollock and the other abstract expressionists broke the ice, Gorky was dead. He killed himself in 1948, with his painting still in the movement's intermediate phase of development, not yet purely abstract; his tearpools of paintings swim with psychic metaphors and spectral shapes, shards of figures, washes of landscape.
The achievement of this exhibition is to reveal that – far from being unresolved – these are among the monuments of American art. They flow and burst with life, evoking waterfalls in drips of thin green and orange paint. The talent that enabled Gorky to perfectly ape Cézanne in an early still life makes his poetic dreams of the 1940s formidably sharp. These are not vague shimmers, like Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, but scarily real encounters with monsters and memories, made real in jagged black lines that stab through swirls of colour. These colours are by turns harshly hot and mercifully cool, and flow with a captivating freedom.
In the two versions of his portrait The Artist and His Mother, Gorky himself faces you: a boy lost in time with his mother, who died in Turkey's Armenian genocide at the end of the first world war. His canvases return obsessively to his childhood by Lake Van, as they strive manfully to create a place for a displaced heart.
Posted in Arshile Gorky, Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Painting, Reviews, Sculpture, Tate Modern | Comments Off
February 12th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A major new exhibition at Tate Modern pays tribute to Arshile Gorky, master of abstract expressionism and one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century
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February 10th, 2010 Skye Sherwin
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.
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February 9th, 2010 Christopher Masters
Sculptor whose work probed political and religious themes
The Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka, who has died aged 81, was a controversial, radical figure whose work was driven by his political beliefs and profound sense of humanity. His notoriety peaked in 2008 with the exhibition of his painting Leonardo's Last Supper, Restored By Pier Paolo Pasolini. Although the title alone spells trouble, the picture was initially accepted by the conservative Cardinal Christoph Schönborn for the show Religion, Flesh and Power at the Cathedral Museum in Vienna.
When Christians around the world expressed their anger at Hrdlicka's seething, homoerotic image, the Church authorities removed it, claiming that this was done out of "reverence for the sacred" rather than censorship. As Hrdlicka himself remarked, the only surprise was that they had agreed to display the work in the first place.
He was born in Vienna into a family of Czech descent. His mother and brother were both professionally involved in psychoanalysis, which later influenced Alfred, although he was never a full-blown Freudian. He inherited leftist convictions from his father, who was arrested for communist activities in 1934, four years before Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich. Only his age spared Hrdlicka from fighting for Germany during the second world war; his brother was killed in 1942 during the siege of Leningrad.
After an apprenticeship as a dental technician, Hrdlicka began his artistic training at the age of 18 under Albert Paris von Gütersloh, an exuberant, lyrical expressionist. Seven years later, Hrdlicka continued his education with the sculptor Fritz Wotruba, whose austere, geometric style exerted some influence on him during the 1950s.
Ultimately the younger artist came to see modernism as too remote from real life and began to concentrate on a more vigorous, carnal approach. Hrdlicka's hostility to abstraction produced the print cycle Roll Over Mondrian (1966) and an article with the same title, which he wrote in 1967. He also declared that "all power derives from the flesh", a belief that was powerfully illustrated by Friends (1964-65), a heavily textured marble relief of two naked women.
With their contorted, at times fragmented, figures, Hrdlicka's works were meant above all to express themes of oppression and alienation. His numerous statues of Marsyas, the mythical character flayed for challenging Apollo to a musical contest, are intended as symbols of anti-authoritarianism, while other pieces refer directly to the outsider in contemporary society.
These images are extremely varied. The prints known as Striptease in Soho, the result of a trip to London in 1966, examine the experiences of sex workers, while others drew on Hrdlicka's study of psychiatric patients, some of whom he subsequently interviewed in a TV documentary, in 1972. Many of these works are enigmatic and allusive, but all have a strong graphic style, with dramatic tonal effects created from pools of black ink.
Like his father, Hrdlicka was a lifelong Marxist. Although he resigned from the Austrian Communist party after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, he maintained cultural links with East Germany throughout the cold war, as well as collaborating with leftwing western artists such as the Italian composer Luigi Nono, for whom in 1992 he designed the set of the opera Intolleranza 1960.
He appeared in anti-fascist demonstrations, particularly during the election of Kurt Waldheim as Austria's president in 1986, when he made a grotesque wooden horse mocking Waldheim's attempts to distance himself from his past. Who was the Nazi: Waldheim or his horse?
Marxist or anti-fascist themes also inspired some of Hrdlicka's most accomplished sculptures, from the Friedrich Engels memorial (1981) in Wuppertal to the Memorial against War and Fascism (1991) in Vienna. With its bronze figure of a Jew coerced into washing the street, this monumental composition, in the Austrian capital's historic Albertinaplatz, attracted criticism for its unsentimental and anti-heroic imagery.
The work, which has also been vandalised several times by neo-Nazis, typifies Hrdlicka's stubborn disregard for decorum and correctness – as well as his intuitive feeling for poses and gestures that get to the heart of the matter, however uncomfortable that may be.
Despite his communist sympathies, Hrdlicka received significant commissions from Christian organisations, including a series of shocking, violent images for a Protestant community centre at Plötzensee in Berlin. In these contexts, Hrdlicka produced highly original variations on conventional subjects.
Hrdlicka's identification of Jesus with the murdered, gay film-maker Pasolini led not only to his infamous version of the Last Supper but also to sculptures, prints and pastels in which the Italian director adopts poses associated with Christ's Passion. These works reveal Hrdlicka's preoccupation with the creative outsider, one of the leitmotifs of his career, and exemplify his mastery of human anatomy.
Hrdlicka was predeceased by his wife, Barbara, in whose honour he made a memorial that was installed in 1995 at the Central cemetery in Vienna.
• Alfred Hrdlicka, artist, born 27 February 1928; died 5 December 2009
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February 6th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
From talking walls in Manchester to an Arshile Gorky retrospective in London, here's what's happening in art around the country
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February 5th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
From patterns to posters, paintings to paper chains, a major new exhibition in London explores the works of modernist art collaborators Art & Language
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February 5th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
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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February 4th, 2010 Adrian Searle
Portugal's representatives at the last Venice Biennale bring together their clever, magical films for their first show in Britain
The short, silent films of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva were among the most memorable works shown at last year's Venice Biennale, where the pair represented Portugal. Their seemingly inconsequential films stay in the head and won't go away. Now some of these same works fill a darkened floor of Birmingham's Ikon Gallery, in On the Movement of the Fried Egg and Other Astronomical Bodies, the duo's first show in Britain. A stone skips across a still pond, in very slow motion. An egg suspended from a thread slowly turns in space, like a distant moon, light and shadow crossing its surface like day turning into night. Somehow this is inexplicably beautiful, arresting and incomprehensible. It's like some kind of old scientific demonstration film – except one is never exactly sure what is being demonstrated, or why.
In another film, a man tries to make a tower of raw eggs, crushing the base of each shell and balancing the eggs on top of one another. He has several failures before finally managing to make a tabletop version of Brâncus¸i's Endless Column, using seven eggs. A farm worker, clearly a bit drunk, turns and turns in a dusty yard. You think he'll fall over, dizzy with it all. He bends to pick up a brick, but it slides away from him across the dust. Is this a joke on him, or a joke on us? In another film, the same man squints at the sky through a hole in his boot. There is as much sadness as humour in this brief moment.
These films are more than clever gags. Something deeper informs them, and they are made with a great deal of care, attention and expense. The artists' writings and catalogues explore extreme forms of deja vu, weird metaphysics and medieval anthropological rumours. The pair also make compilations of texts by other authors, including Plato and Pessoa, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Victor Hugo, Borges and Poe. It is impossible to know if they are teasing us, or trying to educate us in their occult and quite possibly fraudulent ideas; this is theory as rumour, fiction, old-wives-tale and fabulation. The overall effect is magical, without ever being twee.
The films themselves look a bit old-fashioned, the projections never very big on the wall. You can hear unseen projectors clattering. Some works focus on a single, tiny event – like the precise behaviour of water when a stone plunges through the surface. In this particular black-and-white film, the footage is slowed to a few frames a second, allowing one to watch the water's surface break and a sudden hole appear; then the surface boils and bulges, the crisp leading edge of the ripple spreading and losing energy as it expands, the water behaving as ponderously as lead. It is like watching a slowed-down atomic explosion, or some huge cosmic event.
The appeal of Gusmão and Paiva's films lies in their mystery. The Great Drinking Bout, in which a bunch of guys take a clay pot of hooch into the jungle for a booze-up, is like found footage from some lost, and quite possibly ill-fated anthropological expedition. In another film, a man's hand walks among sculptures dotted about a table; I shan't spoil the end, but let's just say it's tragic. The apparent simplicity, even corniness, of their work has to be seen in the particular context these young artists have given them. There must be something more to a film in which an egg is broken into a pan and slowly fries, the orange yolk floating in a coalescing, whitening cloud of albumen. Two more eggs join the first, not side by side but superimposed in triple exposure. At least, that's how I think it's done. The yolks float together and apart, like triple suns in a weird galaxy, striking through curdling interstellar matter. How strange the world is, Gusmão and Paiva seem to say. But in the end, it's just fried eggs.
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