London Art Fair: Garageland Highlights (Part 1)

Magnifying glasses in hand, Garageland gumshoes extraordinaire Corinna Spencer and Travis Riley have inspected London Art Fair top-to-bottom to track down this year’s must see artworks.

Not ten steps through the front door of the fair, Union Gallery is showing four pleasingly ramshackle Rose Wylie portraits. The paintings combine simple-lined naivety with canny (and slightly grotesque) wit, and provide a superb opening to the fair.

Bitter Southern-Belleing – the Art of Kara Walker at Camden Arts Centre

Recent Films such as Django Unchained directed by Quentin Tarantino and former Turner prize winner Steve McQueen’s 12 Years have brought the horrific history of slavery into focus. Talking at the Toronto press conference of the film McQueen stated that “It’s one thing to read about slavery, to have these illustrations – but when you see it on celluloid and within a narrative, it does something different starts a conversation, wonderful, excellent, it’ll be about time… Yes, race is involved, but it goes beyond that.” In fact McQueen goes even further stating that the film, which includes harrowing scenes of extreme violence, is a “film about love…there is a lot of pain in love sometimes and you have to get through it. It’s the journey of Solomon Northup, who gets back to his family.”

Daniel Silver’s Dig

Katee Woods examines a derelict site near Tottenham Court Road and comes to some surprisingly Freudian conclusions about the lost civilisation she finds there.

Emerging from the derelict remains of the old Odeon site, Artangel’s latest commission Dig is presented as an archaeological excavation, unearthing hundreds of culturally diverse statues of human-like form. The arrangement of limbs and partial body parts is both museum-like and reminiscent of a butcher’s shop, yet without the context of the larger sculpture (that is to assume these are parts of a whole), these cuts of meat often remain unidentifiable. This sense of mystery and the unknown pervades throughout the exhibition.

Nathan James' Punchlines

Garageland reviewer Joe Turnbull pays a visit to Nathan James' exhibition Punchlines at KK Outlet and asks: 'just because the punchline's obvious, does that make it any less hilarious?'

It has been estimated that we are exposed to over 3000 advertisements every day. Small wonder then that our brains develop certain filtering mechanisms to deal with such a bombardment of images. Nathan James is all too aware of this, and in Punchlines he exploits it ruthlessly. On first glance his lush oil paintings Turning on the Water Works, Spring Break Fo'ever and Picnic Panic depict the voluptuous, too-perfect curves of a typical airbrushed ad or Hollywood pin-up. It's only once you take a step back that you realise these seductive figures are topped with grotesque cartoon faces, often contorted into guffawing poses.

Turning on The Water Works (2013) and Hey Girl (2013)

A Conversation with Beth Fox

Garageland reviewer Gala Knörr catches up with an old classmate to ask about the pitfalls of one-liner art and for some logistical solutions to transporting oversized Toblerone pieces.

I met Beth Fox whilst studying in the Central Saint Martins College of Art Master of Fine Art program a couple of years ago, a course on which numerous personalities, styles, mediums collided into one big ball of stress, nicotine addiction, thesis writing and art critiquing. 

Her work always stuck out when walking around the studios – extremely aware of its own flaws, almost innocently proud of its lack of craftsmanship and reflective of a humorous approach to how ridiculous life on the frontiers of the art world can sometimes be. When needed to give a lecture about her work to her peers, she simply imitated word-for-word the lecture of her previous classmate in front of the incredulous faces of her colleagues. From that moment on, I knew she would be one to watch.

A Snapshot of Frieze London

Mimei Thompson guides us through the inimitable Frieze London – her personal snapshot of the paintings at the art fair (and a lovely pair from the Sunday art fair too).

Sanya Kantarovsky at Mark Foxx, Los Angeles    

Allison Katz at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

Fragile but Never Tenuous

Recalling the exhibition In This Fragile Place at Vyner Street Gallery, Joe Turnbull asks what it was that wove the works together so well when so many group exhibitions fall flat.

Ineffectively curated multi-artist exhibitions either hang together awkwardly, tenuously strung up by a single common thread, or are crassly bunched together by a homogenising theme. In this Fragile Place at Vyner Street Gallery does both and neither at the same time. The result of a long and collaborative process by the three exhibiting artists, the show benefits from this more organic way of working, making the symbiosis between the pieces feel natural and complimentary rather than forced. And it is this sense of process which shines through, albeit in a haunting milky half-light, in each of the finished works.