Hawick film festival celebrates region's textile history
The film, called On Weaving, is the work of 2012 Turner Prize nominee, Luke Fowler and 2014 Max Mara prize winner, Corin Sworn.It features the current owners of the Kleins former home, talking about them and the story of the textile industry in the Borders.Mr Pattinson said he was delighted to have the film as part of this year's festival."The film is a rich portrait of the Klein home as well as of active sites of textiles production in the Scottish Borders," he said."Its use of analogue film to capture these places in all their colour and texture provides a lasting snapshot of our region's architectural and industrial heritage."
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The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
Painting by Chris Ofili to be auctioned for first time and expected to fetch up to £1.5m
An important work by the Turner prize-winning British artist Chris Ofili, featuring his signature use of elephant dung, will be auctioned for the first time at Christie's in October. Blossom (1997), a portrait created a year before Ofili became the first black artist to win the Turner prize in 1998, is estimated to sell for £1m to £1.5m. The piece blends sacred iconography with popular culture and African symbolism, using Ofili's signature materials of glitter, resin and elephant dung. Tessa Lord, the head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie's London, which is selling the work on 20 October, said: 'This is one of the most exciting paintings that I've worked with in a long time. Ofili's works are large-scale works that are rare to auction.' Ofili's painting will come under the hammer alongside four works by the Scottish painter Peter Doig, which will also be offered at auction for the first time: Ski Jacket, Country Rock, Concrete Cabin and Yara. Other notable works in the collection include 1981-82 by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Hon (She) by the Danish artist Karin Mamma Andersson. Ofili was born in Manchester and is of Nigerian descent. He studied at the Chelsea College of Arts and the Royal College of Art. In 2003, Ofili represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. He is based between London, New York and Trinidad. Blossom was exhibited in 2010 as part of Ofili's mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain, the most extensive display of his work to date. It was also included in the 2014-15 survey at the New Museum in New York. The painting draws upon traditional ideas of the mother and child, depicting a woman with an exposed breast, crowned by an orange flower placed in her afro. On the left-hand side, the painting's title, Blossom, is vertically spelled out, inscribed into spheres of elephant dung. 'The surface is extraordinary,' said Lord. 'It's got these almost pointillist textured dots all over the surface and resin that creates these layers that are really, in person, quite beautiful.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion The piece is from an 'important year' in the artist's career, said Lord. Ofili's 1997 solo exhibition, which showcased in the Southampton City Art Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, 'cemented his nomination on to the Turner Prize in 1998, which he won'. As well as being the first black artist to win the prize, Ofili was the first painter in more than a decade to win the award. 'Previously it had been quite conceptual, so Ofili really represents the strength of British painting in that 90s, early 2000s moment.' The collection is owned by Ole Faarup, a late Danish design entrepreneur and philanthropist who acquired Blossom in 1997. The entire collection was assembled over a period of 50 years. All proceeds will go to the Ole Faarup Art Foundation, which aims to support young Danish artists by placing their works in museums around the world. 'The masterpieces in the collection are the works by two British artists,' said Lord. Ofili and Doig had a 'personal connection'. Having first met as students at Chelsea College of Arts, Doig would later stay with Ofili in Trinidad in the early 2000s, an experience that inspired the work Yara, which is up for auction in the collection. Ofili's style is often considered 'punk art' and is influenced by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Guston. His work has garnered attention for its brazenness and provocation, particularly for the frequent use of elephant dung and pornographic imagery. His painting The Holy Virgin Mary attracted controversy in 1998 for its depiction of a Black Madonna surrounded by images from blaxploitation films and pornographic magazines. It was sold for £2.9m at Christie's. 'We really haven't had something like this or a work of this quality since 2015 when we sold The Holy Virgin Mary,' said Lord.
Time Out
08-08-2025
- Time Out
Tai Shani: ‘The Spell or The Dream'
'The sleep of reason produces monsters'. It's a perpetually instructive aphorism that artists have repeatedly returned to. Francisco Goya used it to name one of his most well-known etchings from the late 18th century, depicting a character whose head rests on a desk, surrounded by shadowy creatures. Centuries later, in 2008, British artist Yinka Shonibare borrowed the image and title for another body of work. And now, the Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani's new commission for Somerset House takes the ongoing sleep of reason as its starting point. In the grand Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court, she has installed a ten-metre-tall blue figure, who lays supine, gently breathing with closed eyes. We're told that this ethereal, childlike giant has slept through 'warnings of present and imminent catastrophes, political and social disaster and environmental collapse.' Watching its stomach peacefully rising and falling, it's easy to believe that ignorance is bliss. Here is a deft balance of content and form Encased in an illuminated casket-like glass box, the figure – the dreamer – is clothed in white lace and mesh. Visitors are invited to step onto its plinth for a closer look at the beautiful hand- painted sculpture, which is both imposing and delicate. On one end, its feet are each the size of a toddler; on the other, flushed cheeks and pink lips give the impression of a fairy tale princess. The Sleeping Beauty parallel is emphasised by an otherworldly, subtly swelling soundscape by the composer Maxwell Sterling, the son of the mononymous artist Linder, whose first London retrospective recently took place across the river at the Hayward Gallery. Though the figure lies alone in the courtyard, it's actually just half of Shani's commission. The Dream Radio is an accompanying online broadcast co-curated by the artist, including newly commissioned work by a diverse array of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers, including poet Eileen Myles, fellow Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, musician Brian Eno and the ex-Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. In this second section, Shani moves beyond a hand-wringing depiction of sleep as a symbol of ignorance. Here, she is joined by a chorus of voices in celebrating its radical possibilities: dreams. The commission is further accompanied by a busy events programme, highlights of which include panel discussions on environmental and economic future models and philosophy seminars for children. Public sculpture often enriches the urban landscape, but rarely does it amount to the kind of engaging flashpoint that The Spell or The Dream will be. Shani's work is neither embittered nor unimaginative – two criticisms that have become fashionable to level at political art. In fact, it's the opposite. Art with a message often risks being didactic, prioritising its statement over its aesthetic experience. Here, though, is a deft balance of content and form: a nuanced message, contained within immediately impressive and accessible art.
Times
30-07-2025
- Times
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review — a master rights some wrongs
Andy Goldsworthy is imaginative, inventive, poetic, hard-working, big-hearted and brave. He has been making art for 50 years. Nature loves him, people who have seen his work in books love him, people who go to his exhibitions love him, I love him, my wife loves him, and so do my kids. But for reasons we need to go into, the art establishment does not. Indeed, it ignores him. He has never been nominated for the Turner prize. He's not in the Royal Academy. He hasn't received an MBE or an OBE, let alone been knighted or damed like the Gormleys, Kapoors or Emins. He has never had a show at the Tate or the Hayward. No one has asked him to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. For 50 years Goldsworthy has been making art that touches the heart and delights the eye. But the art establishment can't see it. Why? One reason is that his work is centred on the landscape, and the art establishment, these days, is an urban beast. Sheep don't fret about their identities. Trees don't remember the empire. Farmers don't express themselves with their clothing as relentlessly as Leigh Bowery did, night after night, club after club, in the posthumous show he had recently at Tate Modern. Another problem is the delightful nature of Goldsworthy's art: that it is so easy to love. The gorgeous patterns he finds in autumn leaves, the magical moments he creates with nature's simplest materials, the ecstatic understanding he has of the joy of colour are not neurotic enough to appeal to the art world's tastes. It sees itself as a complex ally of the ego, not a joyous buddy of the id. It hungers for difficulty, rigour, unpleasure. So my advice to the commissars of the art establishment, to Tate directors and Serpentine curators, is to get yourselves to Edinburgh and visit Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years at the Royal Scottish Academy. It's a look at the whole of his lengthy career, but also a statement show that seems determined to stamp out the rumour that he's a softie. The real Andy Goldsworthy — hardcore, thoughtful, mysterious — is being encouraged to emerge. It begins spectacularly with a long and shaggy sheepskin rug running down the centre of the posh stairs that welcome us to the Royal Scottish Academy. Infused with the stony rigour of the Scottish Enlightenment, carved out of local granite, the posh stairs speak of privilege and rank, politeness and empire. Goldsworthy's rug, meanwhile, ascending shaggily step by step, speaks of muddy fields and the dirty bottoms of sheep. Two worlds are colliding, and societal sparks are flying. The attack continues with the next sight, a filigree of delicate lines stretching between the portentous Doric columns that loom over the entrance. What is it? A silk hanging? A beaded embroidery? As you get closer, you finally recognise it: barbed wire. From many fields and with many patinas. For the first time in its unpleasant history, the vicious outdoor fencing has been woven by an industrious spider into a curtain of fragile beauty. • Like nature itself, the show keeps switching moods. Gravestones, a lumpy gallery full of rocks that appear to have emerged from beneath the floor, like the biblical prophecy about the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days, is doomy and gothic. It's made out of stones dug up in the cemeteries of Dumfries and Galloway. But Sheep Paintings, two panels of cosmic swirlings with a perfect circle at their centre, feels druidically mystical, like that installation with the setting sun at Tate Modern by Olafur Eliasson. Goldsworthy's solar discs were actually created by the muddy feet of sheep feeding around a perfectly circular food trough. In his student days Goldsworthy worked on a farm, where he learnt a respect for labour and inherited an appreciation for the seasons. Despite their many moods, his installations are invariably centred on a simple piece of geometry: a circle, a square, a line. Oak Passage seems, from its first angle, to be an impenetrable tangle of branches. But as you walk round you see that its centre is dissected by a miraculously straight path. Man and nature are doing their thing in evident harmony. Most readers will know Goldsworthy's work from the sumptuous photography books he produced in the 1990s. They were popular and are, I suspect, the chief reason the art world took against him: it dislikes crowd-pleasers. Some of those images are on show here as well — a mysterious zigzag in the earth created with the feathers of a heron; a bottomless hole in a tree fashioned from autumn leaves. Rather than shining glossily in a coffee table book, they hang coolly on the gallery walls, part of a thoughtful photographic encapsulation in which the rigour that went into their production is easier to note. They remain beautiful — what a nose he has for the intensity of nature's colours — but their ambition to record a fleeting moment is much more evident. The job of this gorgeous photography is to record a natural performance that would otherwise be lost. All through the event there's a feeling that the artist is trying to right some wrongs: a sense of correction. Here, finally, the truth is being projected that he is, at heart, a minimalist: a lover of geometry's simplest order. But where most minimalists are urbanites, searching for industrial precision with industrial materials, he's a rural minimalist who finds order and simplicity in nature. If it's not there, he inserts it into the chaos. And like all great landscape artists — and he's certainly one of those — he's bringing the outdoors indoors. It's a traditional British ambition. It deserves far greater recognition that it has hitherto received.
