Latest news with #YBAs
South China Morning Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Summer 2025 exhibitions: Rick Owens' unforgettable aesthetic, Jenny Saville's striking self-portraits, a focus on the history of kimonos, and Wolfgang Tillmans asks: are we prepared?
Rick Owens, Temple of Love Rick Owens' autumn/winter 2023 Luxor runway, one of the designer's unforgettable shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Photo: Handout American designer Rick Owens , who has called Paris home since 2003, is the subject and artistic director of an exhibition at Palais Galliera museum. Since moving to the French capital, the Los Angeles-born designer, who established his eponymous label in 1992, has been wowing his devoted fans with unforgettable shows, most of them held at the nearby Palais de Tokyo. The exhibition, titled 'Rick Owens, Temple of Love', will display more than 100 outfits, and also features Owens' personal archives, videos, art installations, and pieces from artists like Joseph Beuys and Steven Parrino. From June 28, 2025, to January 4, 2026. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting Jenny Saville took the art world by storm in the 1990s with paintings such as Propped (1992), which features in the current retrospective of her work. Photo: Gagosian Advertisement Jenny Saville rose to prominence in the 90s as one of the original Young British Artists (YBAs), who took the art world by storm with their often controversial work. Known for her large-scale figurative paintings, Saville had her first break with her graduation show at the Glasgow School of Art. 'Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting', an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, brings together more than 50 of her works, from oil paintings to charcoal drawings. From June 20 to September 7. Kimono A calendar by Yoshu Chikanobu (1910) is part of the exhibition 'Kimono' at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Handout The word 'kimono' means 'thing to wear' in Japanese, which is no surprise, since until relatively recently the wrapped-front garment was the most common form of clothing in Japan. Normally made from silk and embroidered with motifs such as flowers and birds, the kimono can be considered a piece of art, as the exhibition 'Kimono', at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, demonstrates. Comprising more than 70 pieces, the show also features creations from fashion designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. From June 4 to October 5. Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait Echo Beach (2017) from the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait', showing at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo: Handout Later this year, the Centre Pompidou, one of Paris' most visited museums and one of its most striking architectural landmarks, will close for an extensive renovation expected to last until 2030. Before the temporary closure, the museum will host an exhibition in collaboration with German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who was given carte blanche to reimagine the second floor of the museum's library. From photographs to videos, music and text, Tillmans' oeuvre will interact with the space envisioned by legendary architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Not much else is yet known about the show, titled 'Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait' (Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us). From June 13 to September 22.
Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Seeing Each Other review — Freud, Bacon, Emin and Kahlo all join the party
Looking is what artists do. But at what? At each other, endlessly, on the evidence of this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which looks back over 125 years at the ways that artists working in Britain have portrayed each other. It takes a broadly chronological approach to pick out specific relationships, friendships and social circles (the Slade School, which admitted women from its founding in 1868, mid-century Cornwall, the pop art scene and the YBAs are particularly rich veins) to reveal webs of connection — some more tangled than others — and to show how artists have used portrayals of their peers and heroes to pay homage. The first image, at the entrance, is a WANTED poster. Created in 2001 by
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Body of work: the transgressive art of Helen Chadwick
Helen Chadwick, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at the age of 42, has long been an artist more name-checked than exhibited. Her devotees include the lauded feminist mythographer Marina Warner, for whom she's 'one of contemporary art's most provocative and profound figures'. Yet she is habitually relegated to a footnote within British art: one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987 and an outstanding teacher of YBAs such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. She remains best known for Piss Flowers, her white bronze sculptures whose stalagmite protuberances are phallic inversions of vaginal recesses, cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. (The artist's hotter urine went deeper, creating larger cavities. She described the work as 'a penis-envy farce'.) It's easy to see how her transgressive interests might have quickened British art's pulse. Yet her meditations on the sacred and profane, sex and death, were expansive, propelling diverse experiments across installation, photography and performance. Now, her prolific if all too short career is getting its first major showing in more than two decades. At a time when gender binaries are being dismantled, Laura Smith, curator of a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, and editor of the accompanying book, hopes to make Chadwick's relevance to a fresh generation clear. 'She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity,' Smith says. 'She was really pioneering and she wasn't afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.' The exhibition opens with the decidedly fluid Cacao, one of Chadwick's most affecting evocations of how opposites such as desire and abjection entwine. It's a huge chocolate fountain set to be filled with 800kg of Tony's Chocolonely, which will gush from a central liquid erection. Needless to say, this brown pool evokes more than confectionery. 'It's joyous and kind of gross,' says Smith. 'It bubbles like a swamp. Basically, it farts.' Chadwick was also an inveterate craftsperson. The images of her MA graduation show of 1977, In the Kitchen, where she's encased in sculptural costumes of white goods, are often used to represent feminist art of that decade. What the pictures can't tell you is what went into those creations, including performances with wearable beds and latex nudity suits cast from their wearers' bodies. According to Errin Hussey, who's overseeing an exhibition in Leeds of her archive, 'the costumes really show the dedication she had. The intricacy of detail and planning that went into the textile and metalwork on just one shoe is amazing.' For her first major work, Ego Geometria Sum, she devised a novel way to embed shots of herself on to the plywood surfaces of sculptures by painting them with photographic emulsion. The Oval Court, part of the exhibition that led to her Turner nomination, took the experimentation further. She created its dreamy blue-and-white collage with a photocopier, making direct images of her own body alongside an apparent cornucopia of flowers, fruit and dead animals including lambs and a swan. Complementing this lusciously libidinal work is Carcass, a glass tower that, when originally shown at the ICA in 1986, was filled with dead animals' bodies, plus weeks of kitchen waste. When the gases generated by its live decomposition caused its glass to crack, and the gallery attempted to remove it, the lid blew off, spraying rot across the art space. (At the Hepworth, its vegetarian recreation features a gas valve so it can be 'burped like a baby' each night.) In what would be her final decade, frustrated by the heat she was getting from fellow feminists about her use of nudity, she abandoned depicting her outer body and looked within instead. Moving on from questions around objectified gender towards a polymorphous, fluid sexuality, in these works things are forever collapsing into their opposite, like Piss Flowers' erect recesses. As Smith reflects: 'In her thinking nothing was black and white.' Viral Landscapes, 1988-89In this work created after Chadwick stopped depicting her outer body, photography of Pembrokeshire's coast is overlain with images of cells taken from her urine, blood, cervix, mouth and ear. In the Kitchen, 1977 (main image)Chadwick's earliest works hinged on feminist concerns about constructed identity. For her MA degree show she and her performers donned sculptural costumes of white goods and made a tongue-in-cheek speech about 'kitchen lib' to a soundtrack of clips from daytime radio aimed at housewives. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Piss Flowers, 1991-92Chadwick's Piss Flowers first made a scatalogical twosome with her chocolate fountain sculpture Cacao at her exhibition Effluvia at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1994. The press had a field day but the show attracted record numbers to the venue: 54,000 visitors in six weeks. The Oval Court, 1984-86In this sculptural installation featuring collage on a large, low platform, the artist created a vision of baroque excess using blue-and-white images of her own body, flora and fauna made with a photocopying machine. Unlike the finger-wagging Vanitas paintings Chadwick drew on, its vision of life's transient pleasures mixed with death has a luxuriant, unbridled energy. Loop My Loop, 1991Chadwick had a genius for evoking the slippage between desire and disgust. Here, she entwines the age-old lover's keepsake, a lock of golden hair, with pig intestines. Airy romance meets bodily urges; the human entwines with the animal. Where does one begin and the other end? Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is at Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October; the book of the same name is published by Thames & Hudson (£30); Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist is at Leeds Art Gallery to 4 November.
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Plasticine men and giant goddess women: why Ken Kiff's brilliant, bizarre art is getting a second look
Ken Kiff was a brilliant odd one out in post-second world war British painting. In works that sing with colour and texture, he crafted wibbly-wobbly fables in which eyes and noses slide around faces, animals tower over mountains and dreaming, desiring, questing men are rendered poignantly goofy. Looking to modernist greats such as Klee and Miró, Kiff made colour a defining principle, mixing abstraction with recurring symbols culled from a private mythology that included birds, salamanders, mountains, water, goddess-like women and the 'Little Man', a diminutive chap with a bendy body vulnerable as plasticine, who walks a lonely path. His was a bombast-free take on life's agony and ecstasy, as idiosyncratic as it is relatable and human. When Kiff died aged 65 in 2001, his reputation was that of a bygone artist's artist, whose heartfelt dedication to his medium and the creative process was far removed from the arch, brash conceptual output of the then-dominant YBAs. Now, though, appreciation of his prolifically produced, personal work is growing afresh. 'He speaks to a younger generation, partly in terms of his mix of abstraction and figuration,' says Ella-Rose Harrison, the director of Hales Gallery, where a new exhibition looks back to his 18 months from 1992 to 1993 as 'associate artist' in residence at London's National Gallery. 'There's also a different engagement with his themes,' she adds, 'bringing the mythical into the everyday, or psychologically charged space.' Kiff was the second artist the National Gallery invited to respond to its art historical giants and it was a prestigious gig. Paula Rego was the first and Kiff was followed by Peter Blake. Yet he had reservations. 'He wasn't pro-institutions,' says Kiff's daughter, Anna. 'He was acutely aware it was a very masculine environment. He was from a working-class background and it wasn't his comfort zone.' For an artist who gloried in colour, the National Gallery's collection was also very brown. Working on site in a basement studio with his huge collection of cassettes playing everything from baroque harpsichord to jazz, Kiff went in search of what he called 'the essence' of paintings. He didn't make many sketches there, but rather 'looked intensely at paintings over and over and over', Anna explains. What drew him to work by artists including Rubens, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Pisanello or Giovanni di Paolo is always fresh and surprising. He had a particular thing for Rubens' trees. He paid attention to art's physicality, be it the wood something was painted on or a touch of gold pigment. A splash of colour from a muddy Renaissance landscape might inspire the dominant element in his own work. At times, his paintings adhere closely to the originals, adapting themes and figures that chimed with his own mythologies. John the Baptist, the hunter Saint Eustace or the hermit Saint Jerome might be loftier cousins of Kiff's lonely traveller. At others, his paintings seem to upend the assumptions of the past, as with Woman Watching a Murder, inspired by Bellini's brutal all-male scene The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr. Kiff takes the blue from a scrap of sky in Bellini's otherwise washed-out woodland setting to create an azure vision, where a tiny tussling couple are watched by a giant woman, sad and resigned. Kiff later wrote that he approached the National Gallery project as he did all his work, as 'many interlocking thoughts' which were visual not verbal. 'A painting doesn't become a painting because it conforms to rules of what a painting should be,' he continued, 'but because the 'thought' or 'understanding' has happened.' Ken Kiff: The National Gallery Project is at Hales Gallery, London, to 24 May White Tree, Large Face, 1990-1996Kiff has left the hardboard he painted on visible here. Anna recalls that he found it in keeping with 'the quality of darkness, the browns you find in a lot of old master painting'. The tree was inspired by Rubens but the face – literally falling apart – belongs to the modern world. Woman Watching a Murder, 1996This meditation in blue shows how Kiff used colour as a structuring principle, with its echoing forms and aqua shades. It also underlines his interest in the bleed between representation and abstraction, with the inky midnight morass in the background suggesting a cave or intangible dark thoughts. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion After Giovanni di Paolo, 1992-1993This is one of Kiff's paintings that sticks closely to its source inspiration, Giovanni di Paolo's Saint John the Baptist Retiring to the Desert. Its elements are close to those he was already exploring in his work, from the giant flowers or huge mountains dwarfing the isolated traveller to jarring shifts in scale. Master of St Giles, 1994In addition to paintings, Kiff also produced prints inspired by his time at the National Gallery, such as this woodcut teeming with earthy life that looked to works by an anonymous 16th-century artist known for depicting Saint Giles's friendship with a deer. 'This print encompasses so many things he found important,' says Anna, 'including our relationship to the environment.' Castle Rising from the Sea, 1993This etching showcases Kiff's renowned vivid palette, and speaks to the creative process, with its castle born from the waters of the sea. The sun is a recurring symbol in his work with connotations of enlightenment or inspiration. This one's no Apollo, though; it crawls along recalling one of Kiff's other favourite tropes: the salamander.
Euronews
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Tracey Emin's Sex and Solitude: An unmissable exhibition of love, loss and healing in Florence
ADVERTISEMENT Florence is a city that worships the body - smooth, perfect, immortalised in marble. But Tracey Emin has never been interested in perfection. In Sex and Solitude , her first major solo exhibition in Italy, she brings a different kind of body to Palazzo Strozzi - one that aches, bleeds, collapses, and survives. Wander into the courtyard of the Renaissance palace, built in 1489, and you'll find her colossal bronze sculpture I Followed You to the End (2024). The lower half of a fragmented female figure, two crumpled legs, dominates the space - a stark contrast to Florence's many triumphant bronzes, such as Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa , standing victorious in the Loggia dei Lanzi. Emin's sculpture, which was previously shown at London's White Cube Bermondsey last year, denies heroism. Instead, it is raw, broken, and heavy with vulnerability. Inside, Sex and Solitude unfolds as a non-chronological journey through more than 60 brilliant works spanning the 61-year-old artist's career - from early pieces that solidified her reputation as one of the most audacious voices in contemporary art to new works created in the wake of her battle with cancer. Paintings, drawings, film, photography, embroidery, sculpture, and neon come together across 10 thematically curated rooms. From personal pain to public view Emin first made waves in the 1990s alongside Damien Hirst , Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn, as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs), embracing an unapologetically personal approach to art. She turned her own experiences - heartbreak, childhood trauma, desire, self-destruction - into installations, paintings, and neon declarations that blurred the line between art and autobiography. 'She's a forerunner of feminist artists for sure,' Arturo Galansino, the director of the Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition, tells Euronews Culture. 'She touches on themes that are really relevant for all kinds of people, all kinds of life experience. And why? Because she's very sincere, because of her openness. There is no filter, there is no structure. We can identify ourselves in her sorrow, her pain, her strength, her bravery." Love Poem for CF by Tracey Emin (2007), on display at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska Stepping into the first room of the exhibition visitors are greeted with Love Poem for CF (2007), a neon work dedicated to Emin's great love of the '90s, gallery owner Carl Freedman. The giant piece glows in soft pink, its flickering light illuminating the space as it displays the raw intensity of her words: "You put your hand / Across my mouth/ But still the noise / Continues / Every part of my body / is Screaming / Smashed into a thousand / Million Pieces / Each part / For Ever / Belonging to you". As Galansino explains: "Neon is one of the most famous languages used by the artist. Neon is related to her youth in Margate, which was full of neon, in the shops, in the bars, in the restaurants. It's a part of her autobiography. And her writings have become really iconic. The strength of these texts is undeniable, and Tracey proves herself as both a great writer and a great poet." Words are at the core of Emin's art - not just in her neon pieces or appliquéd blanket pieces such as I do not expect , but in the way she titles her works. They're declarations, accusations and raw confessions. Neon always has a seedy connection. But then I think it's sexy too. It's spangly, it's pulsating, it's out there, it's vibrant... For me it's always had a beautiful allure Tracey Emin Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska The photographic series, 'Naked Photos', displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi. Credit: Ela Bialkowska In the next room is one of the show's centrepieces Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), a notorious performance-installation in which Emin locked herself in a room at a Stockholm gallery, stripped naked, and painted continuously for three and a half weeks (the time between menstrual cycles) under the watchful eyes of the public. For Emin, it was an act of artistic rebirth - after years of not painting following an abortion, she reclaimed her creativity. The installation has been faithfully recreated for Sex and Solitude - complete with paintings that appropriate iconic works by male artists like Picasso , Munch and Rothko , along with empty beer cans, a bowl of oranges, and hanging underwear. A three-piece photographic series, Naked Photos , documenting Emin's time spent in the room, accompanies the installation. Displayed on the wall behind the installation, a quote from Emin reads: "I stopped painting when I was pregnant. The smell of the oil paints and the turps made me feel physically sick, and even after my termination, I couldn't paint. It's like I needed to punish myself by stopping the thing I loved doing the most. I hated my body; I was scared of the dark; I was scared of being asleep. I was suffering from guilt and punishing myself, so I threw myself in a box and gave myself three and a half weeks to sort it out. And I did." A wide view of the room titled "Coming Down From Love" inside Tracey Emin's 'Sex and Solitude' exhibition Credit: Ela Bialkowska 'I waited so Long' 2022 by Tracey Emin Credit: Tracey Emin/Palazzo Strozzi Elsewhere, themes of love, sexual desire, suffering, spirituality, the afterlife, motherhood, and healing run wild. Her figurative paintings - torn by energy, colour, and abstraction dominate the show and its two defining forces: sex and solitude . One particularly attention grabbing painting, scrawled with a frustrated urgency, declares: "I WANTED YOU TO FUCK ME SO MUCH I COULDN'T PAINT ANY MORE." In perhaps the show's most intimate room, Emin turns her focus to the isolation and indeed solitude experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic - a period of collective uncertainty that held a uniquely profound significance for her. In the summer of 2020, she received a life-altering cancer diagnosis. A haunting series of paintings from this period depict interiors and self-portraits in a melancholic blue-grey palette. They take on a quiet, ghost-like quality. After extensive surgery, including the removal of her bladder, uterus, cervix, part of her bowels, and half of her vagina, Emin is now cancer free. Every image has first entered my mind, travelled through my heart, my blood—arriving at the end of my hand. Everything has come through me. Tracey Emin Tracey Emin poses ahead of the opening of her show 'Sex and Solitude' at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Palazzo Strozzi Wide view of the final room of Tracey Emin's 'Sex and Solitude' at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska For longtime admirers of Emin, the unmissable Sex and Solitude reaffirms her lifelong commitment to turning personal pain into raw, unflinching art. For newcomers, it's an introduction to an artist who has made vulnerability her greatest strength. But what seems like an intimate glimpse into her world is, in fact, an invitation to examine our own. As Emin has said before: "I want people to feel something when they look at my work. I want them to feel themselves. That's what matters most." Sex and Solitude runs until 20 July 2025 at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi.
