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The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Leonardo Drew review – are these towers of debris the ruins of America?
This place looks like a storm hit it. The winds have ripped up houses, shops, factories and art studios, whirled the pieces in a mighty twister and smashed them to earth in pulverised fragments. Now they scatter South London Gallery, towering over you in two random heaps, with other pieces gathered in clusters, floating on the walls, thrown all over the floor. Crunch, crunch – you can walk on broken bits of wood carpeting the ground, negotiating your way around bigger debris, as you inspect the ruins of America – and, sadly, of American art. Seven decades ago, Jackson Pollock put America at the forefront of abstract art with looping and spiralling vortices of energy that he created by pouring and flicking paint on to a horizontal canvas. Leonardo Drew grew up in a housing project in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 60s and is consciously influenced by Pollock, whose work he first saw in a book at his local library. Where Pollock threw paint, Drew scatters splintered wood, yet his sculpture can also be seen as painting, since before breaking up many of the boards and planks in this show, he painted them. The entire installation can be seen as a huge action painting in 3D. Drew even numbers his works like Pollock did: the alternative title of Ubiquity II is Number 436. But if action painting in the 50s was a freewheeling image of the improvisational American spirit, this is the debris of a shattered American dream. You get a sense, contemplating Drew's crafted rubble, of surveying the aftermath of a cataclysmic weather event or walking the streets of a US town obliterated by the latest freak hurricane or tornado. This is painfully resonant given the Trump administration's policy of active climate crisis denial, including the withdrawal of government funding for research. And, as the eerie silence of this world in smithereens, broken only by the wood cracking under your feet, reminds you, some of the most traumatic indicators of climate emergency, from storms to fires, have hit the US itself. Drew doesn't claim his art is political in any direct way: it is abstract. I'm reading Trump into it. But although I could go on like this, identifying artistic echoes and urgent themes, it's forced. This artwork is disappointing. On paper, and in photographs, Drew's work seemed spectacular, yet as soon as I walked into the gallery my heart sank. There's a lumpen, flat, unthreatening feeling to this show. It's as depressing as a destroyed town but without the danger or horror. In fact, it's hard to feel anything at all about an assemblage that fails to suggest motion, energy or life. When you enter the long, tall white space, the first disappointment is the way wooden items are stuck around the walls. They don't look like flying fragments propelled through space, but decorations on a bedroom wall. Some resemble cricket bats. One looks like a gun. Whatever they are meant to be, they are as radical as wrapping paper. The second blow to anyone seeking artistic fun is the sight of the two tottering heaps with a valley between them through which you can pass. 'Tottering' is inaccurate, for they are clearly not about to fall. You can see the scaffolding on which the artist has built his Towers of Babel. Everything is safely, staidly stuck in place. I'm not saying it should fall, but where is the dramatic tension? The only hint of danger or dynamism is in the starbursts around the floor. One looks like a fist of rapidly expanding matter. It makes you think of the exploding enemy plane in Roy Lichtenstein's painting Whaam! – which is itself an ironic homage to Pollock's action art. Maybe the contrast is deliberate, for Drew says his art is a meditation on entropy. So the energetic, propulsive assemblages may be newborn stars or fragments of the big bang. But the sagging heaps of crap are the universe approaching its death, Earth under an avalanche of garbage, America at the end of its time. Maybe so. But it's dreary to look at. It's not just at the macro scale that the installation appears inert. Every small chunk you look at, in the heaps, on the walls, has an arbitrary wanness up close. Nothing seems to mean much, or matter much. Perhaps Drew is simply crushed by these times. But it seems to me this work, with its conscious echoes of Pollock that fail to recapture the excitement or surprise of America's modern art glory days, is a symptom of a nation in cultural as well as political decline. Trump's America is a shell of what it once was. Americans were creatively brilliant not so long ago, pumping out the best art, novels, music. But this exhausted art looks to me like the product of a decaying country. South London Gallery from 30 May to 7 December
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Ahead of his time': Guyanese artist gets London show amid reappraisal
An artist whose work was part of the first wave of abstract art to hit the UK and presaged the climate breakdown protests as well as debates over the legacies of British colonialism is undergoing an 'overdue' reappraisal, according to experts and critics. Aubrey Williams, the Guyanese artist who moved to Britain in the 1950s, was a respected figure in his lifetime and the subject of several exhibitions in the UK. But after his death from cancer in 1990, the artist's influence and the legacy of his abstract painting has slowly faded from view in Britain. 'His work was very dramatic with the huge canvases, and the colour was intense always,' says Chili Hawes of October Gallery, the institution that represented Williams during his lifetime. 'There was nothing pale about his work. He loved the drama; he loved the colour.' Williams spent most of his time in the UK after arriving in 1952 and also had studios in Miami and Jamaica. He mingled with art's great and good, once meeting Picasso in Paris after being introduced by Albert Camus. 'He said that I had a very fine African head and he would like me to pose for him … he did not think of me as another artist,' was how Williams recalled the meeting. Despite Picasso's dismissal, Williams was a key player in the Caribbean Artists Movement (Cam), which emerged in the mid-1960s in Britain and was founded by West Indian artists, authors and playwrights. Cam had two main aims: forcing their work into the mainstream and debating what black art should be in the post-colonial 20th century. Alongside the likes of John La Rose, Althea McNish and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Williams took part in small meetings, dubbed 'warshis' by Williams, an Amerindian word he encountered in Guyana, which meant meetings where people 'unburdened' themselves. 'He was one of the ideas men in Cam,' says the academic Malachi McIntosh, who is currently writing A Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Britain, Black Power, and the Caribbean Artists Movement, a new history of Cam, for Faber. 'The big schism that broke Cam apart was between people who were saying art needs to be engaged in the community. Others, including Williams, said artists need to have complete freedom,' McIntosh added. As with his fellow Guyanese artist Frank Bowling who had his first major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2019, and McNish, who had her own major touring exhibition in 2022, Williams has undergone a resurgence in interest. In 2010, his work was included in a landmark Afro Modern show at Tate Liverpool; and between 2022 and 2024 there was a room dedicated to his work. At last year's Frieze Masters, Williams was given a coveted place in the 'Spotlight' section, with curators billing him as someone who had 'taken painting into new territories'. Earlier this year Yale University Press released a book that was co-edited by his daughter Maridowa Williams and included critical responses to his work, diary entries and poetry. 'There has been such a shift in the reception of those artists,' says Hawes. 'But Aubrey needs to be paid particular attention to, because he was ahead of his time. He talked about ecological matters … I think now is his time, in a sense.' October Gallery's artistic director, Elisabeth Lalouschek, points out that Williams's work would also take all sorts of turns, such as his interest in the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. 'When you look at the symphonies of Shostakovich he was trying to paint music in colour and in form, which is, of course, a very difficult task,' she says. A new exhibition of Williams's work is opening this week at October Gallery, which takes in several decades of his work and explains how he was hugely influenced by his time working as an agronomist in Guyana. He initially came to Britain to study agricultural engineering at Leicester University, and his interests in ecological matters and the ancient cultures of the Mayan, Aztec and Olmec cultures was a regular feature in his art. The author Anne Walmsley, wrote in her Guardian obituary of Williams, that his 'enquiring mind is continually focused on the relationship between man and nature, and the mythological mysteries echoed in artefacts of past civilisations'. Aubrey Williams: Elemental Force is on at October Gallery, 22 May to 26 July
CNA
18-05-2025
- Business
- CNA
This art collector went from running his own marketing firm to opening galleries in Hong Kong and London
Hong Kong native Calvin Hui always had a keen appreciation for visual arts, especially abstract art. What started as a hobby buying and collecting art that resonated with him, has turned into a lifelong passion. In 2011, he opened 3812 Gallery in Hong Kong, which specialises in Chinese contemporary art, particularly ink works. A few years later in 2018, he and his co-founder opened a gallery in London's Mayfair, which will be relocating to The Whiteley London this Summer. Hui reflected on his early days buying art: 'The first art piece I bought was a print lithograph by Juan Miro when I was a student. I collected 20th-century modern art, with the small amounts of money I earned from part-time jobs as a student. It has always been my passion.' When he set out to decorate his new home 20 years ago, Hui was on a quest to find and acquire more art. 'In addition to the decorative pieces I've collected earlier, I consider the first 'serious' work I bought to be Jar with Horizontal Colour Bars (2005), by an Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri. It is a large piece, measuring 2 sq m. To be honest, I didn't do much research. It fit my budget and matched my home interiors perfectly. That marked the beginning of my journey as a serious collector.' After his first acquisition, Hui continued to expand his knowledge about art by reading, going to exhibitions, and museums and subsequently attending fairs, thus growing his collection. As Hui's collection grew, unexpectedly, he received a message from a gallery about one of the artists whose work he had purchased; the value of that artist's pieces had skyrocketed at auction. This experience deepened his interest in learning more about art and collecting. Before opening his gallery in 2011, Hui ran his own public relations, events, and marketing company. As his collection grew, he saw an opportunity to showcase the artists' works in a gallery setting. Hui attributes his gallery success to his skillsets as a communications graduate. 'It was a natural progression transitioning from a PR, events and marketing professional to an art business as a gallery owner, curator, dealer and collector,' he said. 'My skills and experience have been incredibly beneficial to my art business; the storytelling, introducing artists and connecting with people came naturally to me.' His foray into the auction market was an organic process that unfolded over several years. He became more involved in the art market beyond just collecting. He described the art scene in Hong Kong during his time as a collector, before opening his gallery in 2011: 'It was all very organic. There were no art fairs, no Art Basel, and no established gallery districts in Hong Kong. I had the opportunity to meet with art institutions, get to know the community, and eventually began writing about art collections.' Hui finds immense joy in art collecting, viewing it as a deeply personal journey enriched by the memories associated with each piece. 'Every work I add to my collection — from travels or when enhancing my office or gallery — carries specific moments tied to the people I'm with and the places I've been,' he reflected. As Hui expanded his personal collection, he delved deeper into the art industry, educating himself about the market and discovering that art can serve as both an asset and an investment. Yet, his passion and joy for collecting transcends monetary value. 'Personally, when you purchase and collect art, when you live with art and appreciate its aesthetics daily, that's what truly holds value for me. If its price appreciates, that's just a bonus.' A particularly cherished part of his collection features works by the late artist Hsiao Chin, who was not only a master of modern art but also a personal friend. 'His ability to blend Chinese culture and Eastern spirit with modern abstract art resonates with me. Hsiao Chin created distinctive and meaningful pieces throughout his lifetime.' Hui has two hats on when collecting, one for his passion and the other for the gallery. He is always on the lookout for emerging artists, to support them, providing a platform to showcase their talents. 'I'm proud to feature several young artists in our portfolio. I assess their talent, commitment, and professional attitude, all while envisioning their long-term development. My goal is to guide these young talents as they navigate their artistic careers.' The works of self-taught Hong Kong artist Thomas Ngan have piqued Hui's interest. There are plenty of choices in the market and Hui does his due diligence. 'Once I collect, I will commit to following the artist's journey. Visiting exhibitions and art fairs is integral to discovering new talents. I can be quite impulsive, but I usually do my homework before purchasing. I keep my passion for collecting art for my personal collection and at the same time, I want to see how each artist develops their art and the unique artistic ideas and concepts they are trying to convey. Aesthetic quality, craftmanship and techniques are very important.' Hui's collection mainly features paintings — ink and Western, most of them focused on Chinese contemporary modern art, along with a selection of European works. Hui believes the rule of collecting is, 'leading by the heart first and foremost. Whatever is visually captivating and speaks to you. You need to like it and connect to the artwork, it should bring you joy looking at it, rather than seeing it purely for investment. Art is unique. It's not just a commodity. The best case scenario is that you appreciate it and see it as a long-term investment, instead of a short-term trade.' Hui's advice on how to start collecting is to start with a budget and define preferences — themes, and mediums. 'Affordable art fairs are a good place to start, define what you like and then go in search of it. Today with social media and the internet you can find plenty of information, but I recommend going physically to the museums, and art fairs and talking to people to help you understand what you like, and it might also help you learn about market trends.' View this post on Instagram A post shared by 3812 Gallery (@3812gallery) Besides his ongoing quest to expand his personal collection, Hui is curating Light of Hope – Hsiao Chin 90th anniversary retrospective exhibition of the late artist Hsiao Chin at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou that runs from now till Aug 17, 2025. This showcase celebrates the prolific works of Hsiao Chin, one of the pioneers of post-war abstract art, featuring pieces that date back to the 1950s. Simultaneously, he is preparing for the opening show at his new London gallery at The Whiteley, highlighting the Paris-based Chinese artist Ma Desheng. Having collected Ma's work for 20 years, Hui has developed a close friendship with the artist and now represents him in both Hong Kong and London. The behaviour of collecting can quickly become addictive regardless of the items one collects. 'It's the thrill of treasure hunting, reading stories about the pieces – it's all part of the pleasure of collecting,' he said. 'When I find something I really like and have faith in the artist, I find myself diving deeper into the fulfilling journey of learning and acquiring their works.'
Washington Post
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
This artist can't speak aloud. His work says it all.
Charles Lenny Lunn creates bright abstract paintings and develops thoughtful messages for each one. But he can't verbally tell viewers the meanings. Born with a rare genetic condition linked with autism, apraxia — a neurological disorder that impacts his speech — and other developmental challenges, Lunn, 34, of Bethesda, Maryland, cannot speak. He paints and then, with a communications specialist, taps to letters on a laminated piece of paper to spell out what he wants to convey. The specialist then types his words on a computer screen.
