This show, Dirty Looks: Desire & Decay in Fashion, currently on at The Barbican, covers many aspects of contemporary fashion’s fascination with desire and dirt, historically known as la nostalgie de la boue. The dresses above were buried with iron filings, letting chemical reactions do their work, before being exhumed and are from the early […]
Places
Dirty Looks at the Barbican Gallery. Post 1 of 2.
This show, Dirty Looks: Desire & Decay in Fashion, currently on at The Barbican, covers many aspects of contemporary fashion’s fascination with dirt and desire, historically known as la nostalgie de la boue. Life time and the body itself all conspire against the perfection that fashion can aspire to. Solitude Studios bury fabric into peat […]
Encounters: Giacometti and Mona Hatoum. Barbican
This exhibition is the second in a series of three, where contemporary artists engage with the work of Alberto Giacometti. Titled Encounters, they are at the Barbican’s new gallery on level 2. I wrote about the first one in an earlier post which featured Huma Bhabha. This time it is the turn of British-Palestinian artist […]
Jenny Saville at the National Portrait Gallery
The Anatomy of Painting, Jenny Saville‘s retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery was one of the must-see shows of the summer for anyone interested in painting. The exhibition covers her career from early works including this piece below, Propped, one of her graduate show paintings. It was originally displayed opposite a mirror to enable the […]
Artist Rooms: Richard Long at Tate Modern
Richard Long is the current artist at The Artist Rooms at Tate Modern. He’s one of those artists whose work makes me slow down and breathe more slowly, something increasingly necessary in our current times. One of his mud paintings, Waterfall Line, is painted directly onto the gallery wall and exudes an energy that I […]
Alien Shores at White Cube Bermondsey
Alien Shores was a group show running over the summer at White Cube Bermondsey It explored contemporary interpretations of landscape, not something I was expecting to be gripped by but I was completely wrong. I’d planned to pop in quickly but ended up spending a substantial amount of time there as it was so engaging. […]