Our pick of this week’s art events: 29 May - 4 June
Our pick of this week’s art events: 29 May - 4 June
RA Recommends
By Eleanor Mills
Published 29 May 2015
From Ryoji Ikeda’s immersive installation at Brewer Street Car Park to the design icons from the Arts and Crafts Movement, we take you through our top shows this week.
-
Last Chance – Ryoji Ikeda: supersymmetry
Brewer Street Car Park, Soho, London, until 31 May 2015
For Remembrance week last November a huge column of white light shot up from Westminster Palace Gardens; it was spectra, an audiovisual masterpiece by Japanese artist-composer Ryoji Ikeda. If you missed that, then don’t miss this – Ikeda’s installation supersymmetry on the top floor of Brewer Street Car Park.Following a residency at CERN, the world’s leading particle physics research centre, Ikeda has created a site-specific intoxicating environment: a pitch black room with three glowing white platforms containing waves of dark matter moving to a soundscape. Walk into the next room, behind black curtains, and feel like you’re witnessing the split-second-to-split-second analysis of the Big Bang. Ikeda has created a truly sophisticated interpretation of quantum physics.
-
Duane Hanson
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 2 June– 13 September
Twentieth-century sculptor Duane Hanson (1925-96) brought the 19th-century realism of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet up to date in his hyper-real sculpture of modern-day Americans engaged in mundane tasks. Works like Flea Market Lady (1990/94, below) draw from a rich visual heritage about the nobility of toil. By representing the American working-classes in this way, in a white space, as art, Hanson raises their status, just like Millet and Courbet did 100 years earlier.
-
Agnes Martin
Tate Modern, London, 3 June – 11 October 2015
American artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004) painted Minimalist canvases, though her works are titled emotively, like Gratitude (2001, below), where peaceful green evokes harmony, and strips of yellow, pink and white conjure the actions of giving and receiving. This summer Tate Modern readdresses this seminal painter, an important female figure in the male-dominated art world of the 1950s and 60s.
-
Architect-Designers: From Pugin to Voysey
Fine Art Society, London, 3 – 25 June
At the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, William Morris and his life-long friend and fellow Arts & Crafts designer William De Morgan paved the way for a patterned future, producing decorative fabrics, wallpaper and tiles on a commercial scale. The Fine Art Society shows excellent examples of their design, including this tile panel by De Morgan – depicting parrots and intertwined snakes, c.1890 – as well as objects by Arts & Crafts-minded architects of the period such as Charles Voysey and Augustus Pugin.
-
London Festival of Architecture
Locations across London, 1 – 30 June 2015
During the month of June, the capital will host pop-up projects, workshops, talks, pavilions and open studios examining a range of themes behind building, urban regeneration and how art works with architecture. In the festival’s first week, you’ll notice two temporary structures erected at King’s Cross (below) by four Irish architects practices – these will host talks, performance and events by emerging Irish design talent.
-
Weng Contemporary
40 Elcho Street, Battersea, London, until 7 June 2015
Weng Contemporary has pitched up camp south of the river, nestling in Battersea nearby the Royal College of Art, Norman Foster RA’s HQ and Will Alsop RA’s creative warehouse studio-space Testbed. Founded by Rudiger Weng, a German contemporary fine art collector and dealer, Weng Contemporary stages a show of original prints to launches a new website www.wengcontemporary.com selling limited editions by internationally-renowned artists such as Gary Hume RA (below) and Alex Katz. One of a few new platforms selling prints, including the RA’s own Art Sales scheme, this initiative helps mark the beginning of an era where it becomes acceptable to not see a work of art in the flesh before purchasing.
-
One More Time: Cornelia Parker RA
St Pancras Station, London, from 28 May
One More Time by Cornelia Parker RA has been installed this week in St Pancras Station, London, for six months. This is the first in a series of site-specific art works by Royal Academicians that will be staged at the station, commissioned by the RA in collaboration with HS1 Ltd, the owners of St Pancras. Parker has created a black replica of the huge Dent clock at the head of the platform, hanging the copy a few metres in front. As visitors arriving at St Pancras walk down the platform, Parker’s black clock conceals the original like a solar eclipse.
-
Eleanor Mills (@slinkissimo) is Assistant Editor of RA Magazine.