Monday November 5th Haunch of Venison
Back down in London again this week. Yesterday, I went to visit the studio of artists Colin Lloyd and Simon Ford near Todmorden, Lancs- a beautiful converted mill in a tranquil semi- rural location, and a great space- Colin and Simon are looking to set up a company offering bespoke reproduction/multiple services to artists, and I wanted some advice about my latest work.
I took along my collection of industrial posters from the 50s and 60s, as I want to do some new work making interventions with the imagery , reinventing them as new works. They are extraordinary things-with colour and design very typical of their times, and about shamelessly promoting industry and factories as modern, clean, and efficent – a now-lost time when Britain still manufactured products!!!! The artwork is extraordinarly inventive. Colin and Simon have the expertise to advise me on how to reproduce them so the originals are not lost-They gave me lots to think about, particularly about selecting parts of the posters to manipulate and how they might be reproduced. Very excited and want to move this work forward as soon as possible.
In London, I had a busy afternoon seeing shows-all in the Bond Street/Green Park area – Guiseppe Penone installation at one of now multiple branches of Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street, (Guiseppe Penone is one of the ‘Arte Povera’ (Poor Art) artists-a movement I’m really interested in ; Kiki Smith ‘Behold’ at the new Timothy Taylor Gallery at Carlos Place (some exciting new work utilising craft processes including tapestry , stained glass and blue/turquoise patinated aluminium stars), and Andrew Mackenzie contemporary scottish landscape paintings at Sarah Myerscough Gallery, Brooks Mews (just behind Claridge’s).
The highlight was a show by young Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, who will be representing P0rtugal at the 2013 Venice Biennale (which I hope to see with our University of Salford students), showing at Haunch of Venison-New Bond Street-huge quirky sculptures combining Portuguese tile structures with knitted and croqueted organic forms intersecting them.
Also visited Phillips de Pury Gallery on Brook Street which had a selection of work for auction, and Annely Juda on Dering Street which reminds me of galleries in New York-all ash floors and elevated views of central London out of the windows, showing Sigrid Holwood and Duan Jianyu paintings and extraordinary domestic objects made of paper.
Nearly got stuck in Oxford Street for the big Christmas lights switch-on!!
