Alan Huck I walk toward the sun which is always going down 2019
Lyrical, philosophical travelogue. He writes with a poet’s sensibilities, images of places, spaces with no human beings in them. simple and yet, and yet you’re entranced, you can’t simply glance at these, you want to follow him on his journey.
Thomas Demand The Dailies 2015
Demand’s paper sculptures, the trickery of photography making them seem not like models, Hal Foster’s meditations paired with them to devastating effect.
Joanna Piotrowska Frowst 2014
Black and white photos made to seem like nostalgic snapshots. awkward poses, claustrophobia, bodies intertwined like dancers in an uncomfortable embrace. Perplexing true tales that she tells through her lens.
William Claxton Young Chet 1993
Chet, crooner, cool, hot trumpeter Let’s Get Lost?, his velvety tones impossible to convey in the publicity photo sessions, but something else captured, the essence of his ambition, the indefinable presence of his magnetism, his charm, images showing people following their bliss as they dance with instruments.
Viviane Sassen Flamboya 2008
Images of Africans’ blue-black bodies by beaches captured with the light of Caravaggio, braggadocio, flamboyance. she stages snapshots of rumpled elegance.
Marina Abramovic 512 hours at Serpentine Gallery 2014
Observing one of Abramovic’s assistants walking around in a circle like a Zen Buddhist doing a moving meditation when the artist came over to me and said: can I explain to you the concept of the exhibition? our minds are like Ferraris, always racing at 100 miles per hour. this show is a chance for you to relax and just be. feel free to lie on one of the beds or do one of the meditations that my assistant is facilitating.
Nodded and thanked her. phones placed in lockers before you enter the show, a chance to really go with the flow of life
Cody Choi & Lee Wan Korean Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2017
Red lights, bordellos, Rancho Notorious, photos of stripper dwarves pole dancing making up one half. the other half Mr K and the Collection of Korean History a photo essay depicting someone’s images from the time South and North Korea were united till post-partition. as moving and as gripping as a rocket flying inexorably toward you
Damien Hirst Treasures from The Wreck of the Unbelievable. Palazzo Grassi & Punta Della Dogana Venice, 2017
A sculpture called “Hydra and Kali” is pictured during the press presentation of the exhibition “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” by British artist Damien Hirst at the Pinault Collection in Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi in Venice on April 6, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / MIGUEL MEDINA / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE – MANDATORY MENTION OF THE ARTIST UPON PUBLICATION – TO ILLUSTRATE THE EVENT AS SPECIFIED IN THE CAPTION (Photo credit should read MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images)
Playfulness, persistence ambition, dedication to a concept. sculptures so large, so epic the scale often jaw-dropping in palatial surroundings by a Venetian canal. buzzzzzzzzz: the audience flitting around stung by the barrage of his ideas.
Damien Hirst mid-career show at Tate Modern 2012
The pills, Mother and Child ?, The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the circle of life depicted in graphic detail: larvae turning into butterflies and being zapped to death as soon as they landed on a device made for electrocution. titles alluding in poetic ways to all kinds of scientific or art historical precedents. he floats like his butterflies and stings like …
The Chapman Brothers The Disasters of Everyday Life at Blaine Southern London 2017
THE GLEEFUL GAY ABANDON WITH WHICH THEY INTERVENED IN GOYA’s PRINTS, THE SUICIDE VESTS, THE COLLAGES. a tiny explosion in Mayfair, a surreal detonation in my heart
Juno Calypso A Thousand Years at TJ Boulting 2018
Atmospheric, 50s? piping through the speakers, glamour, insanity, cryonics. a haunting exhibition, real life weirder than fiction
Tim Walker Wonderful Things at the Victoria and Albert Museum 2019 to 2020
The Pink Room, curation as smooth and slick as a seal’s skin, an entrancing body of work that sashayed down the line between fashion photography and arty images, blurring those boundaries, collapsing the divisions
Sensation at the Royal Academy 1997
The LONG queue to get in, the lifesize, compelling Ron Mueck sculpture on the gallery floor; the captivating image made with the cast of a child’s hand of the repellant child murderer Myra Hindley; the elephant dung in Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary; Emin’s Everyone I have ever slept with 1963 to 1995. the show that catalysed my journey in art, the start, the lodestar.
Olafur Eliasson In Real Life 2019 at Tate Modern
Beauty: magic of a mist produced by the manipulation of light producing a rainbow merging and disappearing depending on the viewer’s movement.
Blind Passenger: fog in narrow corridor, where am I, what is this, what is going on?
Works that elevate by tangling with our minds, gently assaulting the senses
France-Lise McGurn Percussia at Simon Lee Gallery 2020
Dancing, prancing, lithe and lissom figures spilling out across canvas onto the gallery walls and ceilings. sensual provocations
Jordan Wolfson Colored Sculpture at Tate Modern 2016
Haunting, hallucinatory, hellish piece as a dark and disturbing, demonic puppet boy uttering imprecations is swung around by chains. Nightmare-inducing, violence embodied.
Benedicte Kurzen and Sanne De Wilde Land of the Ibeji at TJ Boulting 2019
Poetic photo essay on twins, Yoruba mythology, doppelgangers, the duality within each of us. Sculpture of twins and Yoruba music adding to the sense of a gesamtkunstwerk, the exhibition a master work.