Search results

The Essex-Suffolk borderlands have always produced and attracted great artists, and the association of contemporary artists and craft workers within this part of England is equally significant. Yet until recently there has been no major arts centre which could highlight that heritage. Firstsite is that building: located in Colchester, Britain's fastest growing town, the building is designed by international architect Rafael Vinoly. Opened in September 2011, it is a model for arts-led urban regen...

Showcases familiar and little-known paintings from The Royal Collection and other public and private houses across the country Charles II's reign was a period of revolutionary experimentation: in science, art and sexual etiquette. For the first time in British history, Royal mistresses - such as Nell Gwyn - played an active, public role in court life. Women sensed new possibilities and freedoms, appearing on stage, managing their own financial, matrimonial - and extra-marital - affairs. Encourag...

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs....

A medium that has often been characterized as more craft than art, clay is now an exciting platform for formal and conceptual innovation. Traditionally diverged from engagement with popular culture, clay is now adding a new dimension to Pop Art. Paralleling current concerns in painting, many of the thirty-eight artists featured in Clay Pop are also exploring issues of gender, race, and identity, using clay in novel ways to engage with social issues. Artists are employing the medium to create a...

Textile art and political power Soft Power celebrates the ability of textiles to store and communicate a multiplicity of (hi)stories that act as a disruptive force against dominant social and cultural narratives. The political entanglements inherent to the medium demonstrate the power of textile art to move people, things, stories, and ideas in and out of visibility. Soft Power does not focus solely on textiles as hand-crafted or industrially-fabricated objects, but understands them as being a...

A brilliant exploration of fashion’s complex engagement with the great art and artifacts of Catholic faith and practice   Since antiquity, religious beliefs and practices have inspired many of the masterworks of art. These works of art have, in turn, fueled the imagination of fashion designers in the 20th and 21st centuries, yielding some of the most innovative creations in costume history. Connecting significant religious art and artifacts to their sartorial expressions, Heavenly Bodies: Fashio...

This fresh look at photorealism argues for its continued relevance today This volume, Ordinary People, recovers the social art history of the long-dismissed genre of photorealism and demonstrates the continued relevance of photorealist strategies for artists working today. Spanning the 1960s to the present, this large-scale reexamination of the postwar art movement features the work of more than 40 artists, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and murals. It recasts the work of canonical a...

Poetics as artistic practice and world-making: practitioners from Bernadette Mayer and Sky Hopinka to Liliane Lijn and Shanzhai Lyric explore the wilder, parapoetic shores of language Through work by artists and poets of various generations and geographies, as well as additional thinkers and artistic contributors, SIREN considers the ways in which language is increasingly employed by artists in works that trouble the line between language as a literary practice and language as a visual one. Bot...

The Dutch Republic in the 17th century was home to one of the greatest flowerings of painting in the history of Western art. Freed from the constraints of royal and church patronage, artists created a rich outpouring of works that circulated through an open market to patrons and customers at every level of Dutch society. The closely observed details of daily life captured in portraits, genre scenes and landscapes offer a wealth of information about the possessions, activities and circumstances t...

A fascinating examination of Caravaggio and others who adopted his dramatic style of painting The Italian painter known as Caravaggio (1571–1610) claims a place among the most revolutionary figures in the history of art. His intense naturalism, almost brutal realism, and dramatic use of light had a wide impact on European painters, including Orazio Gentileschi, Valentin de Boulogne, and Gerrit van Honthorst. Each of Caravaggio’s followers absorbed something different from his work, propagating h...

A visual exploration between the work of acclaimed photographer Dirk Braeckman (1985) and symbolist painter Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946). The omnipresence of the colour black, in its myriad shades and nuances, defines their works and adds a nuanced layer to their shared artistic expression. Braeckman’s black-and-white photographs convey a sense of stillness, and combine intimacy and distance to create a private, secluded world whose meaning remains undefined. Text in English and Dutch. Images © D...