Highlights include Michael Bracewell‘s three-part homage to Richard Hamilton, an insightful interview with Richard Deacon, Nicholas Cullinan‘s introduction to Tate Modern’s upcoming Henri Matisse exhibition, Brian Dillon on Ruin Lust, Michael Bird on Lynn Chadwick, Patrick Keiller on D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson‘s influential On Growth and Form, Bice Curiger on Urs Fischer’s clay pots and Kathy Noble on the art of ambiguity.
To coincide with the forthcoming retrospective at Tate Modern of Richard Hamilton, one of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century, author Michael Bracewell pays homage on three fronts to a man who continued to experiment and innovate over the 60 years of his career.
The leading British sculptor Richard Deacon, who first gained international prominence in the early 1980s, is the subject of an important retrospective at Tate Britain. His work in many media—steel, foam, rubber, chrome, leather, marble, as well as drawings—shows a lifelong interest in the potential of his materials to reflect his fascination for communication through form. He talks to Simon Grant about his influences—from toys and mathematics to caves, carved Buddhas and Donald Judd.
The forthcoming exhibition of Henri Matisse‘s ground-breaking paper cut-outs, made between 1943 and 1954, is the most comprehensive to date. With more than 120 works, many seen together for the first time, it shows the artist at the height of his inventive powers in the last decades of his life, as co-curator Nicholas Cullinan writes.
Writer and critic Brian Dillon explores the forthcoming Tate Britain show Ruin Lust, which draws primarily on Tate works, explores artists’ and subsequently photographers’ fascination with the ruin, via works from JMW Turner to Tacita Dean and Jane and Louise Wilson and William Henry Fox Talbot to Paul Nash.
Feted as the natural successor to Henry Moore, Lynn Chadwick‘s sculptures were collected across the globe, before his reputation at home declined in the face of changing taste. However, his work is making a long overdue comeback. Coinciding with the centenary of his birth, author Michael Bird catches “the burned breath of white-hot iron and the anvil song.”
Jackson Pollock kept a copy of it on his bookshelves, while artists such as Henry Moore, Wilhelmina Barns Graham and Richard Hamilton were inspired by it. Why has On Growth and Form, written in 1917 and described by its author D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson as an “easy introduction to organic form,” been such a powerful influence on artists, as well as architects and designers, across the decades? Writer Patrick Keiller, who cites the book as one of his favourites, gives an insight into its enduring legacy.
A Swiss-style chalet made from bread; an excavated gallery floor; life-like wax figures that double as candles… Urs Fischer’s irreverent and compelling installations and sculptures have also recently included inviting members of the public to create clay sculptures—with extraordinary results, as Bice Curiger investigates.
While art is by its very nature ambiguous in its interpretation, post-Second World War culture led to a radical change in the way reality was constructed, broadcast and disseminated. Curator Kathy Noble explores the artists who question reality through social, political and sexual identity.
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