What We Learned This Week
It’s all eyes on Basel this week, as the mammoth art fair opened on Tuesday, with 290 galleries exhibiting. Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid (who is interviewed in Elephant Issue 33), is showing with London gallery Hollybush Gardens. Her work has attracted a lot of attention at the fair, with reports that the majority sold on the first day. This success coincides with the announcement that Himid will also have a solo show at New York’s New Museum in 2019, which sends a powerful message of strong—and newfound—visibility for the black, 64-year-old artist, following a long period outside of the art market at large.
Black artists Rashid Johnson and Martine Syms also have a strong presence in Basel’s Unlimited section, where projects that go beyond the traditional art-stand model are hosted, from large-scale installation to artist video. Johnson brings a tropical enclave of plants, embedded with objects and sculptures made from Shea butter, to Hauser and Wirth’s showing, while Syms presents videos made up of found footage of fragmentary clips that capture the everyday lives of black Americans.
Another artist who notably engages with the day-to-day lives of black Americans is Henry Taylor, who has just won the annual $25,000 Robert de Niro Sr. prize. His distinctive, sensitively drawn figurative paintings show his subjects at ease, perhaps smoking or playing cards, and have drawn comparisons to Alice Neel. His win follows a recent solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, and another at Blum & Poe in Tokyo.
Meanwhile in the Big Apple, there’s trouble brewing in the wake of Frieze New York, which was staged on Randall’s Island last month in record-breaking temperatures. A number of gallerists complained after collectors and other attendees were unable to stay long at the fair in the stifling heat, leading Frieze to offer first a 2.5% refund, and then a 10% refund to their exhibitors. It was announced this week, however, that Chicago-based Shane Campbell Gallery is suing Frieze for their negligence in sufficiently preparing for the heat. In the law suit, the gallery describe the refund as “ludicrously insufficient.” If they are successful, it could lead to other galleries following a similar procedure to reclaim their losses.
In contrast, visitors to this year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion, which opened this week, were kept cool in young Mexican architect Frida Escobedo’s enclosed courtyard design. The structure is built from British-made cement roof tiles, arranged in a lattice structure that highlights the movement of light and shadow throughout the day.
For the first time this year, the Serpentine pavilion is going global, landing at its first outpost outside of the UK in Beijing. Designed by Chengdu-based architect Liu Jiakun, its curved structure takes inspiration from a flexed Chinese archer’s bow. The Serpentine’s artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, said the Beijing pavilion model could be exported to other cities.
Exhibition of the Week
Park Kyung Ryul, On evenness, at Lungley Gallery, London
Currently on display in the cellar of the Haggerston Pub on Kingsland Road are paintings and works on paper by Park Kyung Ryul, a recent graduate of Chelsea College of Arts. The cellar is home to Lungley, a recent addition to Dalston’s gallery scene which opened only recently in January 2018.
In Park’s highly intuitive works, colours and gestural form overlap leaving the artist’s stream of consciousness laid bare on the page. Nothing is resolved, with each line a reflection of her workings-out. In using a variety of tropes from across image-making the artist resists the easy categorisation of media, and in doing so has created an exciting and visually indulgent body of work.
Quote of the Week
“It was important that it seemed to grow out of the land, as if it was laying down its own sediments. […] I want this place to have a bit of a sense of pilgrimage”
—Mark Wallinger on Writ in Water, his new permanent installation created with National Trust in commemoration of the Magna Carta
Instagram Account of the Week
Art School London (artschool_london)
This week saw label Art School’s debut on the London Fashion Week Men’s stage, as part of Fashion East, the prestigious non-profit initiative offering support to early-career designers. The label is the creative partnership of Eden Loweth and Tom Barratt, and is informed by the designers’ backgrounds as fashion and art criticism graduates respectively. To get a sense of the sheer energy and momentum of the label take a look at their Instagram page, where a diverse cast of characters bring their “non-binary queer-luxury” clothes to life. The ever innovative Art School are constantly evolving and moving forward; you can go with them via their feed.
