Tuesday 13 December 2016

Interview with Fabienne Verdier

13/12/16
Interview: Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier: Rhythms and Reflections 
Waddington Custot
25 November 2016 - 4 February 2017

Fabienne Verdier (b1962, Paris) produces large, abstract paintings, characterised by bold, gestural brushstrokes, made using enormous, suspended vertical brushes of her own construction. She combines knowledge and philosophy, learned during 10 years studying with old masters in China, with western expressionism, to create explosions of movement and life on the carefully prepared, layered canvases. Her physical and performative creative practice experiments with reproducing energy lines – invisible forces that are continually evolving – often echoing, albeit unintentionally, natural forms, such as branches, rivers and lightning flashes.


Verdier’s work has been shown alongside a huge variety of artists, including Auguste Rodin, Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly and the Flemish primitives, but watching Verdier in the act of painting most calls to mind Jackson Pollock with his vertical method of pouring, dripping and swirling the paint, using contraptions such as turkey basters.

In 2014, Verdier was the first visual artist-in-residence at the Juilliard School in New York, where she undertook live studio experiments seeking to answer the question of whether painting and music, in the moment of creation, might be “played” simultaneously. Her works in Rhythms and Reflections, her current exhibition at Waddington Custot, London, derive from this experiment, materialising rhythms and reflections on the canvas. They further explore the movement of the body in space and its encounters with lines of force in the landscape as one walks or strolls about.

Speaking to Studio International at the opening of the exhibition, Verdier was palpably excited about her methods and explorations, and full of creative energy.


Read the interview here




Interview with Roger Hiorns

13/12/16
Interview: Roger Hiorns
Ikon Birmingham 
7 December 2016 - 5 March 2017

Roger Hiorns (b1975, Birmingham) is perhaps best known for his installation piece Seizure (2008), involving the bright blue crystallisation of the interior of an empty council flat on a housing estate near Elephant and Castle, London, commissioned by Artangel. Originally intended to remain only for a couple of years, the 31-tonne structure, for which Hiorns was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009, was “saved” and transported to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as part of the Arts Council Collection, where it is now on semi-permanent display. However, Hiorns’ key concern in all of his works – disparate as they might seem – is “putting the human back into the centre of an artwork”, be that by stuffing a falling mannequin with Heidegger text or secreted brain matter; burying an aeroplane and allowing visitors to enter it underground; presenting a deeply documental installation on variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; or planting two seven-metre-tall black granite furnaces on Bristol’s Temple Quay Central as part of an Art and the Public Realm Bristol commission.


With an exhibition opening at Ikon Birmingham, and the Bristol project nearing its (as yet unannounced) launch date, Hiorns welcomed Studio International to his studio on a housing estate in north London, where he talked about some of his key projects and the ideas behind – and linking – them.

Watch the interview here


Roger Hiorns’ exhibition at Ikon Birmingham runs from 7 December 2016 to 5 March 2017. More information about The Retrospective View of the Pathway can be found at Art and the Public Realm Bristol’s website.

Monday 5 December 2016

Feature: Liliane Lijn

05/12/16
Liliane Lijn









Published in issue 23 of State magazine, winter 2016/17

Eurostate: Swansea

05/12/16
Eurostate: Swansea







Published in issue 23 of State magazine, Winter 2016/17

Visible - Four Artists to Watch

05/12/16
Visible - Four Artists to Watch



Published in issue 23 of State magazine, Winter 2016/17

Feature: Paolo Troilo

05/12/16
Paolo Troilo






Published in issue 23 of State magazine, Winter 2016/17

Book Reviews

05/12/16
Book Reviews



Published in issue 23 of State magazine, Winter 2016/17

News of the Art World

05/12/16
News of the Art World



Published in issue 23 of State magazine, Winter 2016/17