Opps

Syrians demonstrating against Assad

"Change in Damascus is inevitable because Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, can no longer be trusted after an eight-month uprising in which thousands have been killed."

Ai Weiwei's Crusade

 Money wrapped fruits and paper airplane notes
 thrown over the wall of Ai WeiWei's home 
donated to the artist to pay his huge tax fine in China.

“...every penny borrowed or made from China has really come as a result of how this nation sacrificed everybody’s rights.” 

Undulation - Murmuration

starling formation

Absence

Mary Corse

Untitled  (White Inner Band, Beleived)

2008

Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas

244x366 cm

 Sergej Jensen

Curtains

2004

Chlorine bleach on linen

75x50 cm

Cement floor pattern 

White Cube Gallery 
Bermondsey

Sparkling glassbeads, silver- and gold leaves, muted, frayed fabric of recycled old shirts all appliqued on huge canvases above the glittering cement floor mirroring the neon lights of the ceiling with the aggressive "contemporary" sound of an installation - there is a real feeling of absence and emptiness here.  

In the White Cube's new exhibition Structure and Absence at their new minimalist Bermondsey Street building structure is absent, there are only surfaces.

Beauty

„The beauty which is inherent in the form of the world and is proven in geometry and expressed in all good art is the proof that the world points to something beyond itself... Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul... a way in which the divine reality behind the world invades our lives.”

Simone Weil

Gift Art

 Over the River

Project for the Arkansas River

State of Colorado, USA

Design: 1992

Realisation: 2014

The project seeks to suspend 5.9 miles of gleaming silver-translucent fabric panels above the river interrupted only by existing bridges, trees and rocks to run along 42 miles with sunshine blinking through the gaps and give an artistic vision to those on the US Highway 50 and to rafters, canoers and kayakers underneath for a two week period in the summer. 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installations are always paid by themselves, no sponsors involved. In the realization of this project they have invested 19 years and 7 million US dollars so far.

Their breathtaking large scale land-art installations are poetical demonstrations of absolute freedom and irrationality. They are beautiful gifts to the viewers to encourage them to imagine the surrounding environment in a whole new way.

"Our art has absolutely no purpose, except to be a work of art. 
We do not give messages."

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Annely Juda Fine Art

Mortality and Destruction

What You See is What You See

 La penna di hu 

1987-2009

Wire frame construction

 Detail 1

Detail 2

Colourful structures without meaning and purpose - Frank Stella's new 3D works combining weight and solidity with a musical fluidity don't present any meaning or story - they only present monumental, colourful, structures:  "what you see is what you see". But what a joy to the eye and the senses, what a refreshing energy and dynamism.

The Reality of Photorealism

Dazwischen

2011

Oil on linen

282x400 cm

Detail

Details of life, details of the painting - both in a state of transition, without any meaning and purpose  -  and at the end all this adds up to a form, a story, a meaning.

New paintings of Jonathan Wateridge

Beauty and Horror

Paradise Lost

2001-11

Oil, acrylic, glitter, enamel and rhinestones on birch wood

300x900 cm

Detail

A paradise with blossoming cherry flowers, mountainous nightscape lit by full moon, voluptuous carnival intoxicated by colourful lotus flowers and glittering precious stones  -  and all this populated with hedonistic and vampire predators in a carnal inertia and mutual bloody carnage. 

This is not a battle of Good and the Evil: this is nature's eternal, voracious, erotic and violate passing of the time.

The sense of a mesmerizing, glamorous luxury is increased with a special technique used in cloisonné: small pools of enamel and metallic paint delineated with a raised edge which is then finished in gold and filled with thousands of sparkling tiny rubies, emeralds and other precious stones - sometimes their value is far greater than what the works are sold for.

New Paintings of Raqib Shaw

Tate Interview

Cosmic Pattern

Stone detail

"Man's own aesthetic maybe no more than one of many manifestations of an all-pervasive aesthetic that reveals itself in the natural world."

Marguerite Yourcenar

"There is a pattern in man's logic: this pattern is the harmony of the cosmic order. "

Bela Hamvas

Above - Below - Between

Towards autumn - Finsbury Park, London

Contamination of Space

Sculptures of Phyllida Barlow

"We live on ruins of the past with broken, abandoned spaces, torso sculptures without arms and feet around us  - we construct and deconstruct all the time.

With aggression I brutally invade, contaminate and fill these spaces with cheap, poor but true materials using my broken memory." 

Who is Ishmael?

West Jerusalem Jews:

-          He is our relative. He is different.

-          An ancestor of the Arabs.

-          A fighter.

East Jerusalem Arabs:

-          He is the father of Arabs – a Prophet.

-         He is the father of Muhammed.

-          He is the inheritant and we are the descendant.

New York City professionals:

-          Moby Dick - Call me Ishmael – an outsider, a stranger.

-         A loner, he is the first cowboy.

-          The guy who walks off into the sunset, all by himself – 

and looking for something, looking for something.

Steve Reich: The Cave

   

Herman Melville: Moby Dick

Beds of Charles Matton

Exhibition in London

for 

Charles Matton

Light and Shadow

John Pawson's Lense and Mirror

St Paul's Cathedral

London

Goddess

Drawing 

feltpen, colour pastel

Textile application 
hand and machine stitched

Light

David Chipperfield 
glass installation

Design Week

London Southbank 

Shadow

The Revolution of Capitalism

The mistake of Marx

The perpetual change is the revolution of capitalism, not communism

Slavoj Zizek

Bad as Me

New album for Tom Waits

Zizek's Communism

"Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem ot the commons in all its dimensions – the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons („intellectual property”),  and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem."

Slavoj Zizek: Living in the End Times

Set Fire to the Rain

Adele

Remix

Mirror Magic

Looking in a flat mirror you split into two  - so instead of you being you looking out to the world here is you looking at you in a different space in front of you.

Richard Gregory

God as the Secret Weapon of Recycled Art

The new trash-art is now  recycling not only cardboard and bitumen, Bach, Berlioz and Schumann, but God itself. 

Bitumen  and medieval cloister recycled in 

Peter Zumthor's new Serpentine pavilion

Cardboard, religion and heaven recycled in 

Pistolettos's new installation at Serpentine Gallery

God, Nature and Bach all recycled in Terrence Malick's new film

The tree of Life

Stockhausen's Questions

     "Am I a newcomer in musical history, or am I a reincarnation of an earlier composer? Are the superficial parallels between my music and the music of other cultures perhaps grounded in experiences of my earlier lives on this planet?

   What are the distinctively new vibrations and rhythms in my music, and what law of the Universe are transmitted in them? To what spiritual lanes do the different works, or isolated events from individual works, aspire? To what level of awareness do they bring us?     What are the underlying mods of particular works? Which is the appropriate state of feeling for listening to a given work? Which works are expressly spiritual in tone, that is to say music of praise, prayer, and thanksgiving to God? In which is the spirituality hidden?     Which works appeal more directly to the physical being, the feelings and sufferings of sensory existence, and which more to the transcendental life of the spirit? Or is a balance of sorts discernible overall between the vibrations and rhythms of the beast and the angel in man?    Which pieces sing more than others, which transport us to worlds far removed from our planet? Which works allow us to experience the way of life of much smaller creatures, down to the smallest micro-organism? Which enable us to traverse great distances with the stride and breath of giants, to fly with giant wings?     In which work has the Prince of Satania, Master Lucifer, insinuated himself with his brilliant wit and glittering alchemy? Which works, which part of works allow us, like a child seeking protection, to cling to God's foot, snug and content in the certain knowledge of complete security?     Where sounds the voice of Prophecy?     Where the voice of Divine Humour?"
Foreword  The Works of Stockhausen by Robin Maconie

Cy Twombly 1928-2011

 

    

Hero and Leandro  I - IV

1984-85

The classical legend of tragic love: Leandro drownded while swimming across the Hellespont to meet his lover Hero, who then threw herself into the sea.

Summer 2011

at Selfridges