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Top 10 events in London
EVENTS IN LONDON ARE UPDATED DAILY - last update (23/05/13 - 7am)
- Rachel Whiteread: Detached - Her title calls by name the process of abstracting or distantiating from reality that is an intrinsic part of the artistic process. Whiteread’s sculpture is predicated on casting procedures, and the traces left on the sacrificial objects and spaces from which the final inverse form is derived. She casts from everyday objects as well as from the space beneath or around furniture and architecture, using single materials such as rubber, dental plaster, and resin to record every nuance. Detached 1, Detached 2, and Detached 3 (2012) render the empty interior of a garden shed in concrete and steel. Cast from generic wooden sheds, the large-scale sculptures render negative space into solid form, and the prosaic into something fantastically disquieting. The sheds recall the monolithic architectural and site-specific works for which Whiteread first became renowned, such as Ghost (1990) and House (1993) and, most recently, the imposing concrete sculpture Boathouse (2010), installed on the water’s edge in the remote Nordic landscape of Røykenviken. Until 25 May. www.gagosian.com
- Barnaby Furnas | The first and last day - The active moment versus painting's innate stillness has been a central concern of Barnaby Furnas' work over the past decade. Pitched between depicted action and the act of painting - paint's illusory potential and its materiality - Furnas entwines history with art history in provocative combinations of narrative and form. The first and last day comprises two distinct yet closely related bodies of work which bookend all of time, encompassing origin and the end of the world. Employing grand religious subjects as familiar narratives for his works, Furnas has developed a suite of six large-scale paintings presented in the downstairs gallery which depict the Creation myth, while upstairs, a series of contemplative near-abstractions evoke the vast desolation of the final flood. Until 25 May. www.victoria-miro.com
- Djordje Ozbolt - Who Say Jah No Dread - These new works combine Ozbolt’s impressions from his travels and personal experiences with iconography from different cultures and found images, all overlaid with the artist’s signature sharp wit and humour. The centrepiece of ‘Who Say Jah No Dread’ is a totemic sculpture of animals stacked one on top of the other painted in rasta colours of black, red, yellow, and green. Featuring a dove perched on the extended finger of a chimpanzee, sitting on a kudu, on top of a cheetah, all resting on the back of an elephant, this work is a veritable menagerie in a riot of colour. Ozbolt’s new paintings picture exotic settings with vibrant blue skies and dense, tropical foliage. The paradisical landscapes are populated by surreal creatures, such as a hybrid beast with a tiger’s head and a half-giraffe, half-zebra body, and animated African fetish sculptures shown dancing to Leonard Cohen’s 1984 hit, ‘Dance me till the end of love’, or gazing into the sunset in a romantic embrace. Until 25 May. www.hauserwirth.com
- Paul Pfeiffer: The Drives - Paul Pfeiffer brings together a large sculpture, two video installations, and a series of photographs in the two gallery spaces. These works form an investigation into the emotional drives that prompt human behavior and lie behind our attempts at understanding and organizing the world around us. In psychonanalytic theory, the drives fall into two basic taxonomies: Eros and Thanatos, or libido and death. From the seemingly perfect and ritualistic architecture of mass spectacles, to the creation of animal communities, to the deceptive secrecy of the family cell, the tensions between these two categories arise throughout Pfeiffer's works. Until 25 May. www.thomasdane.com
- Andreas Eriksson - Coincidental Mapping - Eriksson's acutely atmospheric paintings, sculptures and photographs relate to his daily life and immediate surroundings, inspired by nature and his native Scandinavia. Eriksson's paintings in particular sit somewhere between abstraction and figuration, creating an enigmatic window to the outside world that feels at once familiar and mysterious. Until 25 May. www.stephenfriedman.com
- Ice Age Art: Arrrival of the Modern Mind - Discover masterpieces from the last Ice Age drawn from across Europe in this groundbreaking show. Created between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago by artists with modern minds like our own, this is a unique opportunity to see the world's oldest known sculptures, drawings and portraits. These exceptional pieces will be presented alongside modern works by Henry Moore, Mondrian and Matisse, illustrating the fundamental human desire to communicate and make art as a way of understanding ourselves and our place in the world. Until 26 May. www.britishmuseum.org
- Aura Satz - Aura Satz premieres a new film and sound installation that centres on the invention of 'frequency hopping', patented in 1941 by Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil. The 'Secret Communication System' enabled radio-controlled guidance of torpedoes by synchronising frequency changes in transmitter and receiver, thus avoiding enemy detection. It drew on Antheil's failed attempt to synchronise 16 pianolas in his 1924 avant-garde masterpiece Ballet Mécanique and has since become the basis for today's spread-spectrum technology, widely used in wireless telephone and wi-fi technology. Satz references these technologies to explore visual, musical and data notation, as well as its encryption, synchronization, and decipherment. Until 26 May. www.southbankcentre.co.uk
- Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 - It was the year that the ambitious nineteen-year-old launched his career in Paris with an exhibition that would set him on course to become one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 reunites major paintings from his debut exhibition with the influential dealer Ambroise Vollard. These works show the young painter taking on and transforming the styles and subjects of major modern artists of the age, such as Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. In the second half of 1901, Picasso radically changed the direction of his art, heralding the beginning of his now famous Blue period. Inspired partly by the recent suicide of a close friend, Picasso produced a group of profoundly moving paintings of melancholic figures that are considered to be among his first masterpieces. The works show Picasso’s desire to take on and reinvent the styles of major modern artists, including Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. The show was a success and launched Picasso’s career in Paris. Until 26 May. www.courtauld.ac.uk
- Anne Hardy - It is the first time Anne Hardy allows the viewer to enter an actual space of her making. In the past these were created solely to be photographed and were always destroyed afterwards. Breaking away from this former process allows her to expand her working methods and has given her a new dimension to explore within this exhibition. The structure was created in the space one month prior to the show opening and has slowly taken shape during that time period. Until 26 May. www.maureenpaley.com
- Lichtenstein: A Retrospective - Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is the first full-scale retrospective of this artist in over twenty years. Co-organised by The Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, it brings together 125 of his most definitive paintings and sculptures and will reassess his enduring legacy. Renowned for his works based on comic strips and advertising imagery, coloured with his signature hand-painted Benday dots, the exhibition showcases key paintings such as Look Mickey 1961 lent from the National Gallery Art, Washington and his monumental Artist’s Studio series of 1973–4. Until 27 May. www.tate.org.uk/modern
- Man Ray Portraits - Man Ray Portraits is the first major museum retrospective of the influential artist’s photographic portraits. Featuring over 150 vintage prints from his career in America and Paris taken between 1916 and 1968, the exhibition highlights Man Ray’s central position amongst the leading artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements. The exhibition includes Man Ray’s revolutionary photographic techniques such as solarisation and early experiments with colour. His subjects include friends, lovers and contemporaries, ranging from Kiki de Montparnasse and Lee Miller to Pablo Picasso and Catherine Deneuve. Until 27 May. www.npg.org.uk
- John Riddy - Palermo - This series of Black and White photographs of Palermo were made over a three year period starting in 2011. As with many of Riddy’s previous projects, his interest was sparked by 19th century art – in this case, the photographs taken in Palermo by Gustave Le Gray, shortly after Garibaldi’s entry to the Sicilian capital in 1860. Riddy focuses on the same historic centre; an amalgam of ruin and renovation; working class communities and markets; alleyways and quaysides. Often neglected while other areas were newly constructed, this urban centre has a weight of texture and history that is clearly documented in Riddy’s work. Despite the noise and energy of a modern urban centre, his photographs are silent, formally balanced and complex, exploiting the expressive power of the grey scale to make images with a stillness that is reminiscent of an empty stage. Until 1 June. www.frithstreetgallery.com
