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Welcome to the London For Fun regular newsletter keeping you up to date with what's new in London`s events.

LONDON FOR FUN Newsletter: 21 April 2009 Issue No.170

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http://www.londonforfun.com
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1.) Top 10 London events
2.) Other Events, Theatre listings, Museums and Galleries
3.) How to unsubscribe

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1. Top 10 London events
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1 - John Riddy: Low Relief, Photographs of London - The title Low Relief refers to the artist’s preoccupation with texture and surface, as well as those elements of the urban landscape that somehow provide a measure of relief or reassurance. In particular; natural forms, architecture, paintings and statuary, and the changing nature of both natural and artificial light. Most of the pictures are taken in Autumn and Winter when the city is stripped of leaves and it’s structures and forms are most apparent. Surfaces are often described in a half-light that mixes the natural and artificial so that the passage of time appears to be both halted and expanded within the image. As ever with Riddy’s work, the photographs are intentionally descriptive. However, their deliberate and formal construction presents a world that transcends the space and time in which they were made. The vista might have been dreamt, half remembered, or assembled for the purpose of making the photograph, and although people are rarely to be seen, the evidence of their actions both past and present is clear. Until 1 May. www.frithstreetgallery.com LAST CHANCE

2 - Faye Claridge: Descendants of the Unfamiliar - In Faye Claridge’s latest work, Morris dancers from a number of different traditions are brought together for a remarkably unsettling photographic series. Claridge has worked with the dancers and created specially painted backdrops, to explore a myriad of social and artistic issues. Claridge’s key interest is subjectivity and our relationships to strangers in the present and the past. She deliberately works on the margins of society, with groups who are ridiculed or feared for the image they portray of themselves and their national identity. Employing techniques from the renaissance workshop and the photographer’s studio, in video and photography, Claridge creates work that forces us to confront the ethics of identity and representation. Until 3 May. www.daniellearnaud.com LAST CHANCE

3 - Cy Twombly - The Rose - Each painting comprises four wood panels on which three roses in full bloom are depicted in pulsating colours, ranging from deepest burgundy to tangerine, gold, violet and crimson, set against a background of vibrant turquoise. Inscribed on the last panel of each painting are fragments from Rilke's poem cycle "The Roses." Stanzas scrawled in a gestural mode reflect Twombly's characteristic conflation of painting and poetry, image and word, while his brushwork describes petals bursting open, together with words that hint and evoke. He allows the paint to flow down the panels so that liquidity and gravity interact, asserting the vertical passage of the medium over the broad horizontality of the support. Until May 9. www.gagosian.com

4 - Peter Coffin - Coffin explores various models of perspective and challenges the way in which we perceive space. In his sculptures, installations, photographs and videos, Peter Coffin examines our knowledge and interpretation of the world with curiosity and wit, borrowing from numerous disciplines, such as art history, science and New Age beliefs to test his ideas about the way things work and exist. His largest installation ever in the UK, Coffin projects a 360- degree aerial view of Japanese gardens along the 90-metre curved wall of the gallery. When projected, this footage forms a continuous yet disjunctive landscape, challenging our sense of perspective and space. Until 10 May. www.barbican.org.uk

5 - Phyllida Barlow - Brake - Phyllida Barlow is one of the UK’s most significant sculptors, and her often large-scale works deftly explore space and our relationship to it. These new works have been produced in response to the physicality of the gallery - the low room, the sense of descent. Her sensory and tactile way of working seemingly defies the perception that artistic production without a sense of history or irony is impossible. In her roles as both an artist and educator she has been instrumental in intellectualising this type of practice. Until 23 May. www.oneintheother.com

6 - Roni Horn aka Roni Horn - This exhibition, the most significant overview of American artist Roni Horn's practice to date, will show her earliest works from the mid-1970s alongside pieces from the intervening years and new sculptures. Horn has always defined the meaning of her work as the experience that the viewer has with it. In the 1980s she made pairs of copper objects and showed them in different relationships, for instance in two separate rooms. Unable to see both objects simultaneously, the viewer remembers one when encountering the next. Many of Horn's works feature paired elements which might be similar or identical although the viewer's experience of each is unique. Until 25 May. www.tate.org.uk/modern

7 - Brit Insurance Design of the year 2009 - The winning entries in each category of the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2009, awarded to the most progressive and forward thinking designs from the past 12 months, are: New Oslo Opera House for Architecture, Vogue Italia: A Black Issue for Fashion, MYTO chair for the Furniture category, and the Graphics category is awarded to the Barack Obama Poster. Interactive goes to Make Magazine, Magno Wooden Radio wins Product and the Transport winner is Colombia’s Line-J Medellin Metro Cable. The winning entries represent a snapshot of contemporary design and demonstrate the role that design plays at a global level. Until 14 June. www.designmuseum.org

8 - The Photographic Object - The internationally renowned artists in this exhibition use stitching, cutting, piercing and punching to explore the ambiguous space between two and three dimensions. Dissatisfied with the conventional function of photography as a surface that reproduces the external world, these artists test the materiality of their medium. Through a variety of distinct propositions, this exhibition traces an eclectic journey from the potential of photography to exceed its medium to relishing its hermetic and decorative function. From 24 April until 14 June. www.photonet.org.uk

9 - Matt Stokes - The exhibition includes the newly commissioned song and film The Gainsborough Packet, a social interaction project entitled Club Ponderosa and the UK premiere of these are the days, a two-channel film made during his residency at Arthouse in Austin, Texas, as well as works from the Zabludowicz Collection. Stokes’s research-based practice is frequently concerned with musical subcultures. He proceeds by acquainting himself with particular groups, their histories and values, then producing films, installations and event-based works related to his findings. Collaboration and shared authorship are central to his practice, as is an enthusiasm for DIY approaches. Until 28 June. www.projectspace176.com

10 - Baroque 1620-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence - The magnificence and splendour of Baroque, one of the most opulent styles of the 17th and 18th centuries, will be the subject of the V&A’s spring exhibition. The exhibition will reflect the complexity and grandeur of the Baroque style, from the Rome of Borromini and Bernini to the magnificence of Louis XIV's Versailles and the lavishness of Baroque theatre and performance. On display will be religious paintings by Rubens and Tiepolo while silver furniture, portraits, sculpture, a regal bed and court tapestries will conjure up the rooms of a Baroque palace. Until 19 July. www.vam.ac.uk

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2. Other Events, Theatre listings, Museums and Galleries:

Events listing:
http://www.londonforfun.com/events-in-London.htm

Theatre listings:
http://www.londonforfun.com/London-theatres.htm

Museum listing:
http://www.londonforfun.com/London-museums.htm

Galleries listings:
http://www.londonforfun.com/galleries-in-London.htm

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