Kept to a minimum: RICHARD SERRA at the Gagosian

Renowned for his immense sheet metal sculptures and his key role in the Minimalist movement, Richard Serra has dominated the modern and contemporary art world for decades.

Given his international prominence and the elevated value of his art, it is no surprise that Serra is represented by one of the world’s top galleries: the Gagosian. With locations in New York, Beverly Hills, Athens, Hong Kong, Geneva, Rome, Paris, and London, the gallery is home to myriad acclaimed exhibitions – including, most recently, a show featuring recent sculptures and a large-scale drawing by Serra.

Simply referred to as ‘Richard Serra’, the exhibition spans two of the gallery’s London venues: its locations on Brittania Street and Davies Street, respectively.  At its Brittania location, the gallery will display Double Rift #2, a five-meter long drawing created in 2011.  Abstract in nature, Double Rift #2 is comprised of paintstick on handmade paper.  While it is the only Serra work that will be featured at the gallery’s location on Brittania Street, with its grand scale and bold composition, Double Rift #2 alone is not to be missed.

At its Davies Street location, the Gagosian presents several sculptural works by Serra:  Backdoor Pipeline (2010), Ramble (2014), Dead Load (2014), and London Cross (2014).  While, like Double Rift #2, these are among the artist’s most recent work, they are – thanks to their large scale, steel composition, and minimalist style – undeniably a work of Richard Serra and a modern art must-see.

Double Rift #2 is on view at its Brittania Street location until November 22, while you can catchBackdoor Pipeline, Ramble, Dead Load, and London Cross on Davies Street until February 28, 2015!

Presenting ROOMS 16: SUPERLUMINAL

“This is how it all begins: from blinding darkness enters light; soft, beautiful, expanding, violent, maddening, defiant”

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ROOMS 16 is all about light, offering an explosion of colour, yet meditating the significance of contrast, of darkness. The darkness behind the light, which serves as a technical tool, an inception of creativity. Together with the artists who make up this issue we seek to illuminate what happens when we stop thinking of light and darkness as binaries, but rather as parts of the same force. The force that drives us to create, destroy and recreate. As featured photographer Ryan Harding points out, one must accept the necessity of scrapping things in order to reinvent. To improve. To excel.

Following this year’s Art Basel – Miami Beach, ROOMS 16 muses the creative processes and emotional influences of three Miami-based artists as Autumn Casey, Farley Aguilar and Bhakti Baxter consider the impact of the Sun City on their work. While the works of contemporary artists often exist by an illusion of lighting and composition, the illusion is accepted as an ancient and indispensable artistic extrication. Further, a focus on light in composition is evident in Pawel Nolbert’s works as he discusses the effect colour has on perception and visual impact. We also talk “lighting” with award-winning photographer Jamie-James Medina, whose diverse portfolio includes dramatic and characterful portraits of Mercury-prize nominee FKA Twigs. 

ROOMS 16 explores the realms of digital artistic expression, introducing the work of two extraordinary digital artists, Robert Bell and Andreas Nicolas Fischer. Their compositions are eruptions of light and yet contain within them sinister elements 

adding to the intensity of the visual experience. Featured also is onedotzero, a company responsible for creating astonishing digital sensory arts events, and Eduardo Gomes, who uses 3D computer graphics to implement and demonstrate visual artwork.

Without borders or boundaries, Alex Chinneck creates large-scale surrealist illusions. He describes the making of playful public art, the obligation for cultural experiences to be valuable and also the advantage of controlling your art, beginning to end. With The Fashtons, we ponder photo-realism in visual projects for music and fashion and the consonance brought by two separate, yet intertwined and transmittable, artistic modes of expression.

ROOMS 16 cogitates the blurring of liminal spaces, the creation of complex art. The result is art, which breaks boundaries. Art as light and darkness, simultaneously. Art, which is faster than light itself. Art, which is superluminal.

ROOMS 16: The Fashtons The Cover Artists Uncovered

Photos by Alexandra Uhart

It’s that time of the year to join the festive reflections on togetherness. We here wouldn’t of course, resist revisiting the values of family when it’s novel and tantalising. 

For ROOMS 16, we are welcomed to tap into the creative unity of The Fashtons – formed by husband-and-wife artists Ben Ashton and Fiona Garden. Ben being a figurative painter and installation artist, Fiona a music and fashion photographer: each is as adept in their own fields as in their collaboration. 

I will always be drawn to the play of light on bone. The architecture of a face or body, as it stands, in light, whether made up or bare, discovered or intended, is what inspires me. It’s a constant wonder that in that interplay between light and shadow, I can capture the essence of a person – it’s an endless marvel.—Fiona Garden

 I feel with every self-portrait I produce, I am constantly reminded of my own mortality and as a result I have become fixated upon the idea of legacy. I have plundered the history of painting, initially to teach myself to paint but after that I would always turn to the security of history to make my next decision.—Ben Ashton

For now, you can only read the eloquent and revealing exchange with Ben and Fiona in ROOMS 16, our hand-selected gift to you. And Merry Christmas for that matter.

ROOMS 16, out now

The music videos of 2014 we watched and loved

We dug deep to bring you artist and directors who are totally changing the conventions of music videos. Here are some of our favourites from 2014 (in no particular order):   

FKA Twigs: Two Weeks  

Two Weeks is a siren’s song in which FKA Twigs is seducing someone from another relationship. In the Nabil-directed video, Twigs looks nothing short of an Egyptian sun goddess, dripping in gold with a Twigian tribe as her court (she plays every role in case you haven’t noticed). The video is one long panning shot, slowly rolling out the grandeur of the entire scene. The video appears to be a nod to movie ‘The Queen of the Damned’ where Aaliyah plays a badass vampire. The video showcases Twig’s empowered brand of femininity. 

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Tommy Kruise: Hers

Director Martin Pariseau is demystifying our notions of mental illness in Tommy Kruise’s Hers video (I was really taken aback and pleasantly surprised the first time I watched it). The video follows Bogdan Chiochiu, a (real-life) fan of Kruise’s with Asperger’s syndrome. Pariseau met Bogdan in Cejep, a pre-grad institution in Quebec. Bogdan speaks six languages, is passionate about his music, and is obsessed with radio waves. Parsieau paints the picture of how isolating life can be when institutionalized, but also makes audiences realize that they have more in common with Bogdan than they think. 

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Arca and Jesse Kanda: Trauma 1

Trauma is an ongoing film project by Arca and Jesse Kanda that was first partially exhibited at Moma PS1. Their works together are wonderfully demented. Trauma’s score takes from Arca’s musical works. Scene I depicts a disfigured baby dance crew – think Missy Elliot gone totally off the deep end – celebrating their inner and outer beauty in the limelight.

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Jamie XX, Four Tet, Koreless, and John Talabot score Sofia Mattioli’s Continuum

Blame it on my bias for these producers being some of my favorites, but the concept of this video is why it’s on this list. The London-based artist and writer, Sofia Mattioli and collaborator Rebecca Salvadori presented a silent film they made to the four musicians; each was given a different bit of the movie to compose music for. Although separately written, all the songs flow seamlessly together and bring out the essence of their various sections of film. 

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Tiga: Bugatti 

Tiga’s Bugatti music video is as if Luis Buñuel remade “Aspen Extreme”. The video consists of a deadpan Tiga and bits of surrealist corporate  and ski scenes. Humorous, twisted, and 80’s aesthetic-fueled, director Helmi has perfectly embodied the quirky, fun attitude of the song. 

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Future Brown: Vernáculo

Future Brown’s Vernáculo is a tripped out reggaeton track featuring the dirty rhymes of Maluca. The video sheds light on the ridiculousness of beauty advertising by appropriating its language and esthetics. Future Brown products function as the base for physical perfection. It was commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami, who describe it as “an exercise in capitalist surrealism”.   

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Perfume Genius: Queen

Cody Critcheloe (SSION) directed the video that follows the journey of Mike Hadreas (Perfume Genius) and a female companion.  The two are on a quest to find themselves – or something – I think. The video was inspired by the reactions that Hadreas faces to his identity by macho insecure dudes. The video is a charming surrealist tale about embracing yourself.

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Mykki Blanco: She Gutta

It’s been a busy year for Mykki Blanco. Between creating music with the legendary Kathleen Hanna, and showing non-stop love and support for her contemporaries in  Russia (currently swamped with oppressive anti-gay legislation) through various means, Blanco dropped the video for She Gutta, and it’s hectic (in the best way possible, of course). The video is shot like a documentary and follows the fictitious LA gangs Hoover Locos, Shadow Park Locos, and the Columbia Lol Psychos (that last one gave me a good laugh). The mainstream media’s frigid stereotypes are  shaken up as nightwalker-esque women are thuggish with agency and homosexuality is paralleled with machoness. Violent news clips intermingle with anime cartoons which further adds to the videos manic energy. Mykki Blanco is the dopest. 

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Jamie XX: Sleep Sound

Directors Sofia Mattioli and Cherise Payne explore the themes of silence and sound. Inspired by personal experiences, the video follows a group of hearing impaired people from the Manchester Deaf Center who discover music through dance, emotion, and imagination.  Warning: this one pulls at the heartstrings.  

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GEMS: Sinking Stone

The video for GEMS’ Sinking Stone tells the story of two love struck youngings getting in trouble with a couple of gangsters. Directed by BRTHR, the trippy film stars everyone’s favorite ratchet siblings, the ATL Twins. It's the kind of short that makes you crave trouble and a Bonnie and Clyde style romance.

ArtEZ Institute of the Arts

Shaping New Talent

ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in the Netherlands trains students for professions in which art, knowledge and creativity play a central role. For more than 3000 students, ArtEZ offers a related selection of Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes in visual art, architecture, fashion, design, music, theatre, creative writing, dance and art education. At the same time, ArtEZ is a specialised knowledge institute where lecturers combine theory and practice. 

Meet our talents
The online ArtEZ finals magazine provides an impression of the graduation work of the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts’ Class of 2014: dancers, choreographers, visual artists, designers, musicians, musical therapists, art teachers, actors, and architects. 
We would love to see you around for the ArtEZ finals 2015 in June and July to visit the Fashion show, the Art & Design exhibitions in Arnhem, Enschede and Zwolle and all the concerts and dance and theatre performances. 

artez.nl
finals2014magazine.artez.nl

Facebook.com/artezhogeschool
@artezhogeschool

ROOMS 15

The Breakable issue: 

The Ultimate Manual for Creative Survival.

When something is beautiful, it is very easily consumed and it shouldn’t be about readily consuming. It should be about pausing and relooking. – Lara Jensen, the London based designer and artist takes over the main stage and opens our new issue filled with stories of life adventures, flourishing bravery and conquered barricades.

Giving a voice to our ever growing collection of cutting edge artists and creatives we bring you in this issue: exclusive interview with Another Earth's directing prodigy Mike Cahill who talks to us about his new film I Origins. What is it like to write the dialogue for the most famous geeks in the world? We meet The Big Bang Theory writer Eric Kaplan.  Influential musician and now music video director, Douglas Hart from The Jesus and Mary Chain on the dependent music industry. Paper Rain founder Stephan Wembacher on creative entrepreneurial. Bloomberg Aspirations, we talk to Director Kirsty Ogg and the New Contemporaries. The Technê Revolution, when Science and Technology become Art, feat Liam Young, Koen Vanmechelen and Memo Akten. Also in this issue Mark Neville, Connie Lim, Charlotte Kingsnorth, Kate Simko and many more!

ROOMS presents KÖEN VANMECHELEN - Darwin’s Dream

ROOMS presents

Koen Vanmechelen - Darwin’s Dream  

Interviews with artist Koen Vanmechelen, curators James Putnam and Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church
15 November - 14 December 2014

*Read more about Koen Vanmechelen and our interview in the current issue ROOMS 15

ROOMS 15 present: ARI WEINKLE

After featuring his work in our latest issue, ROOMS caught up with artist Ari Weinkle for an exclusive insight into his working methodology. 

With fractured natural forms and dreamlike imagery, Ari Weinkle presents the viewer with a beautifully stylised art that seeks to express the unseen through the disintegration of fragility. Swirling colours twist their way around a distorted central image that is both arresting and dizzying, but remains fragile and delicate. Make sure you check out his work and have a look for yourself!

Hi Ari, thanks for chatting with us. Can you start by telling us what you do?

I’m an artist and designer. I work full time as a graphic designer, but my passion is digital art. I try to balance the two as best as possible.

How did you get to where you are today? Would you consider yourself to have always been an artist in some way?

Yes, certainly! I’ve been creating artwork my whole life starting in elementary school where I’d always try and make class projects as crazy and artistic as possible. In high school, I started taking a lot more studio art classes that led to art school and then a job in design.

Your work often exposes the beauty of simple natural forms. Does this relate to a desire to slow down and appreciate those things around us?

Definitely. Meditation is a key part of my creative process. I think it’s very important think and consider what you are doing before creating anything.

Let’s talk about the contrast between the fragile and the chaotic in your work. I notice that there is a synergy between delicate, soft forms and harsh geometric statements. Where do you think the balance comes from here? Would it be accurate to say that this reflects us as human beings in some way?

This contrast is key to my work. Often we see artwork that is one way or the other. For me, the challenge is to balance the two. It’s really about moving things around until it “feels” right and looks good. I’ve never thought of the human comparison, but can definitely see that parallel now that you’ve pointed it out.

The centrality of objects seems to be quite important in your work. What are your thoughts on this? 

Nowadays there is so much too see across all types of media. I began using singular objects because it’s easier for people to understand and respond to. Afterwards, they might be interested in the details and spend more time looking at the work.

I really love that there is a kaleidoscopic effect created in some pieces. Do these pieces represent a sort of symbolic mandala? 

Yes, in some way. I often rely on symbols and motifs to express my ideas.

Fragmentation often plays a large part in crafting the feel of your images. How important do you feel that this is, not only to the work itself, but to you as an artist?

Fragmentation allows me to play around with established forms and create something new. Through breaking things apart, I’m attempting to reveal the unseen.

Would you agree that your work is sometimes reflective of the viewer’s experience of it?

Indeed. I think it’s impossible to look at something without bringing your own perspective to it.

Time and nature seem to be recurring motifs in your work. How important do you think these themes are in what you do?

Out of the two, nature is paramount. Being in nature has a soothing effect on my consciousness. I try to bring some of that feeling into my artwork.

Sound also appears to play an important role in your work. Can you tell us a bit about what you think the relationship is between sound and art?

I think sound provides inspiration for visual art and vice versa. Music opens the mind up to unexpected pathways and ideas.

You often use metaphorical imagery about the mind and human memory in your work. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

I tend to overthink everything… I guess it’s natural that these themes continue to appear in my work!

Thanks for chatting with us Ari. Your work looks incredible and we wish you all the best!

ARIWEINKLE

EGON SCHIELE: The radical nude

The Courtauld Gallery opens its doors to what is perhaps the most important exhibition of the year: ‘Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude’.

Today, the Courtauld Gallery opens its doors to one of the most important exhibitions of the year, ‘Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude’, a study on his drawings of male and female nudes that radicalised early 20th Century Art.

The collection brings together an exceptional body of works that are absolutely unrelenting in their technique and play on form. As the first exhibition on Egon Schiele in the last 25 years, ‘The Radical Nude’ proves itself to be a real breakthrough as the artist’s anguished, incessant and decisive lines reveal the terrible greatness in human bodies.

Fascinated by the human body in its simplest form, Schiele puts at the vanguard of his work his sister, his lovers, male friends, prostitutes, pregnant women, his later wife and himself. Through deliberate, almost awkward postures, he turns pink-fleshed bodies into haunting, emaciated figures that become even more intense and important, especially when set against the backdrop of the conservative, bourgeois atmosphere of Vienna in the early 20th Century.

There is a delight to Schiele’s unrestrained boldness – or perhaps curiosity, in tying in life and decay in such a vivid, complex way. Through his stark and raw drawings, he offers an electrifying and penetrative gaze that matters even in our contemporary times.

Egon Schiele, who trained in Vienna under Gustav Klimt in the early 1900s, quickly became known for his fascination with life, death, desire and sex –most of his works were considered pornography and he was imprisoned for two months in 1912 for contravening public decency. An unconventional artist, he subverted old traditions –his 1910 breakthrough was key in the radicalisation of the life-drawing room set-up and models’ poses, and his Gertrude studies (his sister) were crucial in his overturn of the passive, reclining nudes that adorned all the other walls of museums at the time.

Also present in the Courtauld’s collection are Schiele’s drawings of his ‘models from the street’, directly influenced by his vision that Vienna was a city with hypocrisy at heart, through which he shamelessly pulled out the most taboo issues of the time –poverty, vice, prostitution, at times rendering its subjects into creatures of desire, and at other times into tormented figures.

The intelligence of the Courtauld exhibition lies in its chosen chronology: from the nude self-portraits to his meticulous study of pregnant women and their newborns to his final years before his untimely death in 1918 from Spanish Influenza, aged just 28. It is fascinating to see Schiele’s evolution in technique and approach, and there is an honesty, an immediacy in his drawings that one cannot find in his paintings.

‘The Radical Nude’ is a unique collection that puts forward the palpable anguish, strength, provocation and desire behind Egon Schiele’s work. His unflinching portrayal of the human body is a must-see and places this exhibition at the forefront of London’s artistic cultural scene.

‘Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude’ is on at the Courtauld Gallery from the 23rd October to the 18thJanuary 2014.