Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Lewis' figurative, mural-scale works are explicitly influenced by the symbolic conventions and compositional drama of Medieval and Renaissance painting, wherein the plane is dominated by the dynamic intertwining of bodies and punctuated by emblematic tokens of sin, virtue and status.
This is combined with the artist's personal encounters and acute eye for the everyday human dramas that play out in the urban environments he frequents, and filtered through a distinct authorial subject position as a white, gay male of working-class upbringing possessing the satirical, good-natured-but-brutal sense of humour that characterizes much British creative output.
The result is a visual language equal parts Martin Parr meets Chris Morris, Rembrandt-cum-Basquiat; plausibly grotesque, amplified to absurdity, narrative-laden and energetically complex.
