The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the largest Francophone nation in Africa with vast resources and nearly 80 million inhabitants, is a place where commodities play a vital role in the national economy and the country's significance on the world stage. This is the context from which the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale (24 October–24 November...
From 20 to 21 July 2019, Artspace Sydney held a two-day symposium that brought artists in conversation with leading curators, writers, activists, academics, diplomats, and journalists from across Asia. The symposium was the final chapter of the 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS exhibition, publication, website, and Instagram project. Instigated and...
The Power Station of Art will make a fitting location for Andrés Jaque, whose past projects expose the politics concealed by buried pipes and managed cables. Spanish architect, writer, and curator Andrés Jaque has been named the chief curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, which will take place at the Power Station of Art (PSA) from 13 November...
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...
Cranston is a storyteller of sorts, without a clear story to tell. His work is seductive in terms of its use of narrative and humour, but it is the humour of Samuel Beckett or Buster Keaton, always touching on the strangeness and pathos of ordinary life. He draws on a variety of sources, in particular his own personal history; questioning the veracity of memory. This autobiographical activity is combined with passages culled from literature, anecdotes and jokes, second hand accounts, images from cinema and observations of life. Often working directly onto hardback book covers his work is not pre-conceived but emerges through the manipulation of materials - paint, varnish, collage - and the suggestions that this activity provokes, layering and re-working the images until something essential coalesces. As Liza Dimbleby has written in a recent essay "the images that are encouraged to surface are sometimes taboo; sex and solitude, death, nightmares - the ultimate questions, not without a sly humour." Cranston was born in Hawick in 1969 and currently lives and works in Glasgow.
Read MoreIngleby will present a solo exhibition by Andrew Cranston in October of 2018.
Text courtesy Ingleby Gallery.
The Ingleby Gallery in the former Glasite meeting hall in Edinburgh is, in contrast, a brilliant adaptation of what at first must have seemed an unpromising space. It was a church with pews and pulpit, but is now a tall, square hall, perfectly plain and beautifully lit form an enormous central skylight. It is ideally suited to the display of...
The ten vignettes that punctuate the white walls of the Ingleby Gallery invite us to step into the many-chambered mind of Andrew Cranston.
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