Ocula Report LACMA Explores the Allure of Matter 14 Jun 2019 : Jareh Das for Ocula The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (2 June 2019–5 January 2020) is an inter-generational show of 21 Chinese artists working from the 1980s to the present, including Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lin Tianmiao, Song Dong, He Xiangyu, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ma Qiusha.Staged on Level 2 of LACMA's Renzo...
Ocula Conversation Thomas J Price: Reframing Classical Sculpture When the London-born artist Thomas J Price graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Arts in 2004, the school's college art prize was by no means his most notable accomplishment as an emerging artist. In 2001, Price presented his much-talked-about work Licked, a daring performance, later profiled on the BBC 4 television...
Ocula Report Art Basel Lowdown: Shows to See 6 Jun 2019 : Tessa Moldan for Ocula To coincide with Art Basel 2019, which opens to the public from 13 to 16 June, galleries and institutions across the city are presenting a range of stellar exhibitions. From Rebecca Horn at Museum Tinguely to Geumhyung Jeong at Kunsthalle Basel, here is a selection of what to see.William Kentridge, Dead Remus (2014–2016). Charcoal on found ledger...
David Batchelor's work is concerned above all things with colour, a sheer delight in the myriad brilliant hues of the urban environment and underlined by a critical concern with how we see and respond to colour in this advanced technological age.
His studio is a treasure trove piled high with an endless variety of fluorescent plastic objects - clothes pegs, fly-swatters, buckets, spades, children's toys, empty bottles of household products - found in pound shops and markets in cities the world over. He combines these everyday items with a range of light-industrial materials: steel shelving, commercial lightboxes, neon tubing, warehouse dollies, acrylics, plastics and so on to produce extraordinary installations which exalt the ordinary and celebrate the lurid and trashy whilst being, in themselves, often mesmerisingly beautiful.
Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. In 2013, a major solo exhibition of Batchelor's two-dimensional work, Flatlands, was displayed at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and toured to Spike Island, Bristol. Batchelor's work was included in the landmark group exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 - 2015 at Whitechapel Gallery, London. A separate exhibition of Batchelor's Monochrome Archive (1997-2015) was also on display at Whitechapel Gallery until May 2015.
Batchelor's portfolio includes a number of major public artworks including a commission for the British Council headquarters in Hong Kong, a site-specific work for the McManus Galleries in Dundee, a 10-metre high light installation at the Archway Tube Station in London, and a major commission for St. Pancras International Station entitled Chromolocomotion. His most recent commission in 2015, was Chromorama, situated in Broadgate, London.
Batchelor has written and edited a number of books including The Luminous and the Grey (2014), Found Monochromes (2010) and Colour (2008) and Chromophobia (2000).
Related Press A Certain Kind of Light review – let there be mirror balls The Guardian : 29 January 2017 A show about light: a light show – what might a curator put in? Just about all art concerned with making the world visible in some sense speaks of light, the very condition in which it was made.
