Ocula Report 58th Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times 24 May 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula The 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times (11 May–24 November 2019), certainly benefitted from low expectations, given the lacklustre curatorial of the previous edition, when different segments of the show were conceptually framed with titles like 'Pavilion of Joys and Fears' and 'Pavilion of Colours'. Add to this the...
Ocula Conversation Zheng Bo Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo's social, ecological, and community-engaged art practice has, in recent years, focused on moving beyond a human-centred perspective to an all-inclusive, multi-species approach. He takes up marginalised plants and communities of people as subjects in his large-scale interventions, which reintroduce wildness into...
Ocula Report Auckland Art Fair 2019: Conversations Extended 24 May 2019 : Sherry Paik for Ocula The weather was clement for the annual Auckland Art Fair (2–5 May 2019), which was again at The Cloud on Queens Wharf. This year's edition was a get-together of 41 galleries, mostly from around Auckland and across New Zealand, with 5 spaces hailing from Sydney and the rest from Cook Islands (Bergman Gallery), Hobart (Michael Bugelli Gallery),...
The gallery was founded by Kate MacGarry in 2002 on Redchurch Street, London, where some of our represented artists, including Goshka Macuga (Poland), Francis Upritchard (New Zealand), Ben Rivers (UK) and Dr Lakra (Mexico) had their first commercial gallery exhibition. Our current gallery space, originally designed by architect Tony Fretton, is close by on Old Nichol Street where we present six exhibitions a year. The gallery participates in international art fairs including Art Basel (Galleries) and Frieze London where we have presented solo projects since 2010. The gallery represents 22 emerging and established artists; most recently adding The Estate of J.B. Blunk (USA), Laura Gannon (Ireland), Samson Kambalu (Malawi) and Bernard Piffaretti (France) to the roster.
The gallery has a special interest in film, representing John Smith, Marcus Coates, Ben Rivers, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Samson Kambalu and the estate of Jeff Keen. Rivers and Forsyth & Pollard have made feature films with worldwide cinema distribution and received awards from Sundance, Venice and Locarno Film Festivals.
Ocula Conversation Renee So Renee So's first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, Bellarmines and Bootlegs (8 March–2 June 2019) at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, centres on a long-standing motif in her work: the eponymous Bellarmine—a domestic jug used in the Rhineland in the 16th and 17th centuries to carry wine and beer from barrel to table. Following its...
Ocula Conversation Rana Begum Artist, United Kingdom and Bangladesh Rana Begum, winner of the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017, is an Anglo-Bangladeshi artist whose conversation with the historical legacy of minimalism is textured by childhood memories of reading the Quran inside a mosque in Bangladesh. Her union of styles and influences, which combine references ranging from Donald Judd and Agnes Martin to Islamic art...
Ocula Conversation Francis Upritchard Artist, New Zealand Francis Upritchard’s artistic lexicon is perhaps best known for her curious, and at times disconcerting, small-scale figurative sculptures which in their fantastical forms also embody a constellation of historical and contemporary references. These figures inhabit a universe whereby imagination and the ancient and contemporary collide....
Ocula Report 'Freedom Farmers' At The Auckland Art Gallery 4 Dec 2013 : Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers for Ocula Occupying the lion’s share of exhibition space at the Auckland Art Gallery, Freedom Farmers is said to be the museum’s largest survey of contemporary art in the last twenty-five years. Curated by the gallery’s own Natasha Conland, the exhibition looks at how the utopian energy of the 1970s is being artistically deployed in...
Related Press Frieze Sculpture 2018: the highlights Wallpaper* : 4 July 2018 Between Wimbledon and the FIFA World Cup, there's been plenty of distractions from London's unusually Mediterranean weather of late.
Related Press Fields of Light and Colour The Art Newspaper : 21 March 2017 The London-based Bangladeshi artist, an alum of Chelsea College of Art & Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, was awarded the coveted prize last October, receiving a bursary of $100,000 to realise a site-specific project at Art Dubai, working with curator Omar Berrada. And the prize-winning work, which was unveiled near the Abraaj lounge on...
Related Press Rana Begum: Cultural conversations Aesthetica : 15 November 2016 A new and innovative outdoor work by Bangladeshi-British artist Rana Begum is currently installed at King’s Cross, marking the start of a new series of public commissions for the area. No.700 Reflectors, Cubitt Sq. 2016 occupies the full length of Lewis Cubitt Square, measuring 50 metres long and three and a half metres high.The sculpture...
Related Press Frieze's Abby Bangser on the 2016 edition of the London fairs Whitewall : 6 October 2016 Joining Frieze in January 2015 as the Artistic Director for the Americas and Asia, Abby Bangser has brought over 10 years of experience in the art industry (at institutions like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California) to assist in the global success of the fairs, particularly with...
