Ocula Report Havana Biennial 2019: Constructing the Possible 17 Apr 2019 : Federica Bueti for Ocula I first visited Havana in November 2016, a few days after Fidel Castro died, and just under a year before Hurricane Irma hit Cuba in September 2017. Since then, much has changed, including the hand-painted signs that punctuate the journey from the airport to the city centre, which today do not celebrate the revolution so much as the 'Unidad y...
Ocula Conversation Andrew Stahl and Guo Xiaohui The exhibition Beyond Boundaries at Somerset House in London (12 March–2 April 2019) marked the historic contributions of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, on the occasion of their 100th and 150th anniversaries, respectively. Spread across several rooms of Somerset House's...
Ocula Report The National 2019: New Australian Art 13 Apr 2019 : Elyse Goldfinch for Ocula The National 2019: New Australian Art features work by 70 contemporary Australia-based artists split across three venues: the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (29 March–21 July 2019), as curated by Isobel Parker Philip, curator of photographs at AGNSW; Daniel Mudie Cunningham,...
Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential and longest-running international contemporary art galleries in the world. Today the gallery supports and develops 61 international artists across two exhibition spaces in London and two in New York as well as its new space in Shanghai. Established in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, Lisson Gallery pioneered the early careers of important Minimal and Conceptual artists, such as Art & Language, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long and Robert Ryman among many others. It still works with many of these artists as well as other artists of that generation from Carmen Herrera to the renowned estates of Leon Polk Smith, Ted Stamm and Roy Colmer.
In its second decade the gallery introduced significant British sculptors to the public for the first time, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Shirazeh Houshiary and Julian Opie. Since 2000, the gallery has gone on to represent many more leading international artists such as Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, John Akomfrah, Susan Hiller and Tatsuo Miyajima. It is also responsible for raising the international profile of a younger generation of artists led by Cory Arcangel, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Ryan Gander, Haroon Mirza, Laure Prouvost, Pedro Reyes and Wael Shawky.
Haroon MirzaLED Circuit Composition 24 (GMT), 2016 Turntable cover, addressable LEDs, Arduino, wire
Shirazeh HoushiaryMirage, 2017 Pigment and pencil on white Aquacryl on canvas on aluminium
Laure ProuvostIn Grand Ma’s Dream Grand Dad Sculpture of Her Would Look More Like This, 2018 Tapestry Ocula Conversation Andrew Stahl and Guo Xiaohui The exhibition Beyond Boundaries at Somerset House in London (12 March–2 April 2019) marked the historic contributions of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, on the occasion of their 100th and 150th anniversaries, respectively. Spread across several rooms of Somerset House's...
Ocula Report Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019: A Post-mortem 6 Apr 2019 : Diana d’Arenberg for Ocula Although Art Basel in Hong Kong is the youngest of the Art Basel fairs, and a relative newcomer to the international art fair circuit, it has now become a major attraction for collectors and galleries from around the world. The seventh edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong saw thousands of art courtesans and benefactors kick off the week with a string...
Ocula Photolog Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019 31 March 2019 'Art Basel reinforces its ongoing commitment to showcasing exceptional art from Asia and the Asia Pacific, with over half of the participating galleries having exhibition spaces in the region. The main sector of the show features 196 of the world's leading galleries presenting the highest quality of painting, sculpture, drawings, installation,...
Ocula Photolog The Armory Show 2019 11 March 2019 'The Armory Show features presentations by leading international galleries, innovative artist commissions and dynamic public programs. Since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show has served as a nexus for the art world, inspiring dialogue, discovery and patronage in the visual arts.' –The Armory Show Press Release (March 2019).
Related Press Sean Scully’s Figurative Leap Hyperallergic : 9 March 2019 When I became an art critic in 1981 one of the first artists I met and wrote about was Sean Scully. At that time I was teaching philosophy in Pittsburgh and he, having recently moved to New York, was as yet without a dealer. We are almost the same age, and to some extent we grew up together. When we first met, he had just made the transition from...
Related Press Iranian-born artist Shirazeh Houshiary: ‘Numbers are beautiful to me’ Financial Times : 9 February 2019 The secluded London studio of Shirazeh Houshiary foxes my Uber driver entirely. But I shouldn't be surprised that the Iranian-born artist is off-grid. Among a heap of volumes that litter her studio floor is Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, the quantum physicist whose luminous texts explain why Newtonian laws of space and time can only...
Related Press How ‘Paraconceptual’ Artist Susan Hiller (1940-2019) Probed the Fringes of the Familiar Frieze : 31 January 2019 Last week, after reading the interview 'Have Aliens Found Us?' between the writer Isaac Chotiner and Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, in The New Yorker, I thought about Susan. She would have liked it, I imagined, because it discusses the fact that all the images of Oumuamua – an interstellar and possibly alien object detected...
Related Press John Akomfrah Commemorates the Colonial Soldiers Who Fought for a Cause that Was Not Theirs Frieze : 22 January 2019 In the opening image of John Akomfrah's Mimesis: African Soldier (2018), we are confronted by a row of black and brown faces who smile nervously and knowingly into the camera. They represent the faces we seldom see in war documentaries or history books; their smiles evoke a quiet sense of unease and foreboding. Once the colonial subjects of empire,...
Related Video & Audio Christian Jankowski on Manifesta 11 The Art Newspaper : 15 June 2016 Looking out over Lake Zurich, artist Christian Jankowski discusses his Joint Ventures curatorial concept for Manifesta11. The 11th edition of the 'European biennial' Manifesta will be on display until 18 September 2016.
