Two Rooms

Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread, Gerhard Richter. These may not be names that spring to mind when you think of the British Museum, but they all have work filed away in its extensive archive of prints and drawings. 'Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now' lifts a lid on a lesser-known collection at a museum renowned...

The Telegraph described it as an "ambitious and astonishing exhibition" while Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones declared he didn't just like the art but wanted to live in the world it portrays. He also speculated that modernist masters like Picasso were more influenced by Oceanic art than we might have previously realised. The...

Senior English painter and ex-Goldsmiths teacher, Basil Beattie, has had a couple of shows already at Two Rooms. This new display in the narrow upstairs gallery presents twenty works on paper, using oil paint and paint stick, rendering symbolic climbing devices like ladders (he uses flattened loops as rungs) and staircases (diagonally stacked up...

Julia Morison didn't need to give much thought to whether or not to accept her latest accolade. The Christchurch artist has been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year Honours, arguably the highest recognition of a 40-year career. 'Anything that promotes the arts is a really good thing,' she said. 'We have so much...

In the downstairs Two Rooms space, two very different sorts of work are presented by Julia Morison, made fifteen years apart. We see From the Book of Shadows, the larger, older, relief, sponge sculptures positioned on the two parallel longest walls, and Things, the more recent steel and mixed media works aligned on a central dividing axis that...

What a show! Each section and, indeed, pretty much each individual in this rich but rigorous celebration of black artists working in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, could spin off into a separate exhibition in its own right. The various responses to the black civil rights movement and what it meant to be a black artist in this turbulent time range...

The British sculptor Sarah Lucas is facing off against Auguste Rodin at the Legion of Honor museum. Sarah Lucas: Good Muse is the latest in a series of exhibitions celebrating and contextualizing the work of Rodin, who died 100 years ago this year. Preceding Good Muse was an exhibition by Urs Fischer, which pivoted on a discussion about the...

Outside of the fairs this week, don't miss the exhibitions on view at Basel's tops museums and institutions, including Wolfgang Tillmans, Wim Delvoye, Jérôme Zonder, Yan Xing and Richard Serra, amongst others.

There has long been a profound and complex relationship between sculpture and architecture, with many artists encountering or breaking down a boundary between the two disciplines. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, questions what we know and understand about design through [Re]construct, a group exhibition selected from the Arts Council...

After being closed for nearly three years of construction, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopened to the public this past May with 170,000 square feet of exhibition space—more than double what it had before—and a boatload of marquee art on a 99-year loan from the collection of Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher. The material...

The simultaneous exhibitions are divided into three connected gallery spaces for Samoan-born Greg Semu, Maori/New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana and the collaboration of Maori/New Zealand artist Robin White and Tongan artist Ruha Fifita. Each of the works on show at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) effortlessly intertwines contemporary...

Hawaii has a population of more than 1.4 million people but not a single museum is dedicated to contemporary art, said Isabella Ellaheh Hughes, a co-founder of the first Honolulu Biennial, which will open in spring 2017. “We can both highlight our tremendous local talent as well as bring in national and international contemporary artists...

2015 marks the 40th anniversary of New Zealand artist Julia Morison's first exhibition. Morison studied graphic design at Wellington Polytechnic in 1970–2 and painting at the University of Canterbury in 1973–5. After showing a number of severely formalist paintings she took a break from exhibiting: from this came two very large, multi-part works:...

New Zealand's official platform at the Venice Biennale began in 2001, and our formal representation was arguably already overdue at this point. There had been anomalous instances of New Zealanders exhibiting at the Biennale: Frances Hodgkins (she was meant to be in a group show representing Britain, though this was never realised because of World...

In this intriguing assortment of paintings from eleven ‘abstract’ artists, in-house curator Mary-Louise Browne encourages juxtapositions and references from a variety of working processes, looking at ideas behind different support materials and surfaces, and distinctive approaches to colour application. Such an exhibition indicates...

In the Christmas flourish of exhibitions one of the biggest names is Shane Cotton. His show called Blank Geometry is at the Michael Lett gallery. It is an exhibition that does not aim at grandeur but rather a quiet tracing of ideas. The work is of modest size and though everything is done with a subtle skill, the subject is very open.

The Ian Potter Cultural Trust (ICPT) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) jointly announced on 30 October 2014 that they have awarded Melbourne-based artist Daniel Crooks with the AUD100,000 Ian Potter Moving Image Commission (IPMIC). The New Zealand-born artist will collaborate with artistic and technical specialists to create a...

Boyd Webb is best known for his amusing stage set-like dioramas and comical props that were constructed as temporary sculptures to be photographed, as well as (later at Crockford) images of transparent inflatable toys that when deflated and documented, had a disturbing sense of the uncanny. This new series of fourteen photographs at Two Rooms...

In Gretchen Albrecht’s latest exhibition at Two Rooms, she is showing mainly recent large works although there are a couple of works which are  up to 12 years old, which show some of the subtle changes which  have occurred in her work over that time The rectangular works feature oval paintings, of massed colour on bare canvas....

Sculptor and photographer Fiona Hall will become the first artist to exhibit in Australia's new pavilion at the Venice Biennale after yesterday being chosen as the representative for the 2015 event. Adelaide-based Hall's exhibition, an installation comprising a range of artistic disciplines, will be curated by Linda Michael and will...