Ocula Conversation Artist Taloi Havini and Ruth McDougall, curator of Pacific art at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, discuss Havini's first Australian solo exhibition, Reclamation .
Latest Ocula Report Armory Week Lowdown: Art Shows to See By Casey Carsel, New York After structural issues forced The Armory Show into last-minute relocation pirouettes last year, the fair returns between 5 and 8 March 2020 with a flourishing programme, complemented by stand-out shows across New York City.
Ocula Insight Ella Kruglyanskaya Steals from Art History, Takes Back Gaze By Tessa Moldan, London For her second solo exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Ella Kruglyanskaya's compositions signal the many possibilities of paint.
Francis Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin and died in 1992 in Madrid. Bacon, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, remained devoted to figuration and portraiture throughout his career. In his art, modernity and tradition converge. His ectoplasmic figures and faces strain like savage forces of nature against shallow fields of intense color and the sketchy armatures that bind them back to the picture plane. In his gut-wrenching serialization of the human body and its sensations, he showed himself to be the unflinching witness of the hysterical reality of the body and the primal fear of those who inhabit it. Although Bacon's aggressive deformations suggest an intense level of existential alienation, he was actually intimately connected to most of his sitters, among them his lover George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes, who owned the Colony Club, Bacon's favorite drinking spot, and Isabel Rawsthorne, the renowned artist's muse. He often painted his subjects at a remove, from photographs, although the resulting portraits are far from being objective or idealized images. Lisa Sainsbury, a close friend and patron, sat for him every week for two years while he made a concerted effort to work directly from life. Of the eight portraits of her that Bacon completed, he destroyed several and Head of a Woman (Lisa Sainsbury) (1955-57) is one of only three remaining.
Ocula News London Auction Sales Down Despite $30m Hockney Splash London, 18 February 2020 The third highest price fetched by Hockney at auction contributed to over US $500 million in sales.
Related Press Francis Bacon: Couplings review – a taboo-busting opus of sizzling flesh 7 June 2019, The Guardian The authority of Francis Bacon’s art is papal. I am not referring to the paintings inspired by Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X that made him famous. It’s just that walking into Gagosian’s immaculate selection of his paintings feels like exploring the art treasures of St Peter’s and the Vatican, so sublime is this display. If these pictures...
Related Press Painting’s Patriarchal Spirit 20 October 2018, Hyperallergic LONDON—In 1981, the Royal Academy of Arts in London put on an exhibition of 20 th century painting that changed the art world. A New Spirit in Painting was 'a manifesto,' the accompanying catalogue said; it showcased a set of contemporary, mostly European painters, whose work possessed qualities—figurative, narrative, emotional...
Related Press The Spirit of Painting in an Altered World 12 May 2018, Hyperallergic 'A faint, beautiful memory' is how curator Norman Rosenthal described A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981-2018 , the current show at Almine Rech Gallery on the Upper East Side. What he’s remembering, as spelled out in the exhibition’s title, is the seminal survey, A New Spirit in Painting , which opened, barely, at the Royal Academy of...
Related Press Francis Bacon and gay Iranian artist Bahman Mohasses shown in Tehran 10 March 2017, The Guardian A remarkable collection of modern western and Iranian art that had been gathering dust in the cellar of a Tehran museum and blocked from being shown in Europe has gone on display in Iran’s capital. The collection features works by two prominent gay artists, Francis Bacon and Bahman Mohasses.
Related Video & Audio Wake up and smell the art at Tate Sensorium 11 September 2015, i-D Vice From the kids who started playing candy crush the moment they slipped out the womb, to gadget-obsessed geriatrics, technology is the go to attraction of the 00s. So, for art to remain truly relevant, it needs to grow collaboratively with the technology we are all so hooked on. Cue Tate Gallery's IK Prize, an annual initiative to support...
