John Kørner, Apple Bombs – at Victoria Miro

Victoria Miro presents Apple Bombs, an exhibition of new paintings by the Copenhagen-based artist John Kørner, which opens at the Mayfair gallery on 8 April.  

John Kørner, Organising Honey, 2016 | Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London. © John Kørner.

Painting, for Kørner, serves the unambiguous, if impalpable, function of exercising the imagination much in the same way as a bicycle stretches out the legs. In this exhibition, aspects of contemporary geopolitics including imbalances of wealth and the displacement of populations are obliquely problematised. Rather than predetermined allegorical narratives, the paintings in Apple Bombs present a constellation of seemingly incongruous pictorial elements in which the viewer is caught up, setting in motion dialogues concerning wellbeing, human relationships, consumption and survival.

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‘My work explores the anti, unfixed and impermanent’ – ArtAttack Meets HelenA Pritchard

TJ Boulting presents the gallery’s first solo show with South African artist HelenA Pritchard.

Untitled Encounters, 2016 | © HelenA Pritchard. Courtesy the artist and TJ Boulting

A 2011 graduate from the Royal College of Art MA in Painting, since then her work has expanded beyond the realms of painting into the sculptural, the object and most recently beyond that into the extra dimension of light. The common thread between them all being her utilisation of form, colour and material.

I had the chance to speak with Helen about her artistic practise and upcoming exhibition.

‘I was holding one of his pineapple grenades when it struck me how small and beautiful it was’ – K-tee at CNB Gallery

CNB Gallery, presents an exhibition of new works by British artist K-tee.

K-tee has long used weaponry in her work, and in this show she takes the distinctive American army MK II hand grenade, known colloquially as the ‘pineapple’, to create a series of small and medium-scale sculptures.

K-Tee, Milk Whole, 2016 | © K-tee. Courtesy the artist and CNB Gallery

I had the chance to speak with K-tee about her artistic practice and upcoming exhibition.

‘Who says a mathematician can’t be creative?’ ArtAttack interviews ‘Metamorphosis’ co-curators Olivia Bladen & Alice Procter

Last year, for their annual exhibition, the UCL Art Society, put on a fantastic show entitled ‘Escape,’ which left ArtAttack impressed and inspired. So with this year’s show, ‘Metamorphosis,’ just a few days away, we jumped on the opportunity to interview exhibition director’s Olivia Bladen (ArtAttack’s own!) and Alice Procter to gain some insight into the curatorial process and what we can expect from this exciting emerging art exhibition.

ArtAttack: So ‘Metamorphosis’ is the theme for this year’s show. Can you tell me how this idea came about and what it means to you?

Alice Procter: As strange as it sounds… We were eating gnocchi in a park last summer, throwing words at each other in the hope that something would stick. I don’t remember who said Metamorphosis first, but it just made so much sense. We wanted something open, that anyone could look at and say, ‘okay, how can I relate this to my work?’, because every artist is always making a change or transforming something. It felt like a way of encouraging our members to step back and look at the process behind their work.

Olivia Bladen: We went through a long list of words it could be! Previous exhibitions had names such as Alchemy and Escape, and we wanted to keep the theme true to those vibes; something that was open enough to be accessible to anyone, but would still provide direction. As the curators, it helps to have a unifying aspect, obviously. But as Alice said, the process of change is inherently an artistic one, so none of the submissions felt really out of place.

‘Better to buy the best of a less well known artist than a bad work by a big, fashionable name’ – ArtAttack meets Guy Stair Sainty

In light of Stair Sainty Gallery’s current exhibition FEDERICO BELTRAN MASSES: UNDER THE STARS, we spoke to founder and renowned dealer Guy Stair Sainty about the gallery and the current state of the market.

F. Beltran Masses, Maja Maldita, 1918 | Courtesy Stair Sainty Gallery

Guy opened his first public gallery in New York in 1982 and quickly made his name as a specialist in 18th and 19th century French painting, before gradually expanding into Spanish and Italian painting of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. Guy served for seven years as a member of the Art Advisory Panel of the Commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service, and is a former Vice-President of the Private Art Dealer’s Association.

Radiohalo a major solo exhibition by Michael Joo, Blain|Southern

Blain|Southern presents Radiohalo, a major solo exhibition of new artworks by acclaimed New York-based artist Michael Joo.

MICHAEL JOO Untitled, To (Drive) 2015-2016, Silver nitrate and epoxy ink on canvas | Photo: Tim Pyle, 2016, Courtesy Blain|Southern

A conceptual artist who works across a variety of media, Joo is interested in themes of energy, nature, technology, history and perception, which he explores through narratives of places, people and objects.

AMERICA IN REVOLT: THE ART OF PROTEST – ArtAttack meets Barry Miles

Shapero Modern presents AMERICA IN REVOLT: THE ART OF PROTEST, an exhibition of original posters and artwork created by students and activists during the landmark ‘Berkeley demonstrations’ in California in the early 1970s.

American Flag [Untitled], 1970 | Courtesy Shapero Modern

Drawn from the archive of the late publisher Felix Dennis, and curated by the revered writer and counterculture historian Barry Miles. The exhibition is made up of 50 works from the Felix Dennis collection, which was recently acquired by Shapero Rare Books, each one capturing the incendiary spirit of that time.

I had the chance to speak to Miles about the exhibition and the counterculture of the period.

‘Federico Beltran Masses: Under the Stars’ Preview

Salome, 1918. Oil on canvas, 141 x 165 cm.

In Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 novel À Rebours, the solitary aesthete Jean des Esseintes is ‘obsessed’ with the Biblical figure of Salome, ‘a mystery to all the writers who had never succeeded in portraying the disquieting exaltation of this dancer, the refined grandeur of this murderess.’ Salome was a fixture in the mind of many such writers and artists, as a seductive enchantress of the femme fatale variety, the (in fact unnamed) dancer who requests the head of John the Baptist on a platter in the New Testament. She has cast her spell on the likes of Titian to Rubens, in particular igniting the artistic imagination of the fin-de-siècle and the Symbolist artists. Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Salome famously invented her ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ striptease, whilst in the paintings of Gustave Moreau, ‘Des Esseintes at last saw realized the superhuman and exotic Salome of his dreams’ – a revelation he subsequently delights in waxing lyrical about for several more pages.

ArtAttack ArtCalendar: Our Top 6 London Art Shows for February, 2016