Publisher: The Studio Trust
Content: 320 pages, full colour
Language: English
ISBN: 0983259909 (Hardcover).
Dimensions: 11.0 x 8.7 x 1.0 inches
Price: Hardcover: US $29.99, UK £24.99
Editor: Michael Spens
Deputy Editor: Dr Janet McKenzie
Creative Director: Martin Kennedy
Vice-President: Miguel Benavides
To order your copy please contact studio@mwrk.co.uk
Introduction
Another Yearbook feels like a cause for celebration. In response to the financial crash in 2008, cautionary spending policies were adopted by galleries and museums, and major auction houses laid off junior staff and battened down the hatches. At the top end of the art market, however, prices and profits continued to rise, exacerbating the paradox of cut-backs and closures at community and regional levels. Art publishing too must proceed carefully, making the role of online journals such as Studio International in education and in the dissemination of critique more important than before.
Against the values we have inherited from the Enlightenment and 20th-century romanticism, whither are we bound? That art is central to global culture, there is no doubt, and so too, the role of the artist to question powerful hegemonies on the world stage. The relatively modest exhibition, Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion, which had sprung out of the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery in late 2008, reached New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in the spring of 2009 (also shared with the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton Long Island). Is the non-centrality of these venues, the non-celebrity status of most of the 15 international exhibiting artists, or the non-alignment of the exhibition’s theme to current high-priestly curatorial preoccupations in the main centres, a reason why this challenging exhibition has not yet moved on to a wider, major circuit? It would be a most fitting exhibition in any of a number of venues in Europe at the present time.
A sympathetic strain of motivation and inspiration was already evident in the contributions of many of our writers here, and the works they choose to focus on: Cildo Meireles, Rosalind Nashashibi, Anthony Gormley, Aida Tomescu, Sophie Calle and Tracey Emin. We have also sought to cover major museum and gallery events, with the relaunch of London’s redesigned Whitechapel and outstanding shows such as Tate Modern’s Rodchenko and Popova, which at last set right the key role of Liubov Popova in reappraising Constructivism. This enabled the principles of Constructivism to find fuller application in photography and film-making. Perhaps it is symptomatic of the redefinition of that key movement in Russia, and its ramifications and legacy, that two new publications on film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky have appeared, in which his lasting – but not fully recognised – influence on film and television today is asserted. Tarkovsky can be seen to have been a “damaged Romanticist” who mirrored modern emotion.
We keep a watch on today’s pivotal figures, including Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Luis Barragàn and now Ed Ruscha, always wary of the curatorial urge to revise and the art market’s urge to hedge. Even Frieze Art Fair, a superb London innovation, showed symptoms of both processes. We welcome our growing cyber-readership, including an increasing number of students.
Michael Spens
Editor
Contents
Sharjah March Meeting 2024: Tawashjuat
This year’s edition of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s March meeting focused on collectives, collab...
Martin Boyce – interview: ‘You’re both inside and outside. There’s...
Martin Boyce’s show at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, offers three distinctive, in-between spaces for exp...
Hanna Bekker vom Rath: A Rebel for Modern Art
This richly documented show does justice to the feisty Hanna Bekker vom Rath, a German art collector...
Infinite Variety: Harold Cohen and Cybernetics in the 1960s
On the occasion of a show of Harold Cohen’s work at Gazelli Art House in London, we consider the p...
Through his sensitive and thoughtful works, Issam Kourbaj ensures the plight of those in his native ...
The English eccentric William Blake meets his German peers in a treasure-strewn exhibition that make...
Chronorama: Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century
Highlights from the golden age of photography, produced for fashion magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair,...
Thea Djordjadze: Framing Yours Making Mine
In this comprehensive show, Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze’s spare sculptural works emanate a sen...
Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Alberta Whittle and other artists from the African diaspora consi...
A post-apocalyptic landscape or an abandoned toolshed? This compact exhibition, by ceramics sculptor...
This show looks at how John Singer Sargent styled his sitters, insisting they wore certain garments ...
Francis Picabia: Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950
A career-spanning exhibition of drawings and watercolours shows the elusive modernist Francis Picabi...
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
The Royal Academy, founded at the height of the British empire, brings together more than 100 histor...
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You
As poetic as it is urgent, Barbara Kruger’s text-based work packs a weighty punch. Her methods of ...
Moon/King: The Work and Friendship of Phillip King and Jeremy Moon – 195...
Phillip King and Jeremy Moon met as students at Cambridge and remained friends until Moon’s death ...
A flurry of museum and gallery exhibitions flags a surge of interest in Korean art. The most compell...
Through paintings, works on paper and projections, this exhibition traces the evolution of AARON, th...
Gayle Chong Kwan – interview: ‘I’ve made a connection between displa...
Gayle Chong Kwan talks about using sand and sugar to make historic and contemporary connections betw...
Spanning seven decades of Yoko Ono’s groundbreaking work, from the 1950s to now, some done with Jo...
Leo Robinson – interview: ‘Human beings need meaningful symbols and na...
Leo Robinson, whose exhibition Dream-Bridge-Omniglyph is now at the London Mithraeum, considers his ...
Outi Pieski – interview: ‘Contemporary art museums in general are spac...
Small carved figures, knotted fringes and historic hats represent Outi Pieski’s Sámi heritage as ...
These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture
In this joyous and eccentric show, Hoyland’s jaunty ceramic sculptures are shown alongside equally...
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
The 50 artists in this formidable show have all used textiles to tell powerful stories of resistance...
Ronald Davis – interview: ‘Two artists who use perspective in their wo...
Ronald Davis talks about his art and how he started out in the 1960s, his friendship with Judy Chica...
Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus* and Warbur...
Spanning master plans and covert models, these two exhibitions conjure up a point in the early 1930s...
Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads
Repeatedly drawing the same sitters from among his circle of close friends, Auerbach conveys his sub...
Jacqueline Poncelet: In the Making
After years of resistance, Jacqueline Poncelet has facilitated a full retrospective of 50 years of h...
The Hayward Gallery’s spring exhibition is an effervescent playground of kinetically inclined scul...
This show celebrating the centenary of the local artist who became internationally famous includes m...
This major new show pays homage to Kngwarray, an Indigenous Australian who, though she only began pa...
Special issue 2004, Volume 203 Number 1026
Special issue 2004, Volume 203 Number 1026
Special issue 2005, Volume 204 Number 1027
Special issue 2005, Volume 204 Number 1027
Special issue 2006, Volume 205 Number 1028
Special issue 2006, Volume 205 Number 1028
Special issue 2007, Volume 206 Number 1029
Special issue 2007, Volume 206 Number 1029
Special issue 2008, Volume 207 Number 1030
Special issue 2008, Volume 207 Number 1030