Archive for the ‘Arts’ Category

For the fifth consecutive year, Goldsmiths’ College has featured prominently in the Turner Prize 2010 shortlist. Vying for the £40,000 prize are former student Angela de la Cruz and lecturer Kodwo Eshun from the Otolith Group.

Spanish-born de la Cruz’s solo exhibition ‘After’ at Camden Arts Centre, London, earned her the nomination for the shortlist.  Known for her abstract paintings and sculptures, she damages her artwork to reveal human frailties with titles such as ‘Ashamed’. She attended the College from 1991-1994 for her BA (Hons) in Fine Art.

“Awarded to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding.”

Founded in 2001 by SOAS graduate Anjalika Sager and Kodwo Eshun, the Otolith Group work with “media archives, histories of futurity, the legacies of non-alignment and tricontinentalism.” The group have been nominated for their mixed-media exhibition ‘A Long Time Between Suns’ at Gasworks and The Showroom, London.  The duo creates film-essays which fuse science fiction with social commentary, such as a film of sweatshop workers in Mumbai.

Dr Richard Noble, head of Goldsmiths’ Art Department, commented: “We congratulate both Angela and Kodwo, and we are honoured that two such brilliant artists have been associated with our programmes.”

Tate Britain will host an exhibition of the shortlisted artists from 4 October 2010.  The winner will be announced on 6 December.

That is the daunting question being asked by Dutch composer Michel van der Aa in his latest opera, After Life, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican on 15th May.

Based on the 1998 film of the same name, the opera’s characters are at a midpoint between heaven and earth. Before they leave their earthly lives behind, they are allowed to relive only one key moment in their life, which they can then take with them to eternity in the form of a film.

Every week, a new group of dead people enter this midpoint between heaven and earth, and have to sift through their memories to choose one, decisive moment.

“It such a humanistic story,” says van der Aa. “Something that we all can relate to. Everybody has one or several moments that they like to think about – but I haven’t picked one yet.”

For the University of London students we surveyed, decisive moments were mostly orientated – perhaps unsurprisingly – around family and friendship. Answers included:

Euro-trip last summer, watching fireworks with my family on New Year’s Eve, getting a coursework question in last week’s exam, first day at university, family vacation to Alaska, my first graduation, and – for one enamored student – valentine’s day.

To help the audience answer this philosophical question, van der Aa hopes to awaken their imagination by combining live stage action with film, music and an electro-acoustic sound. A series of mini-films have been recorded by the cast and will be projected onto the stage while the opera unfolds. “It’s a very natural extension to my music and a very natural extension to my vocabulary – stretching my vocabulary in a way I could cope with more ideas,” van der Aa added.

Since its world premiere in 2006, Van der Aa has developed and perfected the composition of After Life: “Back then I decided I wanted to compose a very sparse musical material because there are so many things happening on stage, but I think in being that careful the music turned out to be a little too sparse. So this is one of the things I immediately thought I had a chance to change.”

The UK premiere of After Life at the Barbican is performed by ASKO/Schoenberg Ensemble conducted by Otto Tausk, who also premiered the work in 2006.

More details on the website: http://www.barbican.org.uk/afterlife/

This exhibition provides such a rare and concentrated fusion of passionate impasto paintings that the creative energy is impossible to avoid. Do not be put off by the number of art-connoisseurs-on-their-lunch-breaks wandering around, (the Courtauld is a little prone to this clientele) the exhibition is both really accessible and (importantly) free to all students.

Frank Auerbach is amongst the most highly valued living British artists, known particularly for his female portraiture and cityscapes of Camden Town, where he still has a workshop to the present day. Comprising of only two rooms, the exhibition has been put together thoughtfully and conscientiously to display Auerbach’s heavy urban impasto to its best advantage.

The exhibition focuses on fourteen of Auerbach’s urban scenes painted between 1952 and 1962.  After the devastating bomb damage of the Second World War artists became preoccupied with London in ruins. Auerbach stood apart by preferring to depict London at its vital moment of rebirth, when order was restored and chaos cast aside as new buildings rose from the ashes, a subject-matter particularly suited to his intense style.

The exhibition culminates in a small side-room containing two large paintings of the rebuilding of John Lewis in Oxford Street, which are considered to be the climax of these works. Handily the exhibition catalogue has been chained to a bench in this room for the free perusal of those who are interested.

What makes this exhibition so exciting, for both art-lovers and the curious newcomers, is that for the first time Auerbach’s sketches and preliminary oil painting experimentations have been displayed beside the wild paintings that issued from them. The thick, liberally applied paint stands are in true Auerbach style, set up to an inch and a half from the canvas, so that it could almost be considered a relief work, and the earthy colours (although in truth they were the only pigments that the artist could afford at the time) create a distinctively gritty and urban vitality.

Small but perfectly formed is definitely the phrase for this exhibition; the collection is not overwhelming, but rather has chosen, un-ambitiously but wisely, to display a very specific fragment of this prolific artist’s work in a way that makes them immediately engaging. Well worth the four flight climb to the exhibition gallery in Somerset House, especially as the café downstairs sells delicious cakes!