The Woven Child at London’s Hayward Gallery is a moving examination of Bourgeois’s fabric sculptures, drawing out themes of motherhood, gender, identity, and trauma.
Hayward Gallery
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In Intricate Weavings, Igshaan Adams Maps South Africa’s Tangled Histories
Adams’s weavings are the kind that demand to be stood directly in front of, for you to hunker down on your knees, or crane your neck at all angles.
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Kader Attia’s Work Holds a Mirror to the World’s Injustice
Attia links seemingly disparate things and gives them new meanings by mining history, politics, literature, religion, art, anthropology, and medicine to find echoes everywhere.
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An Artist’s Violent and Beautiful Reflections of South Korea
Lee Bul illuminates the relationship between South Korea’s artists and their country over the tumultuous second half of the 20th century.
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Andreas Gursky Captures the Pandemonium of Industrialized Overproduction
The photographer reproduces a sense of economic spectacle suffused with an encroaching disbelief in its benefits in his retrospective at the newly renovated Hayward Gallery.
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9 Thoughts on Funhouse Art, Now with Cat GIFs!
I originally considered writing in a standard review format, but Carsten Höller’s retrospective Decision, currently on view at London’s Hayward Gallery, is more amenable to the listicle form.
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The Real-Life Applications of “Post-Internet” Art
LONDON — The best works on view in this seven-artist selection are “post-internet” experiments (sorry) that probe the ways in which the internet has reconfigured, and continues to reconfigure, such charged arenas as identity, surveillance, and labor.
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The Unbearable Lightness of Frances Stark
LONDON — In a 21st-century take on the artist and his model, Frances Stark has performed a gender swap and had her wicked way with up to ten male muses.
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Counting Up With Martin Creed
LONDON — The fact he gives each work a number is the first thing anyone learns about Martin Creed. His website lists “Work No. 3” up to “Work No. 1674” and counting. Pointing out the UK artist likes seriality is like pointing out that Pollock liked drips or that Duchamp liked plumbing or even the fact that Michelangelo could paint upside down.
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For Dayanita Singh, Photography as Literature
LONDON — At a press view on the Southbank, Dayanita Singh warned the assembled crowd that she gets a twinge whenever referred to as a photographer. And yet her photographs proliferate throughout the Hayward Gallery, where her exhibition Go Away Closer is installed, with many more on display than a conventional show of the form.
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Why Was a Major Outsider Art Survey 91.3% Male?
LONDON — A major survey of outsider art, Hayward Gallery’s Alternative Guide to the Universe closed on August 26. It was a show featuring many of outsider art’s most prolific practitioners of the last several decades, all under the aegis of providing institutional space for “alternative” modes of knowledge. Yet of the Alternative Guide’s 23 artists, only two were female.
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What Does It Mean to Be Alternative at the Museum of Everything?
LONDON — The Museum of Everything, a twee traveling carnival of outsider art, seems to have appeared just about everywhere since its founding in 2009, from the Chalet Society in Paris to Selfridges department store in London.