Ellie & I recently visited A A Murakami’s Silent Fall at Burlington Gardens at the rear end of the Royal Academy building complex. Timed with the beginning of Frieze Week 2021 the installation will be running until summer 2022. FLOATING BUBBLES You enter a giant, relatively dark room where bubbles are being released from tube-like dispensers above you. Because of the mirrors spread all over the walls, the space seems like an infinite forest. The bubbles look relatively heavy like honey or jelly. However, they turn out to weigh next to nothing. This is why they float towards the ground very slowly. CATCH THEM WITH YOUR HAND You can catch them with your hand. The gallery provides you with a glove for that purpose, as you are not supposed to touch the bubbles with your bare hands. You can make the bubbles bounce up and down on your glove-covered palm […]
Wayne McGregor & Random International’s No One Is An Island Dance Performance
We checked out choreographer Wayne McGregor’s & art group Random International’s collaboration No One Is An Island today. The dance performance simply blew us away. Superblue and BMW are presenting this brilliant show. MEET FIFTEEN POINTS/II The 12-minute show explores the interaction between humans and machines. It involves two dancers and one robotic machine or kinetic sculpture called Fifteen Points/II on a track of about 20-metre long rails with 15 stick-like arms that each have very strong lights at the end. It can move forward and backward on the rails and move its arms with the lights up and down, forward and backward. INPUT FROM HARVARD The ideas for the machine were developed by Random International during various artist residences, including one at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. A MACHINE WITH SOME HUMAN FEATURES Many of the moves of the machine feel almost human-like. This […]
Moments Exhibition at Moyse’s Hall in Bury St Edmunds – Banksy, Hirst, Emin and more
Ellie recently dragged me to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, near Cambridge, to visit a sunflower field nearby. After we’d enjoyed a sea of yellow, we went back into town to look for a place to have lunch at. This is when we saw a random banner spanning over the main pedestrian zone. It advertised Moyse’s Hall’s Moments exhibition. Moreover, it advised that the artists on display included Banksy, Damien Hirst, and Tracy Emin. We normally don’t go to a lot of art exhibitions outside the bigger cities, but this caught our attention. World-class art at the Moments Exhibition Bury St Edmunds While we were waiting for our food to arrive we did some googling. There were various enthusiastic reviews of the Moments Exhibition Bury St Edmunds. We learned that Banksy himself is thought to have visited the exhibition just a week earlier, before going on a spraying […]
Henry Moore Studios and Gardens – The perfect way to spend an afternoon
A couple of months ago Ellie & I visited the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens, the workplace and family home of world-famous 20th century sculptor Henry Moore. The vast estate stretches over 70 acres of land near Stansted Airport, about 2h20m (sic!) by public transport, or half that by car, from London. Spread all over the fields and gardens are more than 20 of the big man’s monumental sculptures. SIX HENRY MOORE STUDIOS While visitors are not permitted to enter the main building, you can have a close look at the six different studio spaces. One is for maquettes, another one for carving, one for etching, one for drawing, and so on. A lovely, perfectly restored 16th century barn is the only place in the world to see Moore’s unique tapestries. EDMUND DE WAAL’S ‘THIS LIVING HAND’ AT HENRY MOORE STUDIOS At the moment, one of the larger side […]
Ai Weiwei’s Roots Exhibition at the Lisson Gallery – Only until 2 Nov!
We have been huge fans of Ai Weiwei for many years. We find his art immediately intuitive and aesthetic, we love the versatility, the materials, (in many cases) the sheer physical scale, how he’s often at the forefront of what’s technically possible, and not least of all we love angry art and this feller is angrier than a dozen wives whose wedding anniversaries have been forgotten. Weiwei’s art always comes with a message, he’s risked more than most artists for his beliefs, suffered at the hands of the Chinese regime, but nothing will stop this one-man army. What’s even more: he doesn’t stop at the message and actively runs projects worldwide. The Roots exhibition at Lisson Gallery mainly consists of giant, rusty iron sculptures cast from tree roots collected in Brazil for Weiwei’s biggest exhibition so far, which took place in São Paulo last year. To be more precise, […]