Arrested Motion

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Streets: Swoon @ Nuart Aberdeen

Posted by feralthings, June 6, 2024

Nuart returns to Aberdeen this weekend with a full program of murals, conference talks and screenings and this provides a good opportunity to look back at the undoubted highlight of last year’s event: Swoon‘s return to the streets for the first time since 2017. Following her retrospective at CIC Cincinnati, the Brooklyn-based artist, also known as Caledonia Curry, decided to shift focus to work on other pieces of her artistic puzzle, most notably the stop-motion animation Sibylant Sisters which is currently in production. But the […]

Streets: Unmute Gaza

Posted by feralthings, May 31, 2024

Emerging as a creative response in support of Palestinian photojournalists, Unmute Gaza has brought together an array of artists highlighting the unimaginable suffering currently being experienced by the people of Gaza. The project features interpretations of photographs captured on the ground in the exclave which can be easily downloaded and pasted up around the world; so far interventions have been seen across 83 cities in 30 different countries. These images both make visible the suffering which is all too absent from much of the media’s […]

Showing: Aryz – ‘Vanitas’ @ National Pantheon (Lisboa)

Posted by feralthings, April 17, 2024

Housed within the central rotunda of Lisboa’s National Pantheon, Aryz’s latest installation takes full advantage of its emblematic surroundings to re-frame the centuries-old conversation about our own mortality. The two works reference the vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries which sought to emphasize the transience of life. An archetypal example by an unknown artists hangs elsewhere within the former Church of Santa Engrácia and this still life is populated with an assortment of memento mori: a recently-extinguished candle, an hour-glass through which the […]

Recap: Bartek Świątecki AKA Pener – ‘Chasing The Wind’ @ Chenus Longhi

Posted by feralthings, March 17, 2024

Last weekend saw the conclusion of Bartek Świątecki’s Chasing The Wind exhibition at Chenus Longhi in Paris. It seems that Poland has produced a disproportionately large number of artists who started out writing graffiti and have then stretched the movement’s foundational principles to oblivion in their own unique ways, creating new languages of expression in the process. Świątecki, also known as Pener, was part of the Spectrum crew alongside the likes of Proembrion and later painted walls in Bydgoszcz with Sainer and Bezt before increasingly […]

Streets: Banksy (North London)

Posted by Patrick Nguyen, March 17, 2024

Banksy is back, with a new, large-scale street piece appearing overnight on a residential building on Hornsey Road, midway between the Archway and Finsbury Park areas of North London. AM was prompted out of hermit mode, jumped on a bus, and went to have look, before the artwork could be dogged by the petty-minded/envious, sidebusted by coattail-riders, or covered in perspex. The whimsical mural interacts with a tree in the foreground — a rather sad-looking, currently leafless specimen that was aggressively lopped and topped by local authorities. Having taken matters […]

Showing: Invader – ‘Invader Space Station’

Posted by feralthings, March 8, 2024

For three months, visitors are invited to step aboard Invader Space Station to experience the Parisian artist’s most artistically and physically expansive exhibition to date. The show is being held in the modernist edifice which was once home to Libération, the newspaper whose pages the artist invaded in 2011. Upon entering, visitors are met with a barrage of sound and light emanating from an installation which occupies the entirety of the first of nine floors; the classic Space Invaders arcade game has been reimagined in […]

Opening: Sickboy – ‘Optical Delusions’ @ Harvey Nichols (Bristol)

Posted by feralthings, November 24, 2023

Mixing art and fine dining, Sickboy (interviewed) is kicking off his latest show at the high-end department store Harvey Nichols tonight with a launch dinner and artist’s talk. Optical Delusions is presented by Fluorescent Smogg and builds upon his ever-expanding use of semiotics to create a dream-like world that glows and radiates light. The Bristol-based artist has long experimented with an array of unorthodox mediums: from painting on bell-jars in the early 2000s, to creating tapestries a decade later and onwards to the lightboxes which […]

Showing: José Parlá – ‘Phosphene’ @ Ben Brown (London)

Posted by feralthings, November 17, 2023

Closing today after a four week run, Phosphene is José Parlá’s second show at Ben Brown Fine Art’s London location. The title references the phenomenon of seeing light without any external stimulus and the exhibition features 11 large scale canvases infused with kinetic and sensory energy. For many, graffiti is a means to exist beyond the corporeal and social confinement of our current circumstances and the now Brooklyn-based artist’s Ease tag was like a visual mantra repeated across south Miami in search of personal perfection. […]

Openings: Jeff Soto – “Sadlands” @ KP Projects

Posted by sleepboy, September 27, 2023

Earlier this month, Jeff Soto’s (interviewed) new exhibition Sadlands opened up in West Hollywood at KP Projects. Showing though the end of the month, the striking new body of work featured almost 20 medium to large sized paintings inspired by a post-apocalyptic Southern Californian landscape. Each piece, rendered in vibrant colors, correlates loosely with a location that the Riverside native denoted on a map (displayed in the gallery) with the sides of the frames painted to color coordinate with each pinned location. This conceptual thread nicely […]

Showing: Alistair Canvin – ‘Do Not Over Inflate’ @ Plan X

Posted by feralthings, September 26, 2023

Earlier this week, Alistair Canvin presented his debut solo exhibition at Plan X Gallery in Milan. The show, entitled Do Not Over Inflate, presents a series of photorealistic paintings depicting deflated flamingoes, crocodiles and beach balls set against a backdrop of water-refracted pool tiles. The partial use of an airbrush captures the tactile, plasticky feel of those objects and evokes memories of holidays in the sun. At first glance, the work’s aesthetic appears to reference youthful simplicity and the carefree optimism of childhood. But, this […]