The American Century: Labour, Warhol and Rosenquist
With Alex Veness - Dec'16
-The first piece of the text was not about art, but more about industrial revolution
-Maybe when art is mixed with industrial revolution or politics, it becomes more complicated and difficult
- Some artists show their work in a specific way [spectacle] to create certain psychological state
-Art is an expression of individual experience rather than a social one.
Letters to a Woman Painter – by Max Beckman
With Nelson Diplexcito - Nov'16
The text discussed ideas such as:
-Certain ideas can only be expressed by art.
-In the development of one’s taste, one leaves certain things behind [understanding of art and the development of taste changes/ develops over time]
-Art, love and passion are very closely related, and all seeking and aspiration ends in finding oneself.
The discussion group revolved mainly around certain points:
-Painting is a wordless intelligence
-Whether it difficult to speak about painting.
-Whether it is easy to create a painting nowadays with all the distraction
-Paintings starts to become more expressionist
-A brief comparison between painting and photography
-Artists like Cezanne who moved from picture to painting
Imaging Terror: Gerhard Richter's 18 October 1977
With Geraint Evans - Nov'16
The text tackled the actions and the tragic death of the members of the Baader-Meinhof Group, who called themselves (the Red Army Faction). Images of the dead bodies filled the media and 10 years later Gerhard Richter responded to the disturbing images by painting them, with some blur.
The group discussion revolved around the effect of the social media and the idea of displaying images repeatedly over and over, and the kind of impact this has on the audience perception of the magnitude of the event.
Also, the discussion involved the difference between the photo and the painting, whereby in painting there is some sort of movement/life that one does not see in a still picture.
We also discussed Richter’s process from collecting images up to creating the final artwork and self –critique.
The Worm in the Bud by Mary Horlock
With Mark Fairnington - Feb'17
This was a hybrid of a reading group and a professional practice seminar, where we had the chance to visit the artist's show in Handel Street Projects in 14 Florence street. The show was accompanied by a text commissioned and tailored especially for the occasion. Mary Horlock was a curator at Tate Britain and is now a fiction writer. The show consisted of 4 large paintings of flowers (please see the Galleries page) According to Fairnington, all Horlock enquired about, was the names of the flowers in display, then she wrote the fiction text where the flower names were woven in the story line.
The gallery owner was involved in the discussion; at first the discussion revolved around the artists struggle after they have finished college and how to manage oneself in a challenging world. We later discussed the paintings one by one, however, the one with the large white flowers gained much focus, the way it was positioned in the gallery and the degree of detail evident in the work. Regarding the position of the painting, a colleague commented that it was as if cropped from the wall creating tension between the
Inside the White Cube
The Ideology of the Gallery Space
With Tom Cardwell April 2017
We came up with the main ideas that outline the text:
-
Questioning space in the sense of turning everything upside down and looking at the galley space fro every corner
-
The relationship between the individual and the gallery space
-
The "White Cube" not being neutral, due to all the history that comes with it.
We also discussed the relationship between money and art, whereas, being an artist, one needs to be pragmatic sometimes in order to generate some income from their art.
​