16 March 2013 – 20 April 2013

This exhibition of all new works focuses on the corruption, excess and debauchery that have in part led to the current economic crisis. With characteristic wit and critique, Yinka Shonibare explores the contemporary worship of luxury goods and the behaviour of the banking industry while referencing well known iconography and art historical homage – most notably in his creation of a large tableau based on Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’.

For more info please visit the Stephen Friedman Gallery

April 6—May 11, 2013

Puppets, Pawns, and Prophets features recent and new work by Marcel Dzama, including three videos inspired by the game of chess, as well as puppets and masks based on the characters, drawings, collages, dioramas, and sculptural works. Dzama has become known for his prolific drawings, which are characterized by their distinctive palette of muted browns, grays, greens, and reds. In recent years, the artist has expanded his practice to encompass three-dimensional work and film and has developed an immediately recognizable language that draws from a diverse range of references and artistic influences.

Death Disco Dance is a four-minute video loop featuring characters based on chess pieces. It was filmed in Guadalajara, Mexico, in conjunction with Dzama’s A Game of Chess (which debuted at David Zwirner, New York, in 2011). In lieu of the latter’s narrative of fatal interchanges and power reversals, Dzama shows the ballet-dancing actors in a synchronized, but almost entirely improvised, dance, that was planned and choreographed on the spot. The artist himself created the disco-like soundtrack using a small drum machine. The loop will be displayed on several monitors in the gallery’s street-facing window.

For more info please visit David Zwirner

March 30 – April 27, 2012

Marion Peck has eleven new paintings on show at the new Michael Kohn Projects space that highlight the artist’s talent for meticulously painted narrative imagery. This particular body of work explores solitary animal figures placed in various situations and often anthropomorphized to reflect human emotion and mental states. These luscious paintings play with the kitschy stylization of animals while underscoring Peck’s faithfulness to Northern Renaissance realism in her treatment of landscape, flora, and the particularly stoic expressions of her subject matter. Continue reading “Marion Peck’s ‘Animals’ at Michael Kohn Projects, LA” →

Ryosuke Otsuji’s ‘Okinawan Lion’, historically found in domestic settings to ward off bad spirits.

Souzou brings together more than 300 works for the first major display of Japanese Outsider Art in the UK. The 46 artists represented in the show are residents and day attendees at social welfare institutions across Honshu, Japan’s largest island. The wonderfully diverse collection comprises ceramics, textiles, paintings, sculpture and drawings.

‘Souzou’ has no direct translation in English but a dual meaning in Japanese: written one way, it means creation, and in another it means imagination. Both meanings allude to a force by which new ideas are born and take shape in the world.

Starts on the 28th March, for more info visit the Wellcome Collection

28th Mar – 2nd May 2013

NO WAY in collaboration with Ghostown and the Print House Gallery present the first ever UK exhibition of works by Toshio Saeki. Known as ‘the Master of Japanese Erotica’, Saeki blends traditional Japanese technique with his own bizarre and perverse imagination.

Continue reading “Toshio Saeki at The Print House Gallery, London” →

Capitol Designer Studio have commissioned artists Lily Jencks and Nathanael Dorent to create this  pop-up installation in Primrose Hill. Lily Jencks says “One is about perception – how you perceive distances and shapes; and make sense of space. The other is about how to display an object that’s for sale; we wanted the space to be more than just a showroom selling tiles; to rethink the commercial transaction as something more creative.” Continue reading “‘Pulsate’ by Lily Jencks and Nathanael Dorent, Primrose Hill” →

Montreal-based painter Peter Ferguson shows intricately detailed paintings, evocative scenes of explorers and adventurers with a 1940’s National Geographic meets HP Lovecraft twist. Peter Ferguson’s meticulously painted, darkly humorous narratives also evoke early 20th century small town Americana (or Canadiana as the case may be). Combining the fantasy of the great ages of exploration with a distinctly paranormal bent, Ferguson’s work hovers along the lines of fantasy without ever fully teetering into full scale camp, and his work retains an air of both wonder and occasional melancholy. Continue reading “‘Black Jubilee’ with Peter Ferguson at Roq La Rue, Seattle” →

8th Mar – 27th Apr 2013

A group exhibition of international artists that examines the world of draftsmanship.

Features: Salvador Dali, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Steven C. Harvey, Reece Jones, Dirk Lange, Seung- Hyun Lee, Fernand Léger, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, Robert Longo, Dominic McGill, Robert McNally, Ludwig Meidner, Yan Pei-Ming, Paul Noble, Dennis Scholl, Erinç Seymen, Mircea Suciu and Hugo Wilson. Continue reading “‘Between the Lines’ at All Visual Arts, London” →