Author: TAC blog

Max Naylor
At the Prema Gallery, Uley
31 Oct – 11 Dec

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Max Naylor is an artist currently based in Bristol. Born in Cheltenham, raised in Cornwall and having spent time exploring Berlin, Delhi and London, a sense of place is deeply rooted in his practice.

His recent works warp the conventions of landscape painting, at times playing within the confines of perspective and scale and at others rejecting these notions completely. Somewhere between drawing and painting, his distinctive mark making approach combines the figurative with the abstract evoking a sense of mystery.

Familiar yet exotic, these mindscapes have as much to do with the inner subconscious realm as they do the external world.

Max recently completed a postgraduate course at the Royal Drawing School, he has exhibited widely in the UK and in 2016 won the Jackson’s Art Prize.
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At the Prema Gallery, Uley
31 Oct – 11 Dec” →

Vasilis Avramidis – Harvester
A new series of paintings
At the START Art Fair,
Saatchi Gallery

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Vasilis Avramidis graduated from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design with an MA in Fine Art in 2011.
Avramidis was shortlisted for the Salon Art Prize 2011 and he and his work has appeared in the Metro (UK), Sunday Telegraph (UK), Idol magazine (UK), Hi Fructose (LA), Rooms Magazine (UK), Juxtapose Magazine, Beautiful/Decay, Arrested Motion among many others.
His work is exhibited internationally and collected by University of the Arts London and private collectors in UK, Greece, USA and Japan.
Continue reading “Vasilis Avramidis – Harvester
A new series of paintings
At the START Art Fair,
Saatchi Gallery” →

“Primordial Soup”
at the James Freeman Gallery
Carolein Smit, Chris Berens, James Mortimer, and Sam Branton
9th September to 8th October

Primordial

Opening Reception:
Friday 9 September, 6:30 – 8:30PM

Trusting instinct over reason is rather frowned on nowadays, the implication being that it is a lack of discipline to be tamed. But for many artists, unfettered magical thinking sits at the core of their artistic practice, allowing them to tap into hidden ideas and give some shape to things that don’t make sense. In ‘Primordial Soup’, we present four artists who each use this approach as a key part of their work: Carolein Smit, Chris Berens, James Mortimer and Sam Branton.
Continue reading ““Primordial Soup”
at the James Freeman Gallery
Carolein Smit, Chris Berens, James Mortimer, and Sam Branton
9th September to 8th October” →

In Search of an Author by Lex Thomas
An Art Circus Book

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In Search of an Author is a collection of 62 fluidly drawn ink studies, individual drawings in their own right, but interlinked by the subject of belief and the stories we tell ourselves. Artist Lex Thomas examines unexplained natural phenomena such as the supernatural and paranormal as well as magic, cults and UFO religions. The effect is a non-textual, fragmentary narrative echoing the idea that ‘truth is in the eye of the beholder’. The title acknowledges the playwright Pirandello, credited with breaking through the ‘fourth wall’ with his creation of Mirror Theatre.

In Search of an Arthur is currently available at BookArtBookShop, Shoreditch, Gosh! London or direct from Lex Thomas’ Website.

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An Art Circus Book” →

Elizabeth Price’s A Restoration
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

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As a fresh graduate from The Ruskin School of Art in 1998, Elizabeth Price worked for a year in the Bodleian Library’s underground stacks. She remembers the damp, the haphazard stacking of books, the way the floors got smaller as they went further and further down beneath the cobbles of Broad Street. A book could be declared lost for twenty five years and turn up in a pile a few centimetres away from its original place. In the stacks books were arranged by size rather than subject, and Price would spend most of her shift reading books in unexpected succession.

This sense of the subterranean, along with the archival practices of collecting, collating and cataloguing, are key components of Price’s new video installation A Restoration.

After winning the Contemporary Art Society Award in 2013, Price received a commission to make an artwork in response to the collections and archives of the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean Museums in Oxford. During the course of her research, Price became particularly interested in the work of British archaeologist Arthur Evans. After holding the position of Keeper of the Ashmolean, Evans achieved fame for the excavation of the Cretian palace of Knossos at the turn of the 20th century. He set about restoring the site with what Price calls ‘a kind of energy that is unreserved and febrile and exciting’, adding concrete pillars and filling in frescos with an ‘extraodinary’ creative license. Continue reading “Elizabeth Price’s A Restoration
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford” →

Island Hopping
The 2016 Setouchi Triennale

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From this week onwards a small cluster of islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea will host its third international art festival. The 2016 Setouchi Triennale will run for a total of 108 days, and is expected to receive upwards of a million visitors, along with over one hundred new artworks joining the permanent installations already dotted across the archipelago.

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Twelve islands in total will be taking part, along with Uno Port on mainland Honshu and the town of Takamatsu (known by fans of Haruki Murakami as the setting of Kafka on the Shore) on nearby Shikoku. This year’s thematic focus looks both inward and outward: paying particular attention to local Setouchi cuisine and traditions alongside ‘cultural exchange among Asian countries that are connected by the sea. Continue reading “Island Hopping
The 2016 Setouchi Triennale” →

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A Case of Postdiluvian Tristesse: The Encounters in Sam Branton’s Deluge
‘Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them’ 

There is a strange poem by Andrew Marvell about a nymph and her pet fawn. Written in the mid seventeenth century, ‘A Nymph Complaining to Her Fawn’ is a poem of three parts, revolving around a central act that recounts the intimacies of their relationship. This intimacy is physical in that it is rooted in the senses – glimpsed at through heady descriptions of the nymph suckling the fawn with milk-dipped fingers, and the fawn feeding on roses ‘until its lips e’en seem to bleed’, pressing the bloody pulp onto the nymph’s lips in a bright red kiss. This is the story of an inter-species relationship that is tender and erotic and odd without being straightforwardly sexual or pornographic, suffused with a libido that Matthew Augustine has described as ‘tactile…rather than genital’. In other words, arousal is a creature of many eyes and ears and fingers and holes, and a discussion of the erotic should not be limited to genitalia. Continue reading “” →

Wu Lan-Chiann
Contemporary Ink Paintings

The first UK solo exhibition of the Taiwanese ink painting artist, featuring work produced over the last 20 years.

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Reflections is the first UK solo exhibition of Wu Lan-Chiann, Chinese ink painting artist. This exhibit shows a selection of Wu Lan-Chiann’s work produced over the past twenty years. Displayed in reverse chronological order in the museum’s galleries, the exhibition has three themes; early career work, dusk to dawn series, and current directions.

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At the core of Wu Lan-Chiann’s work, is a deep personal contemplation of universal themes and values that connect people across time and place. While continuing a tradition that is centuries old, her paintings are distinctly contemporary both in concept and execution. Starting from a young age, she combined Asian and Western modes of representation into a personal style that is intensely poetic. Blending two very different painting traditions, she has emerged as an artist with an authentic style marked by decisive brushwork and delicate application of colour.

In her recent work, Wu Lan-Chiann is interested in capturing the precious but fleeting moments of life through the depiction of free floating petals and leaves. She sees a comparison between the rhythm of nature and the human cycle of life. Her work captures special moments and at the same time represents the invariable and eternal cycle of life and nature.

Wu Lan-Chiann is exhibiting at the Museum of East-Asian Art in Bath