I’m really interested in creating my own architecture, rather than working within a historical framework,’ says Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová, ahead of her first exhibition at London’s White Cube (at the Bermondsey gallery, 11 February – 29 March 2026). ‘If you are creating a new world, it’s much more difficult, because everything has to be a completely new visualisation.’

Throughout her career, Hosnedlová has built entirely new landscapes, interweaving architectural elements with expansive embroideries, performances and sculptures, which together form vast installations. In her richly immersive worlds, Hosnedlová is drawn to both natural materials – flax, hemp, sand – as well as colder forms such as glass, For Hosnedlová, it is essential that the environments are welcoming. ‘I don’t come from an artistic family, so it is important for me to create a world that is more familiar. I love to be able to speak to those who have never been in a museum. I’m lucky that I can still speak through quite a realistic language, which is embroidery – you can see what it’s like in your hands. It is not abstract.’

This tangibility was key throughout her epic recent exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, which used raw materials sourced from what is today the Czech Republic, but formerly Bohemia and Moravia. By drawing on these craft traditions, Hosnedlová unites references to both local folklore and, more personally, childhood memories, creating a general world of the imagination. It is a textural, raw and primal landscape that is always changing, fluctuating, living and dying.

The industrial architecture of Hamburger Bahnhof ’s hall was transformed by six vast, handwoven tapestries, made from flax, hemp and plant-based dyes and reminiscent of animal skin. Their sheer scale became a sanctuary, and one in which the visitor was encouraged to enter, walking among them to discover their own private zones. The experience Hosnedlová created was multisensory, set to a backdrop of music by performance artist Billy Bultheel.

Hosnedlová has worked with Bultheel again for the White Cube exhibition, where her utopian landscape is populated with her large-scale tapestries and sculptures. Throughout, 3D-printed concrete columns are adorned with embroideries, while large floor objects are covered in mycelium (reishi mushrooms), her first time working with the fungi. To support the living elements, the atmosphere is moist.

‘It’s very important for me to be focused on the small details,’ says Hosnedlová. ‘But I also thought in a bigger context, about bringing in new worlds. The contrast is important. I spend some days in a little village, and then I’m in Berlin, which is such a huge city. I am always combining different materials, but it depends on the space. At Bahnhof, it was a monumental hall that used to be a train station. It’s very masculine, full of metal, with a big open space where I always felt a little bit lost. That’s why I started to think about some monumental tapestry, something that’s coming more from nature, and where you can be hidden behind. Sometimes I have a problem in museums where I am standing in front of some artworks and everybody can see me from all sides, so in my installations I create places where you can be a bit hidden.’

She has brought this tension between the heavy-duty industrial and the organic to London. ‘When I saw White Cube, I knew I wanted to create some kind of a laboratory, a stage where I could grow new sculptures,’ she adds. ‘The whole of the space here will appear to be underground. There is no natural light, and usually that’s important for my work. But in this case, it is a space to grow something. The sounds, too, appear to come from underground, with every speaker projecting a different sound. It creates one big one full of many messy noises.’

With new materials and a deeper immersion, Hosnedlová is pushing herself further than she has before. ‘If I can, I’ll push myself into something where I don’t feel 100 per cent comfortable. I love that feeling when I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.’

New work by Klára Hosnedlová will be on show from 11 February – 29 March at White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1, whitecube.com

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘Land’, marks Black British artist and designer Samuel Ross’ first solo foray into the world of fine art. Ross initially rose to prominence circa 2015 by way of his meticulously crafted fashion label A-Cold-Wall: a thesis on the British class system. For a near decade, he has created body-mapped garments that tackle race and socioeconomics in abstract and visceral manners whilst draping and flowing in beautiful symbiosis with the human form.

‘Land’ by Samuel Ross at White Cube, London

The artist's inaugural solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey (until 14 May 2023) is a multisensory experience. The collection consists of sculptures, scents, soundscapes and paintings geared towards the exploration of working-class Black British experiences. Here, a man, self-described as ‘obsessed with the exoskeleton of society’, provides us with an additional lens by which to peek into his conception of the world: what he knows to be true.

Ross has been quietly refining his artistic practice. The oldest of the artworks on display, a three-piece concrete sculpture, was made in 2016. Sitting in the furthest corner of the room, it props up a burning incense stick filling the space with an oaky scent that lingers, tantalising your senses as you manoeuvre through the exhibition.

To the artist, these paintings and sculptures are to be viewed as ‘lucid and open, not rigid’. However, his stylistic and formal decisions hint at a desire to protect, to obscure. Layers of dark red, blue, black and butter-milk paint are heavily applied on soaked duck canvas, concealing and revealing each other to varying degrees. The carefully selected colours are oblique homages to his Caribbean heritage. In an untitled work, we see what appears to be metallic sheets layered on canvas, painted over in dark tones with tiny slivers of their veiled silver sheen occasionally peeking out of an otherwise nightmarish black and grey abyss. 

In conversation, Ross cites American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness − an inward 'twoness' experienced by members of the African diaspora, brought on by racialised oppression. He also expresses a desire to formulate a pictorial lexicon for what British Caribbean abstraction could look like in the 21st century.

Once Ross’ vision for his work is embraced, these artistic interventions quickly reveal the clear and intelligible story of the internal struggles faced by Black people tasked with integrating into white paradigms. Through these images, we are invited to bear witness to what is likely an all too familiar experience for Ross: the act of sublimation required of Black men, like himself, to operate in not just the creative industries but the world at large. The dawning of harsh exteriors to hide and protect the sensitive and vulnerable man within. In his decision to eschew figuration, opting instead for multisensory emotive abstraction, a welcome deviation from the core-stream art world's post-covid fascination with Black figures, Ross finds compelling ways to create space for intriguing explorations of the Black interior.

'Land' by Samuel Ross is on view until 14 May 2023

White Cube Bermondsey
144-152, Bermondsey St
London SE1 3TQ

whitecube.com
samuel-ross.com

Arley Hall and Gardens, a stately home in Cheshire, north-west England, is famed for its Jacobean Revival architecture and its picturesque landscape, created over 270 years by successive Viscounts Ashbrook and their families. To these attractions, it can now add an impressive display of contemporary sculpture, courtesy of White Cube.

The London- and Hong Kong-based gallery has selected Arley’s grounds as the venue for its first-ever outdoor sculpture exhibition, which includes 12 modern and contemporary artists from its roster, and runs until 29 August 2022.

‘At the same time as being a symbol of continuity, history and stability, gardens are continually changing and evolving,’ says Susanna Greeves, senior director at White Cube of her inspiration for the display. ‘This is a theme that we had in mind as we took on the task of placing contemporary art in this already very carefully curated setting. We thought about the ideas of nature and order, the tropes of the English country house garden, and how we might play with and subvert those.’ 

Among the more ambitious installations is Tracey Emin’s Surrounded by You (2017), initially created for the artist’s solo exhibition at Château La Coste and inspired by Mont Sainte-Victoire, not far from the Provençal art destination and a recurring subject of Cezanne’s paintings. Seen from another angle, it bears a resemblance to a reclining female nude, a signature Emin motif. Its alternately monumental and sensual form is not an easy match for the pristine hedges and manicured lawns adjacent, but it makes a memorable statement nonetheless.

Similarly impressive in scale, the late Greek artist Takis’ kinetic sculpture, Aeolian (1983), measuring 4.5m tall, towers over a field of wildflowers. At the top, a pair of hemispheres rotate gently on an axis, suggesting a modern radar picking up signals from afar and disrupting our vision of rural idyll.  

Beyond an untitled cedar pavilion by Danh Vo (2020) – a modernist version of Qin Dynasty architecture, which previously stood outside White Cube’s gallery in Bermondsey, London and has been integrated into its new home with planting by Arley’s gardeners – it’s the smaller works that better respond to the present landscape. 

Notably, a trio of Antony Gormley’s anthropomorphic Domain sculptures (2003), made from stainless steel bars that terminate at the perimeter of the body, perch on 17th-century garden walls, appearing and fading with changing weather conditions in a poetic ode to transience. 

Classical statuary is often placed where it might draw attention to a fully orchestrated view; in a prime spot along Arley’s Furlong Walk, where one might expect a nymph, Greeves has installed a radical work by Canadian artist David Altmejd. L’heure (2016) depicts a figure in contrapposto whose head is formed of hands cast from the sculptor’s own: ‘It’s almost as if the sculpture is making itself or unmaking itself,’ says Greeves.

Equally well-situated is a recent example of Marguerite Humeau’s ‘sculpture-elixirs’ – imagined plants that are intended to resurrect bygone medicinal traditions. Greeves has placed it near Arley’s Kitchen Garden: ‘I liked the idea that it refers to an earlier tradition of the great house growing medicinal plants,’ she says. The full title of the work is as evocative as its placement: Noxcalidus, The intense heat on the skin of a sleeping person, as if all their secret delusions were becoming vapour. Inspired by the Poppy’s milk that induces deep sleep and intense dreams, and connects us to a primordial consciousness or cosmic times (2022).

Meanwhile, Mona Hatoum’s Inside Out (concrete) (2019), a waist-height spherical work covered in a circuitous pattern that resembles the lobes of the brain, occupies a small clearing in The Grove (an informal garden in a woodland setting), as though an alien seed pod about to take root.

A large swathe of The Grove is dedicated to the work of Isamu Noguchi, represented by White Cube since 2021. Glistening gently in the summer sun, each of the sculptures in hot-dipped galvanised steel has an alluring silhouette, ranging from the majestic peaks and valleys of Rain Mountain to the Venus of Willendorf-like Goddess (both 1982-3). But the star of the show is the bright red Play Sculpture (c.1965-80). Around the 1970s, the Japanese-American sculptor had the idea of connecting standard sections of industrial sewer pipe into an undulating loop. The results are whimsical and striking, and just as Noguchi intended, visitors to Arley are invited to clamber around, or otherwise sit on the structure for a spot of rest. Dynamic in form and democratic in spirit, this is White Cube at Arley Hall at its best. 

INFORMATION
White Cube at Arley Hall runs until 29 August 2022, whitecube.com, arleyhallandgardens.com 

Your body appears on a series of screens lining the walls. You’re in motion, grainy, and caught on camera from several angles. But what camera? 

In the centre of the space, two glowing, 3D-printed light bulbs swing from the ceiling like pendulums or a deconstructed Newton’s cradle. They skim pools of water, one dyed black, the other white. During the exhibition run, splashes from the bulbs will create a small exchange of liquid between pools, meaning that neither will remain black nor white.

We still don’t know where the camera is hidden, but we do know that this is Swinging Gray (2021) a kinetic video installation by Chinese artist Wang Gongxin as part of ‘In Between’ at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London.

It’s a show that examines dualities: East and West, artificial and natural, individual and collective, spectator and spectated, and crucially, the often intangible space in the middle of these poles. 

As a student, the Beijing-born artist trained in the modelling techniques of the Soviet School and used Socialist Realist techniques to imitate the Neo-Realist styles of the West. He was also inspired by 1960s minimalist sculpture and Japanese architect Kurokawa Kisho’s concept of ‘grey space’. In his London art exhibition, he expands on the core thesis of Japanese writer Tanizaki Junichiro’s 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows. In this influential text, the author argued that light is used differently in the East and West: Western cultures seek illumination and clarity; East Asian cultures embrace shadow and subtlety.

Wang has long probed the contrasts between his native China and the United States, and the dazzling, sometimes stifling complexity of living in a globalising world. Pieces such as Readable Scenery (2019) combine traditional Chinese landscape painting and Western conceptual art. 

‘After arriving in New York, as I hesitated to give up the two-dimensional plane, I experimented with partial abstraction, abstraction and minimalism, before eventually experimenting in three-dimensional installations of various materials,’ says Wang. ‘If there is gradual enlightenment here, could it perhaps be found in this gradual progression of my practice? If you ask what motivation or drive was behind it, I think that the work of the artist is driven by an obsession with creativity and pursuit of a complete spiritual world.’ 

Three wall-mounted marble panels bear words associated with landscapes, including ‘horizon’, ‘river’, and ‘farmland’. These are carved into the backs of the slabs, readable only when lit from behind. Attached to the marble are 3D-printed objects: ornate picture frames, more light bulbs and electrical cords and a bar of soap. There is also a row of real coat hangers located in the upper left-hand corner of a panel, a nod to Trap, Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 readymade which repurposes the same type of hanger.

Wang’s work, often black and white, but never straightforward, composes a dynamic interchange between the work’s movement and that of its viewer. When people are involved, tightly controlled elements are at risk of unexpected outcomes. The spectator sees the work, and is the work, as humanity sees the conundrum, and is the conundrum.

INFORMATION

Wang Gongxin: I’n-Between’ White Cube Mason’s Yard, until 26 February 2022. whitecube.com

The life and work of artist Theaster Gates are famously intertwined with Chicago – the city where he was born, raised, and continues to be based, whose South Side neighbourhood he has revitalised and transformed one building at a time. Lesser known, but no less interesting, is his long-standing affiliation with London. He remembers his first visit vividly: in 1998, while a master’s student at the University of Cape Town, he came to the British capital on a holiday and visited the Crafts Council Gallery. ‘I remember being so excited that I could see a Julian Stair work, and a Michael Cardew, a Shoji Hamada, and a Bernard Leach,’ he says, listing the ceramic artists who would come to shape his artistic practice. ‘It was a very important time for me.’

A subsequent sojourn, in 2012, was just as formative. Soon after Documenta 13, where Gates showed 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (restoring an abandoned hotel in Kassel, Germany with labour and materials from a derelict South Side building), he arrived in London for his first exhibition with White Cube, which involved suspending a fire truck from the ceiling of its Bermondsey gallery, with a cabinet full of Ebony and Jet magazines on its tether. Titled Raising Goliath, the work pointed to culture as a way to alleviate the Black American struggle. The audience ‘was so kind and generous, and my practice really flourished’, recalls the artist. ‘London has been like my second home. And while Londoners can be quite critical of a bad exhibition, because I’ve had such good reception in the past, I’m very excited to offer this proposal to this place that I love so much.’

Theaster Gates’ London cultural takeover

The proposal he refers to is ‘The Question of Clay’, an ambitious project involving some of the city’s top cultural institutions: a solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery (until 9 January 2022) and an intervention in the V&A’s ceramics galleries this autumn, followed by a commission to create the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion. Add to this a show at White Cube Mason’s Yard (until 30 October 2021), and you have the biggest takeover by a single artist that London has witnessed in recent years. A seminal moment for sure, but Gates, who has become one of America’s leading cultural figures, feels no cause for anxiety. ‘Now that I have no more points to prove, I would use these next years to really share and explore my interest in ceramics. The shows are all varying exposés around craft, craftsmanship, the cultural connections between places, and my training as a potter.’ 

In parallel with his conceptual inclinations, Gates has always had a fondness for craft. He took up pottery as an undergraduate student at Iowa State University, eventually completing a residency in Tokoname, Japan, where he worked with a group of master potters. His 2007 exhibition ‘Plate Convergence’, often considered his breakthrough moment, showed a collection of his pottery, only disguised as the work of a fictional Japanese potter who moved to Mississippi and married a Black civil rights activist; three years later, his show ‘To Speculate Darkly’ paid homage to Dave the Potter (also known as David Drake), an enslaved 19th-century artist who created extraordinary stoneware pots. Gates believes that training in craft involves ‘thinking with the hands’ and is a necessary complement to the study of art, history, and philosophy: ‘If you bring contemporary art and craft together, you have the best of two really amazing worlds.’

Not surprisingly, craft was the starting point for the Whitechapel Gallery show. In 2015, Gates and Lydia Yee, the then-newly appointed chief curator at the gallery, sat next to each other at a lunch in Venice. They talked about ‘Spirit of Utopia’, a 2013 group show at Whitechapel for which Gates had installed Soul Manufacturing Corporation, a working pottery studio where visitors could learn how to make bricks and throw clay on a wheel from a skilled potter. Gates registered his interest in doing a follow-up show, thus kicking off a series of conversations. ‘And the more I talked to Lydia, the more I thought, there are so many places in London that have amazing craft histories and things in their vaults, but they’re rarely seen in a contemporary light. Could we connect with these places?’ Gates wondered. He thus set on a path to draw from other collections to create a history of ceramics, displaying the work of his artistic ancestors alongside his own.

An invitation from the V&A to undertake a research fellowship came at the right time. Given free run of the museum’s ceramics collection, Gates naturally gravitated towards craft potters he long admired. He was particularly interested in those who worked across different cultural contexts, such as Leach and Hamada, who co-founded the Leach Pottery in St Ives a century ago; and Ruth Duckworth, who fled Nazi Germany, studied in London and became known for monumental stoneware murals in Chicago.

But Gates also took the opportunity to explore more practical uses of clay: searching for the oldest bricks in the collection – including one marked with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled Babylon in the sixth century BCE – and surveying the output of the Wedgwood factories, which represented the apex of 19th-century industrial manufacturing. He sought out ‘perversions’ within the collection too, namely ceramic figures of enslaved Black people from the early 19th century, some serving double duty as tobacco jars or candlesticks; though commissioned by abolitionists, these figures have exaggerated physical features that perpetuated racial stereotypes. A selection of these ceramics have made their way to Whitechapel, complemented by loans from other public and private collections (including a storage jar by Dave the Potter, who is not yet represented in the V&A collection).

‘The V&A was so excited that a contemporary artist was interested in these things,’ says Gates, who characterises the museum as an extremely open environment, deftly confronting its colonial past by championing openness, equity and diversity. ‘All the big institutions have the challenge of making right these complicated paths, and the only way to do that is to open your museums up to more artists of colour, more queer artists, artists across the gender spectrum, people who are trying to say new things with old objects.’ 

In this case, the juxtaposition of old objects – such as 18th-century Chinese earthenware, an emancipation medallion commissioned by Josiah Wedgwood, a series of Black ceramic caricatures, and Dave the Potter’s storage jar, all within in the same vitrine – speaks to the relationship between global trade, colonial expansion, slavery and abolitionism.

They accompany Gates’ own ceramic work across two decades, including his ‘Afro-Mingei’ sculptures, which incorporates Japanese elements with the culture of Africa and its Diaspora. For instance, a 2019 piece, titled Afro-Ikebana, comprises a bronze cast of an African mask paired with a rotund ceramic vessel containing a single branch, presented on a tatami mat. 

‘I’m trying to couple Mingei, the folk craft movement in Japan, with the Black Arts Movement in the United States. In this moment [in the 1930s] Japan was saying, “Who we are is beautiful, we don’t need Western culture to reaffirm our beauty and the importance of our craftsmanship and our people.” In the United States 20 years later, Black people were saying, “Our hair and our skin are beautiful, and the objects and foods of our culture are important.” The resistance to a certain kind of Western whiteness created both movements, which I’ve brought together. That very strong philosophical meld led to a material meld, which is very exciting to me.’

Also part of the show are Gates’ new stoneware vessels, installed on custom plinths of hand-milled wood and stone, referencing African sculpture, the human body, and industrial and utilitarian objects. Many of these were made at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana, where ceramic artist Peter Voulkos had begun his career in 1951. Voulkos’ work ‘is very material and muscular, masculine and action-oriented’, describes Yee. ‘He would often work in an improvised way, even down to allowing some degree of chance to happen in the kiln. Some of the work that Theaster has made is in response to this.’ 

Gates additionally brought his band, the Black Monks, to Montana to make music that explores themes of craft labour and spiritualism; at Whitechapel, their performance becomes part of a new film that explores the history of clay practice in the UK, US and Japan. The spiritual aspect ties in with the title of the show, ‘A Clay Sermon’.

‘Theaster grew up in the Baptist church in Chicago, and he’s said that he learned about art every Sunday by going to church: the aesthetics, the way people put themselves together, the music. I think that goes very much to the fact that music, and the community spirit of being part of a church, is integral to his work today,’ explains Yee, adding that Whitechapel Gallery has a similar history of community engagement.

‘A Clay Sermon’ coincides with Gates’ intervention at the V&A. ‘Because they are loaning me works from their ceramics galleries, I will replace those works with my own, so their vitrines are not empty. There’s a little bit of trade happening, and I think it’s an interesting way to get people into the museum,’ hints the artist.

Serpentine Pavilion 2022

And while the design of his 2022 Serpentine Pavilion is yet to be unveiled, Gates is brimming with enthusiasm for the commission and already eager to talk about it, unfazed when I point out that he will be the first non-architect to take it on (previous participating artists have partnered with architects – Ai Weiwei with Herzog & de Meuron, and Olafur Eliasson with Kjetil Trædal Thorsen). ‘I’ve restored a lot of buildings,’ says Gates of his work on the South Side, through the Rebuild Foundation. ‘And while I’m not a trained architect, I think about space more than anything. Black space, especially, is core to my practice. And I feel that making space is such an amazing power move within art, for people like Robert Irwin, Sam Gilliam, Donald Judd, or Hiroshi Sugimoto. I’m part of a continuum of artists who have been thinking about disruptions and interventions in the public sphere and in nature – in my case, the urban environment in a Black neighbourhood.

‘My art has always been kind of land art. So if we can open up the architectural project to one that is actually concerned about land, its politics and complexity, then it seems quite reasonable that not only me, but more artists in the future, will do substantial things [with the Serpentine] commission.’

The first thing about making a space, Gates contends, is to create the conditions for a gathering of people, which is why he’s thinking not only about physical architecture but also ‘the sound system, the food, the energy, the lighting’. Since 2013, he’s run an annual gathering called the Black Artists Retreat, and he hopes that his Serpentine Pavilion ‘will be a place where we might also convene, converse, party, reflect, and celebrate together’.

Looking at the various elements of ‘A Question of Clay’, it becomes clear that Gates wants us to engage deeply with art, design and architecture, not just taking them at face value but also understanding their social function, and the political implications that come with putting them on display.

‘Sometimes politics are on my mind, and sometimes the colour red. And I want to have self-permission to talk about either. There are moments when a truth should be shared, and I don’t want to hide behind the colour red, out of fear it would diminish my artistic practice. Some people choose not to talk about politics because it can be a little messy. I never want to lose that courage. I want to grow in courage to be as sophisticated in my knowledge in politics, as I am in my belief in colour.’

Exemplars of Black excellence

It follows naturally that Gates’ creative leaders of the future for Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue ‘5x5’ project would be creators of elegant, distinctive forms who are advancing a social message with equal confidence. His pick of five talents are exemplars of Black excellence in Britain and the United States, ranging from fashion to architecture to furniture. He lauds shoe designer Kendall Reynolds, co-founder of the Kendall Miles brand, for delivering ‘an elegance, luxury and femininity for Black women’, menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner for ‘offering a new lens through which to consider conversations on race, identity and sexuality’, and fashion and textile designer Tolu Coker for being ‘a fierce advocate for Black models and models of colour’.

Gates selected architect Germane Barnes for being ‘unafraid of uprooting contemporary notions of scale, ideological complexity, or boundaries within his design. He moves me to have deep conversations about what design can achieve for the masses.’

Also on the list is Norman Teague, a more established talent who worked with Gates on 12 Ballads for Huguenot House. ‘Brother Teague designs collaboratively, thinks strategically, and is committed to training Black and brown makers. His determination and design vocabulary continue to inspire me,’ Gates enthuses.

He acknowledges that his mentors – among them artists Kerry James Marshall and Ingrid Lilligren, curators Okwui Enwezor and Thelma Golden – had a major role in shaping his practice, encouraging him to study abroad, learn about other cultures and indulge in craftsmanship. ‘Those moments were very important to me, and I’ve always tried to create opportunities to have that time and space to speak to younger people, to offer them support and advice.’

With support from Prada Group, Gates has just launched the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, a three-year programme that will provide emerging artists of colour with opportunities for exchange, training, critical feedback and exposure. 

‘I’m trying to mimic what I was blessed to receive,’ says Gates. ‘And I’m excited to be able to invest financially, invest emotionally, invest lots of different kinds of resources into designers, artists and other creatives so that they can do more of the great things they want to do.’

Meet Theaster Gates’ five creative leaders of the future: 

• Kendall Reynolds
• Grace Wales Bonner
• Norman Teague
• Tolu Coker
• Germane Barnes

INFORMATION

theastergates.com

‘Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon’, until 9 January 2022, Whitechapel Gallery, London, whitechapelgallery.org

Theaster Gates: ‘Oh, The Wind Oh, The Wind’, White Cube Mason’s Yard until 30 October 2021

A version of this article appears in the October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue of Wallpaper* (W*270). Subscribe today – 12 digital issues for $12,£12,€12

Beijing-based artist Liu Wei’s show, ‘Nudità’ is a commentary on the state of the world from 2020-2021. Dominating the entire White Cube Bermondsey space, Liu draws on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, relating his theories of ‘nudity’ to an urban landscape drained of life and human connection during the pandemic. 

Born in 1972, Liu grew up during a period of rapidly accelerating urbanisation in China. The artist has consistently turned to architectural themes, probing how we plan, build, consume and experience our cities.

Expanding upon the artist’s recent solo exhibition at Long Museum earlier this year, a new series of works is a timely examination of how urban space, devoid of human presence, is just a series of redundant, abstract objects.

‘Would a society, absent of physical bodies, lose the foundation of love, and would it still be possible to trust one another without physically getting together?', says Liu. ‘We compromise everything: our daily life, social relationships, work, even friendship, romance, religion, and political creeds, to preserve the “bare life." After all, we've only become more distant, sceptical, or even hostile.’

Among new sculptures and paintings is the colossal installation, Dimension at once resembles a flesh-stripped carcass, a spaceship, and a futuristic cityscape. Forming part of Liu’s ongoing ‘Microworld’ series, the piece feels like the building blocks of a new world observed through advanced scientific and optical tools. 

Elsewhere, Liu’s multi-part installation Allegory, is a concrete diorama. Unlike Dimension, this is a city in ruins: fragmented columns, pedestals, roadblocks inhabited by an eclectic combination of species: a giant tortoise, a cat, a snake, a fox and an owl.

‘The emergence of animals (in my work) suggests different inherent instincts within the human body, which brings forth those allegories embedded within,’ says Liu. ‘It assigns a sense of vitality to the abstract urban environment while releasing a dimension of time that has been contracted due to such a pause, then taking the body back to its origin.’

INFORMATION
Liu Wei, ’Nudità’, White Cube Bermondsey, until 5 September 2021. whitecube.com

Throughout his practice, Cerith Wyn Evans has deconstructed and pushed the concept of language, light and sound to its limits. His latest show, ‘No realm of thought...No field of vision’ at White Cube Bermondsey, which runs in tandem with Wyn Evans’ largest solo show to date at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, proves why he is one of contemporary art’s most respected.

Drawing on the thematic potential and erotic resonance of mechanised sculptures from the 20th century combined with present-day innovations, this new body of work is an amalgamation of the artist’s inspirations, interpretations and self-reflections. Interweaving different trains of thought on the subject of mechanism, installations are suspended, obscured and mirrored, forming a captivating yet disorientating experience. Consisting of 25 sculptures utilising the mediums of light, text, glass and paint, the exhibition sees Wyn Evans inject meticulous detail into every individual piece

Channeling Duchamp and other 20th-century artists, much of the show evokes an emotive sense of reflection and uncertainty over our own physical futures – works point to key moments in our human understanding of mechanism and are displayed using autonomous technology. In Composition of flutes, 11 crystal flutes are played through by two mechanical ‘breathing’ units suspended from ceiling with threads and cable.

Wyn Evans’ relationship to language is of continual fascination, and the artist has consistently constructed environments to explore its notions. Here, he uses language to create multiple veils, both linguistic and physical. An architectural wall of neon sculpture – a Wyn Evans specialty – partially obscures a selection of works behind. The wall features a passage from Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu translated into Japanese kanji. 

Elsewhere, the artist uses new mediums to confront the exhibition’s themes: Still life (In course of arrangement)...VI is two rotating pleached trees placed against each other and lit by spotlights, referencing the earliest forms of mechanised moving images. A dedication to his own practice is what makes Wyn Evans’ White Cube show so compelling, looking not only to art and humanity’s mechanical past but also drawing from his own to look forward. 

INFORMATION

‘No realm of thought...No field of vision’, until 19 April, White Cube Bermondsey. whitecube.com

ADDRESS

White Cube Bermondsey
144-152, Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

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Few 72-year-olds can pull off shoulder-length hair, a fitted white shirt, skinny jeans and trainers. But Jeff Wall does, with aplomb. He looks like a wise old pro in a Jim Jarmusch movie. But, as witnessed in his monumental new works at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London’s St James’s, Wall’s poise in person is matched by the incredible precision of his work.

Wall is, along with Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and, slightly later, Gregory Crewdson, among the most influential conceptual photographers alive today. He grew up in Vancouver, the son of a doctor and a housewife. His parents were interested in art, and he was encouraged to be creative from an early age. ‘I was able to judge from an early age whether a piece of art was good or not,’ he says. He went through his parents’ book collection, learning about the history of artistry as a child. By his teenage years, Wall was using the local library to take out art books not available at home, and was going to galleries on his own while his friends cavorted around doing the things more typical teenagers do.

He studied history of art at the University of British Columbia, where he fell in with a group of radically experimental artists. Wall took a while to find his voice or his chosen medium, experimenting with painting, performance and various different types of photographic imaging. But a trip to the Prado Museum in Madrid, where he genuflected to the creations of Velázquez and Goya, was significant. He remembers looking at a garishly backlit street advert he saw at a bus stop on his return home from the Prado. Wall decided he would make monumental pictures, as detailed as a Goya tableau, but with the high-production values and photorealist aesthetic of the advertising world.

Wall would soon shake the world of photography like a snow globe. Through his staged images, often painstakingly recreated from memory, or built out from an idea he happened upon, he subverted what photography was supposed to be – the act of using a camera to be a passive observer of unfolding reality, a witness to the world as it happens. His new approach caused something verging on outrage. Yet it also hooked the art world. In 2012, his work Dead Troops Talk – a meticulously staged vision created in 1992 of the moments after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol in Afghanistan – fetched just over $3.3m at Christie’s, New York, making it the third most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

Today, he’s considered one of the godfathers of what is sometimes called ‘set-up’ photography, in which we are presented with a single image that seems stolen from a far larger, much more multivalent scenario; one unfolding either side of the moment the shutter momentarily closes, and often also happening outside of the frame. Is it real thing he witnessed, or a fiction he conjured, or a mixture of both? Wall isn’t about to provide you with an answer.

The new show at White Cube demonstrates how restlessly Wall has worked ever since. The exhibition’s titular work is Recovery: a photorealist depiction of a young man coming to in a seaside park after, we can only presume, a fall on his bike. The image is based on years of photographs, yet it also returns Wall to the techniques he learnt as a student – that of painting. For the figures surrounding the dazed man are depicted with the ripe, vivid and off-kilter colours you might find in the expressionist movement of Paris in the first decade of the last century. The image is a ‘vision’ says Wall, a reflection of the dazed man’s mental state. But it also feels like something of a homage to the artists that have guided him, while his contemporaries were so preoccupied with exactly that – the contemporary.

Alongside Recovery hangs a triptych titled The Gardens. The three images feature arguing couples in strangely manicured but maze-like landscapes. Look closely and we realise, from one image to the next, the couples are doubles of each other. Then there’s Daybreak (2011), showing Bedouin olive pickers sleeping al fresco in the Israeli scrubland. It’s dawn, and the light is soft. They seem to be on a journey together. The image has a classical, almost Biblical quality – it could be an image from the Renaissance. Yet, on the horizon, we can see a huge secure complex, surrounded in barbed wire and white neon lights. A road leads the olive pickers to it.

It can seem an obvious point, but Wall’s images are huge. Recovery stretches across 4.5m of the gallery’s walls. The Gardens and Daybreak are not much smaller. This undoubtably changes the way we consider the image. A Wall image develops its own centrifugal force, sucking us in. It demands our attention, forces us to try and work out its enigmas. It’s also worth noting that the presence of a triptych is in itself something of a departure for Wall. Most photographers work in series, understanding a single subject by focusing on its many angles and sides. Wall tends to make single images, each its own construct, its own complex scenario. He creates and then presents it, avoiding any hint at his own motivations. Beyond a title, he leaves us to do the detective work.

Wall remains a student of painting, one who ‘still spends a lot of my time in galleries’. ‘If you want to be an artist, why would you not learn about the history of art,’ he says. ‘What else would you do?’ He most points out that many of the great canvas works over the centuries are ‘life-sized’. Why not a photograph? The great painters of the late 19th and early 20th century were, he points out, basically heretics, so revolutionary was their use of colour, their distortion of perspective, the lowliness of their subjects and, in Braque and Picasso’s case, the everyday objects they transformed into high art.

The photographer speaks of looking at Manet while studying at the Courtauld in the early 1970s – ‘I preferred London then,’ he says. He talks of the influence of Matisse and Gauguin and their contemporaries: of how their pursuit of Arcadia, the Greek vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature, is also his own. Wall came of age in an era when photographers spoke of the pictorial as done and disinteresting – a thing of the past. By focusing on the eternal and fertile mysteriousness of the pictorial with forensic finesse, Wall has outdone them all. 

INFORMATION

‘Jeff Wall’, 28 June – 7 September, White Cube Mason’s Yard. whitecube.com

ADDRESS

White Cube
25 – 26 Mason’s Yard
London SW1Y 6BU

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Sarah Morris is having a moment: the US artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK in six years sees her emerge from what has largely been a cocoon of film and painting, along with her first ever sculptural work. ‘Machines do not make us into Machines’ at White Cube Bermondsey is as much an exhibition as a manifesto. But what does it say? A great deal as it happens, though it’s hard to tell rhetoric from reality. Morris believes that truth lies not in what can be proven, but what can be disproved. This London show is what happens when the assertion of a scientist, the insight of political philosopher and the artistic flair of a true radical collide.

Morris was born in Kent to a family of medics and forms Cambridge University’s prestigious alumni. But even before Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst had begun scandalising the nation with sex, death and pickled farm animals, Morris had fled the nest to America. The YBA who got away? Not really, she herself will explain how she might have been born in Britain, but she was made in New York. She now occupies a Long Island studio in a former aviation manufacturing facility – an industrial space for an industrial scale mentality.

For Morris, language is, quite literally, a construct. She’s invented her own painted dialect which looks and sounds somewhere between the synthetic snarl of scrolling computer code and a political declaration. The gathering of ideas is as regimented as the execution, and it all begins with plucking phonetics from sentences and plotting coordinates.

In this painting-rich show, each canvas forms an index for transport networks, surveillance, wild conspiracy theories and global connections. Aggressivity and Thinking (Sound Graph) 2019, demonstrates how sound bites become garishly coloured bars and dots, resembling radio waves and flirting with the language of American abstraction, minimalism and pop art. ‘They’re static but the eye makes them move,’ Morris explains.

Her paintings are as energetic as an Elsworth Kelly and as smooth as the polished concrete floors they watch over. An enormous, site-specific wall painting – named after Ataraxia, a philosophical concept meaning an ‘end state of imperturbable calm’ – is supposed to leave you in ‘suspended judgement’, but you’re too mesmerised to care. Not a smear, drip or speck of dust in sight, just block fragments filled so perfectly to each brim that there isn’t much left for the paint to do. It has the intricacy of a computer motherboard – everything in its right place or it will cease to function.

Morris’ zinger of a sculpture, What can be explained can also be predicted (2019), is a network of vibrant glass tubes which look like one of her paintings has climbed off the walls, sprouted two-metre legs and planted itself on gridded marble plinth. The test tube-like form could be a neon sea anemone, a Vegas chapel organ or something phallic if you squint hard enough. ‘I wanted to make a cross between a musical instrument and an image of a future city, and it has a bit of The Wizard of Oz in it too’ she says.

Compared with the paintings, her films move at a glacial pace. They’re sullen, reflective and pose all the important questions with little resolution. ‘You can project a lot into these narratives that are fragmented, interrupted, don't have a beginning and don’t have an end’ she explains ‘the coordinates are set, the time is set, the but what’s in that moment is not set – that’s the fun part for me.’

It seems like Morris has a taste for critiquing capitalism, bureaucracy and power, but that might be a misdiagnosis. They could actually be muses, or she could be totally indifferent. In 2017 architects Herzog & de Meuron hit headlines with a renovation that cost a ludicrous €789 million. Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie concert hall takes the spotlight for Finite and Infinite Games (2017), a film Morris shot within the gleaming, cacophonous belly of its central auditorium, inspired by a book by religious scholar James P Carse.

‘The film became so much more than the script and so much more than this irreparable excuse of the concert hall’ she says, ‘all of that aspiration of the city and all of this capital going into the building.’ This piece is both lulling and disconcerting with no tangible narrative aside from flecks of gaming psychology and industrial capitalism. It all feels in flux, in anticipation of a finale that never comes to be. In a similar vein, Abu Dhabi (2017), a Guggenheim commission, surveys the psycho-geography and political undercurrents of the Middle Eastern capital through film, underlining the consequences of rapid urban transformation in a city that went from desert to decadence in less than half a century.

Much of Morris’ work doesn't look like human hands created it. Her aptitude for order and dominion over paint is intimidating. You leave with her grids, graphs and algorithms still stained on your brain, confused by what you may or may not have seen or learnt, which might be an entirely new language. ‘It all goes back to speech and how you pin meaning to something,’ she says. ‘Art in the end is a series of conversations.’

INFORMATION

‘Machines do not make us into Machines’ is on view until 30 June. For more information, visit the White Cube website

ADDRESS

White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

‘Our lives are in a trilogy. I’m in my last bit, so I’ve got to try and get it right,’ Tracey Emin reflects on the eve of her new solo exhibition, which has just opened at London’s White Cube Bermondsey. What’s the overriding theme of the exhibition? Herself. Because after all, Emin is what Emin does best.

In the 1980s, she emerged as the fresh faced enfant terrible of the Young British Artists movement. Four decades later and she’s still charged with the same acerbic bite – an unflinching exhibitionist who manages to exhibit both her self and work in a single space. Much to the relief of her admirers and critics, Emin has emerged from her sabbatical no less explosive albeit older, wiser and less of a ‘party girl’. The passion with which she visually and verbally dissects everything from ‘hideous’ Brexit to abortion, rape, relationships and her mother’s death is itself sobering to witness.

But the captivating candidness and apparent self-annihilation that earned her public notoriety in youth are not moments she reflects on fondly. ‘I suddenly woke up one morning and realised that I’d really fucked myself over by talking too much... by giving too much away,’ she recalls. But here, within the walls of White Cube it feels as though Emin is entirely in control of her work and self-image – as she puts it, ‘getting her act together’. ‘What this whole show is about is releasing myself from shame. I’ve killed my shame, I’ve hung it on the walls,’ she explains.

Sprawling over 5,440 sq m of White Cube, the artist’s first London show in half a decade feels like a homecoming – a culmination of new and historical painting, photography, film, large-scale sculpture and neon text, of course, the 21st-century answer to Dada’s Readymade. The idea for the exhibition title, ‘A Fortnight of Tears’, long preceded the majority of this work’s creation. She’s had this one in the bank for 15 years, tentatively awaiting the right time to deploy it. ‘It’s the longest I’ve ever cried for I think, a fortnight,’ she says.

Themes in the exhibition stem directly from the artist’s own emotions: the loss of her parents and her ‘self-respect’, the female experience, spiritualism and sexuality. Three monumental bronze sculptures – including one portraying her mother in her eighties – are the largest Emin has produced to date. These sit adjacent to new a photographic series Insomnia (a four-year work in progress) alongside a vast quantity of paintings, studies and artefacts including a Ouija board. An early video work How It Feels (1996), chronicling Emin after her harrowing 1990 abortion, is shown in tandem with The Ashes, a new film work shot in the artist’s east London home. The camera pans over a scene in Emin’s light-drenched dining room where her mother’s ashes sit in a wooden box.

In the first gallery, visitors are reacquainted with the artist’s infamous bed – but this time it’s Emin in bed, 50 times over in a grid of self-portraits on the gallery’s walls. This format is nothing fundamentally new: Emin has been performing the selfie before the selfie was even born. In these portraits, viewers become intimately acquainted with Emin’s surgery scars, facial lacerations and cyclical changes in mood and nightwear.

Some are humorous, some are haunting and one was taken the night she knew her mother had died. This is the ongoing Insomnia series, which sees Emin alone, tormented by fatigue but incapable of sleep. ‘I had it [insomnia] in my early twenties in art school, but I loved it then, I could do whatever I wanted and it seemed that I had more hours in the day. As I’ve got older it’s got more and more soul destroying. Insomnia is not an affectation, it’s crippling,’ she says.

But it’s Emin’s paintings that steal the show, both in their immense quantity and volatile passion. They Held Me Down While He Fucked Me 1976 and But You Never Wanted me (both 2018) are two of the many portraits depicting gestural female nudes – presumably Emin – reclining, sleeping, bleeding and masturbating. The paint seeps in visceral layers riddled with trauma, rage, rejection and sexual aggression – Schiele-esque in twisted, gritty composition and Munch-like in eerie dilution.

With its acute commentary on the extremities of the female experience, it’s difficult to avoid drawing parallels with the today’s #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. ‘I kept trying to say [this] to people years ago’, Emin exclaims. ‘Suddenly I’m allowed to express myself and to have the language and the voice that I’ve had for years and years. Now we’re in a time where we can put things right, and this is what my work is about.’

So once again, we’re voyeurs in the next phase of this turbulent artistic existence, no less gripped, but perhaps now a little more empathetic. The White Cube show feels far beyond raw personal confession and seems to assert the precision and complexities of the broader human experience. ‘I don’t have anything else in my life,’ she says, ‘my work has completely taken over now and I’m completely dedicated to it.’

INFORMATION

‘A Fortnight of Tears’ is on view from 6 February – 7 April. For more information, visit the White Cube website

ADDRESS

White Cube Bermondsey
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

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Those familiar with London-based artist Christian Marclay’s impressive body of work will hardly be surprised by his new collection of black and white woodblock prints that masterfully blend collage, digital technology and traditional printmaking.

The American-born, Swiss-educated artist and former Wallpaper* Guest Editor has a reputation for cutting and pasting fragments from still images and video to sound, to create highly original pieces. His best-known work, The Clock (2010), is a mesmerising 24-hour loop of thousands of film clips and television shows that reflect the passage of time. 

It has, however, been a mixed blessing: so successful that all other works are seen in its shadow. ‘Of course, there are worse problems,’ Marclay laughs. ‘It is great that people pay attention to this, but I am trying to create something new and different.’ 

For the works at White Cube’s Hong Kong outpost, Marclay cut slivers of images from Japanese manga magazines and American comics to create a face caught mid-scream. The small, detailed collage is scanned, enlarged and carved into plywood or woodchip composite boards using a computer controlled carving machine. The woodcuts are printed with an etching press. 

‘The scream is the most basic human sound, the first we make when we are born. Enlarging the collage makes the scream louder, even if you can't hear it,’ Marclay says. The artist sees fragments as tools, a vocabulary to express himself in, although the collage-making is largely instinctive. ‘The collage is revealed as I am making it.  I let the material tell me everything, so I never know what I will find.’

The process may be laborious but the results are sublime, combining the graphic nature of manga that still retain a trace of having been cut, and the grain of wood in an ‘onomatopoeic’ image.

Marclay says he enjoys the making procedure: ‘There are so many stages in the process and interesting accidents, and the there is the magical moment when you lift the paper at the end.  You can never be completely in control and I like that.’

Inspiration for the series came from Edvard Munch’s iconic lithograph print The Scream (1895). ‘It had a huge influence on so many people and I like the way he allowed the wood to be present,’ he explains.

For his own works, Marclay looks for a piece of wood that works with the print, matching it to the image so that natural knots appear as eyes or ears. ‘In some, you can see how the wood grain is like sound waves,’ he adds.

Interestingly, the standout pieces are a pair of prints on composite wood without any distinct grain but with a grainy texture that adds an unexpected tension between the background and the image. This is the 62-year old artist’s first exhibition in Hong Kong, and he created all the pieces displayed especially for the show. 

INFORMATION
‘Screams’ is on view until 13 January 2018. For more information, visit the White Cube website

ADDRESS

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

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Larry Bell is an illusionist. At the 77-year-old West Coast minimalist’s fifth solo exhibition at White Cube’s Bermondsey outpost, he promises to conjure ‘Smoke on the Bottom’ — or at least, something like it.

The show is arranged into three sections, grouping distinct bodies of works that serve as visual magic tricks in which Bell literally weaves light into sculptures. ‘Smoke on the Bottom’ centres on Bell’s major work, 6 x 6 improvisation (1989-2014), an epic freestanding wall sculpture, first show in 2014 in Texas, now reconfigured for White Cube.

Forty clear, grey and metal-coated glass panels transmit, reflect and absorb the light in the gallery in different ways—both mesmerising and disorienting as you walk around. ‘We made one end of the room darker than the other end, so there’s a light differential that is a subtle as the gradient in the panels. I’m quite pleased with the way it came out,’ explained the artist the unveiling of his exhibition.

Bell began his experiments with glass in the 1960s. At the time, he says, ‘Glass was readily available, very few if any artists were working with it, so there was a chance to do something with a material that was not canvas and paint. It was inexpensive and had a shelf life of 3 million years – so it was a kind of material that had these magical qualities, and no-one else was playing with it.

To perform these kind of tricks, you need to know your materials to a scientific degree. Bell devised a unique coating process by teaching himself to use a specially-commissioned vacuum thermal evaporation machine (you can imagine his studio more like a chemist’s laboratory.) He began to try coating on other materials. ‘It had never occurred to me it could do exactly the same thing on paper as on the glass—except you couldn’t see through it. When I realised it would stick to paper, I realised it was possible to make images using a technique that had never been done before.’

Bell’s early ‘vapour drawings’, from the 1970s, are the first results of that breakthrough on view here, and they really steal the show. The image is simply created by gradients and optical effects, via a process that involves applying thin layers of aluminium and silicon monoxide, (a quartz-like material) that are vaporised onto their paper surface in varying thicknesses.

The results: forms appears to float on their surfaces, others seem to animate autonomously before our eyes, shapes come towards you and then retreat, and materials seem to flow into infinity, off their edges. ‘It’s the same process as going to a filling station and seeing a little gasoline on a puddle of water,’ he explains. ‘The various rainbow colours you see come from a varying thickness of the gasoline, where you see blue on the water, the gas is thinner than where you see red, so the same applied with the quartz-like material, I began doing these gradient things, trying to weave the light reflected off the paper into an image.’

Of course, Bell isn’t only concerned with stunning his audience with visual alchemy, but over 40 years, he has shown us how symmetry affects our perspective and spatial awareness, both within a work of art, and as a work of art might relate to a particular architecture—of course, implying endless metaphors that challenge human perception.

Bell’s newest works – his Church Studies, not seen in London before – combine laminate and Mylar film coated using a vacuum on red, black and white paper. ‘The laminate film was hanging or draped over something, so the folds collect the vapour as it’s being deposited,’ Bell reveals. ‘Every one of these pieces is made of 50 layers of materials on each of these collages. They get crispy like a saltine cracker and break easily – so I mount them onto a canvas.’

The works, remarkably, are voluminous, even having been submitted to this heated procedure. Prepare for your eyes to fool you.

INFORMATION
‘Smoke on the Bottom’ is on view until 18 June. For more information, visit the White Cube website

ADDRESS

White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

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‘Contemporary art is struggling to address real events in the art world right now,’ claimed Gregor Muir, executive director of the ICA, two weeks before Frieze opened. As co-curator of the fair’s talks programme, he chose the theme ‘Borderlands’ in a bid to galvanise this year’s speakers into exploring mental, physical and political boundaries.

Witnessing oversized mens’ trousers, pink plastic, Barbie-style detritus and sculptures made of scaffolding tubes, Muir’s words resonate. There are always lots of gimmicks at Frieze, but there’s good stuff too and Universal Design Studio – the fair’s architects – and the galleries, have gone to great lengths to make this year’s fair navigable and exciting. At the Modern Institute, recycled corrugated panels from Glasgow’s Tramshed are used by artist Martin Boyce as effective backdrops, while Hauser & Wirth tapped into the vogue for recreating the artist’s studio with a chaotic, fictional space filled with works by 46 practitioners.

Applied arts headlined at Gagosian in the form of black and white ceramics by Edmund De Waal and at the Viennese Galerie Meyer Kainer artist Lucy McKenzie created furniture wrapped in oil canvases inspired by Ettore Sottsass and Memphis, and Adolf Loos. At Mother’s Tankstation, this year’s Frieze Artist Award winner, Yuri Pattison, evoked 1970s California with an installation that explores the workspace and communal campuses.

For the first time, Frieze looks back this year, to the 1990s. Fourteen galleries revisit seminal shows from what was an impactful decade. Galerie Buchholz has recreated the bookshop in Cologne where Wolfgang Tillmans first showed photographs pinned to the walls, while Thomas Dane’s focus is on Michael Landy’s exhibitions in warehouse spaces

German gallery Rüdiger Schöttle also looks back, to 1926 and the International Institute on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory body that acted to unite a fragmented Europe (and of which Albert Einstein and Marie Curie were members). Visitors are encouraged to take a seat at a concrete table and discuss the pressing issues of the day. The first session was full – Muir might just be proved wrong.

INFORMATION

Frieze London runs from 6 until 9 October. For more information, visit the Frieze website

ADDRESS

Regent's Park
London NW1 4NR

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It takes a curious eye to find beauty in the banal, and few are more curious than Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay. His latest work, a series of six new videos due to be unveiled at White Cube Bermondsey later this week, explore precisely that: the brilliantly boring artefacts that litter London’s streets.

On view from 5 until 10 October to coincide with Frieze Art Fair, these looped works will be screened on the façade of the iconic gallery. Each animation hones in on a different object that is routinely discarded. Here, everything from cigarette butts, to cotton buds and straws star in static images that are then stitched together to form frenetic video animations, by way of Eadweard Muybridge’s zoetrope.

Marclay has collated thousands of photographs taken during daily walks in the city, weaving a digital tapestry from these found objects. 'I was thinking of the Bermondsey community for this projection,’ explains the London-based artist. ‘They are my main audience for this project and that's why I wanted to present a different work each night for a week. Every evening when walking back home, they will encounter a new work.’ It’s street photography – but not as we normally know it.

Like specimens being examined underneath a microscope, they metamorphose in shape (and colour) like living cells, dictated by the sequences Marclay has orchestrated. Silent and enlarged ‘to architectural proportions’, the videos take on a hypnotic, even strangely therapeutic, quality.

'It’s fun to be able to bring back what I found on the streets back to the street,’ the artist says. ‘The large wall used for the projection will be visible by passersby; they don’t have to enter the gallery. The gritty character of the photographs fits the gritty context of the streets – there’s a nice symbiosis.'

INFORMATION

’Christian Marclay: Outdoor Projection’ is on view from 5–10 October. For more information, visit the White Cube website

Artwork imagery courtesy of White Cube

ADDRESS

White Cube Bermondsey
144–152 Bermondsey Street
London, SE1 3TQ

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As eerie as his theatrical display of mammoth fossils might seem, Danh Vō’s first solo exhibition at White Cube’s Hong Kong outpost nevertheless offers a timely reflection on modern day questions about identity.

The Vietnamese-born Danish artist’s collection of some 450 ancient bones and a 17th-century ivory statue of Christ – suspended from the ceiling of the gallery's upper floor – has been shown before, as part of his 2015 ‘Banish the Faceless/Reward your Grace’ exhibition in Madrid. Here, it takes on a new dimension within the brightly-lit, sheer white gallery.

'It has a completely different energy and spirit to before,' observes the show's curator, White Cube director Mathieu Paris. 'He likes to frame the work in a space, taking the form from the room to create a new conversation.'

The ground floor, meanwhile, provides a stark contrast with just two works: a 16th-century sculpture of Christ's head inside a contemporary fridge topped with a Roman sculpture of a lion. Nearby, is the artist's iconic gold leaf Budweiser box.

'He works with fragments,' Paris explains. ‘The ivory sculpture, for instance, is a reflection on ivory trafficking, highlighting the confrontation between the material and message.’

Like all his works, the exhibition is an intensely personal reflection on his and his family’s history. Born in South Vietnam, Vō grew up in Denmark, after being rescued by a Danish commercial tanker from a boat his father had constructed in order to flee the country.

The artist says he was especially keen to exhibit in Hong Kong, not least because, as a city of economic and political refugees, it reflects his own mediations on dislocation.

INFORMATION

’Danh Vō’ is on view until 12 November. For more information, visit the White Cube’s website

ADDRESS

White Cube
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

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‘I get bored very, very easily,’ warns the globetrotting Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, whose latest series of works – inspired by his 18 month-long residency in Tokyo, Japan – is on show at White Cube Hong Kong.

The 80 watercolour paintings range from postcard- to poster-size and are produced on the simple gilt-edged card ubiquitous to Japanese stationery stores, which he covers with gold leaf before painting. 

The works feature Orozco’s trademark semi-abstract geometrical circles dissected with precise lines, along with an ethereal natural landscape quality that evokes the fluidity of sumi-e brushstrokes.

‘I see the gold surface like an empty space,’ he says. ‘I start with brush strokes to activate that perfect gold surface.’

The paintings are deliberately propped up on a narrow unvarnished timber shelf, that runs throughout the pristine white two-storey gallery space; to be experienced ‘more as objects reclining on the shelf’, the artist explains.

While best viewed as a complete collection, the standout piece of the exhibition is one of the smaller and more simple iterations, a sole leaf that the artist painted in a single brushstroke.

This eagle-eyed focus on space is his trademark. ‘Emptiness is my favourite subject,’ he says. ‘Here it was about what to leave empty like the spaces in a Zen garden.’

Fear of boredom keeps him moving to different countries, a process that helps him learn by continually trying new things, he says.

‘It’s very strange, though, because I tend to go to the same restaurant and order exactly the same things off the menu,’ he laughs. ‘But not with my work.’

INFORMATION

’Suisai: Tokyo Strokes’ is on view until 20 August. For more information, visit the White Cube Hong Kong website

Photography: Vincent Tsang, White Cube. Courtesy the artist

ADDRESS

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

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A new exhibition at the White Cube at Mason's Yard introduces experimental work from across the 50-year career of one of Eastern Europe’s most prominent artists.

Since the 1960s, Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer has been producing original and precise conceptual art in an impressive range of mediums – print, drawing, painting and sculpture, performance and film.

At first her work seems to be defined by its boldly graphic aesthetic, starkly yet elegantly minimalist. However, if you linger in this show you will begin to realise that this aesthetic – the appearance of her art – is almost completely unintentional. It’s a byproduct of the various scientific systems and processes Maurer has created, and from where all her art stems.

Now approaching 79, Maurer was born into the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the first communist state set up after Soviet Russia. She had the unusual freedom to roam between communist Eastern Europe and the West since 1967 because her husband, the Hungarian artist Tibor Gáyor, had Austrian citizenship.

'It is only [a state of] order that you can break free from,' she says, explaining her obsessively methodical way of working. Maurer has described order as one of the few 'fundamental laws that affect the entirety of a human being'. Her work celebrates the innate geometry and mechanics in all working aspects of life, particularly human form and action – and always with a view to finding its counter-motion, be it chaos or absurdity.

In her 1979 film Properties she is partly seen performing a precise series of measurements on a roll of paper, using only her body. She creates a new metric system, exactly one quarter the length of herself. She then demonstrates that this is the perfect system for measuring all possible lengths of her own body – feet and hands, shoulders and shins – as if her whole body derives from one sizing system. Watching her rolling awkwardly around on the floor, her method seems random and absurd at first, but gradually we begin to see the logic of it, to marvel at the mathematical perfection that every chaotic, organic motion derives from.

This little show is an understated gem. It reveals an extraordinarily comprehensive artistic career that became, essentially, an experiment – a search for the precise right angle where the lines of order and chaos, logic and absurdity, intersect.

INFORMATION
’Dóra Maurer: 6 out of 5’ is on view until 9 July. For more information, visit the White Cube website

Photography: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy the artist and White Cube

ADDRESS

White Cube
25–26 Mason's Yard
London, SW1Y 6BU

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There’s a hint of the megalomaniac in Georg Baselitz’s art. In recent years his output has accelerated, as if he is battling to keep up with the frantic energy he projects in his work. In his latest show, ‘Wir fahren aus (We’re off)', the scale and number of his paintings, drawings and sculptures can barely be contained by the cavernous White Cube in Bermondsey.

Baselitz focuses on his subjects with an intensity that borders on the obsessive. With the exception of two sculptures, everything on show in ‘Wir fahren aus’ is based on a handful of figurative subjects.

In the monumental oil paintings – 16 of them altogether – Baselitz has returned to an older portrait of himself and his wife Elke. Their bodies are rendered as stark, contorted figures in white or pink, floating in thin mists of paint against dark backgrounds. At their best, these works live up to their enormous scales with a clarity of composition and subtlety of texture.

The inspiration for these paintings came from Otto Dix, the influential portraitist of inter-war Germany; in fact, throughout ‘Wir fahren aus’ there are hints of an expressive, macabre German and Austrian tradition that also includes Egon Schiele and George Grosz. This is especially true of the works in ink, which combine an aggressive, incisive line with vaporous blotches of yellow and purple watercolour.

Baselitz is almost 80, and one of this exhibition’s main themes is aging. It appears that, like many artists before him, this preoccupation will only make him more productive.

INFORMATION

’Wir fahren aus (We’re off)’ is on view until 3 July. For more information, visit the White Cube’s website

Photography courtesy the artist and White Cube

ADDRESS

White Cube
144–152 Bermondsey Street
London, SE1 3TQ

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There’s been much furor ahead of Tracey Emin’s latest exhibition, ‘I Cried Because I Love You’, not least because it is her first solo venture in greater China – and rumoured to be her last before she embarks on a yearlong sabbatical. Opened this week to coincide with Art Basel fair in Hong Kong, the frenzy surrounding the British artist’s major new show might only be overshadowed by the startling revelation she married a large, ancient stone in her garden in southern France last summer.

Spread over White Cube and Lehmann Maupin galleries in Central, the exhibition brings together older pieces alongside new paintings, drawings, embroideries and neon works. A narrative centred on her impromptu union (wearing her father’s funeral shroud in lieu of a wedding dress, no less) threads the duet of shows – fittingly, two become one.

‘It’s about me being able to not have to define myself within a gallery, within a space, within a country,’ she explains in the exhibition catalogue to Carl Freedman.  ‘I can just make my work and show it, that’s what’s important to me.’ To wit, the show is typically Emin: unabashedly confessional in its nude drawings of splayed female figures; yearning words scrawled in light and across canvases; and raw, explosive brushstrokes.

Emin doesn’t deviate far from the artist we know, yet, her new works seem bolstered by a newfound sense of self-acceptance, perhaps the result of her recent union. ‘You can find people to have sex with, but, you know, loving them is something else,’ she said. The marriage to the stone (it’s not a rock, Emin insists) is a metaphor about the longing to be with someone and the stability that comes with enduring love.

‘It’s my life. I think I’ve cried over more people that I love than people that I hate. I don’t think I’ve really hated hardly anyone,’ she has said. ‘I think my big mistake is loving people too much.’ However droll Emin is, the more she chastises journalists, the bitterer her acerbic tongue becomes: the more we try to love her.

INFORMATION

‘I Cried Because I Love You’ runs until 21 May across White Cube and Lehmann Maupin galleries. For more information visit the White Cube website

ADDRESS

Lehmann Maupin
4/F, Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street

White Cube
50 Connaught Road

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Having just marked his 87th birthday, American artist Robert Irwin has touched down in London for his latest solo exhibition at White Cube’s Bermondsey outpost. The show, entitled ‘2 x 2 x 2 x 2’, unites three different bodies of work, including fluorescent tubes, a diptych and a pair of transparent plastic columns.

A pivotal member of the Light and Space movement, which originated in the West Coast, Irwin molds light but not as you would expect it. Leading the exhibition, the artist presents a sequential series of coloured fluorescent lights, placed vertically along the wall. Measuring 7 x 8 feet each, they are cocooned in hued gels, the sparse offering of colour immediately drawing the eye in.

Nearby, a new diptych – Black Painting (2015) – has notes of Josef Albers and Barnett Newman, but reads more like a tribute to Kazimir Malevich’s 1913 piece, Black Square. Reflective lashings of urethane paint and lacquer on honeycomb aluminium both mirror the viewer while drawing them into a sinister abyss - there’s a curiousness to this contradiction.

White Cube’s 9 x 9 x 9 gallery, meanwhile, holds court to a ghostly duet of crystal-clear acrylic columns. Although supposedly conceived as early as 1969, the works look hyper-futuristic in the pristine white space. Irwin has described his columns as perching sitting ‘on a delicate edge’, adding: ‘You don’t think about whether it’s art or not art. It’s just about what you’re seeing or not seeing.’

Irwin’s immaculately conceived works offer a perfect foil to Cerith Wyn Evans’ frenetic neon designs in the adjacent South Galleries. These two wildly differing shows form a fascinating symbiosis that brings light into sharp relief.

INFORMATION

‘2 x 2 x 2 x 2’ runs until 15 November 2015

ADDRESS

White Cube Bermondsey
North Galleries
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

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A fantastical force is coursing through White Cube Bermondsey’s South Gallery, which is hosting new works by the Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans this autumn.

The artist found an inspirational spark in the flow of energy in conduits (both material and immaterial), circuitry and choreology. To that end, the site-specific intervention comprises a dazzling ballet of neon pieces, spinning palm trees, a sound sculpture and a Morse code lighting installation.

Taking centre stage, an arrangement of three neon sculptures cuts vividly through air, borrowing movements from traditional Japanese Noh theatre. These new works hark back to Evans’ earlier sculptures, tracing a complex medley of gestures, motions and shapes in light.

A fourth neon piece, The Illuminating Gas…(after Oculist Witnesses), uses Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) as a springboard. A skewed trio of vast neon discs echoes Duchamp’s artwork, projecting it into multi-dimensional objects.

Meanwhile, an otherworldly soundtrack reverberates through the space, emitted from a large sculpture made up of 19 ‘breathing’ glass flutes. Each flute, connected to a long tube suspended from the ceiling, is mechanically operated, exhaling a breath-like sound. In an adjacent corridor, the artist has hacked one of the existing light fixtures to broadcast a message in Morse code, narrating the transit of the moon during a solar eclipse.

Palm trees, perched atop rotating on turntables, punctuate the space. These tropical carousels conjure an unexpected natural counterpoint to the stark, artificial glow of the neon sculptures – just one of Evans’ many bright ideas.

INFORMATION

Cerith Wyn Evans’ exhibition runs until 15 November 2015

ADDRESS

White Cube Bermondsey
South Galleries
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

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Hong Kong’s current love affair with contemporary Chinese art continues with a freshly unveiled solo exhibition of mirrored sculptures, collage and a ‘shape-shifting’ video by the Beijing-based artist Liu Wei, at the city's White Cube outpost.

The artist has been producing interesting works for the past 15 years, not least with his sensational Looks Like a Landscape, 2004 – a large-format black and white photograph of what seemed like a traditional Chinese mountain scene but is, in fact, a landscape of naked bottoms. His new show builds upon an exhibition at UCCA Beijing earlier this year with a refined yet unconventional examination of the symbolism of everyday urban materials.

The highlight of the exhibition is Puzzle, an abstract assemblage of enormous organically-shaped mirrors creating an intriguing sculptural enclosure while simultaneously playing with our notions of perception.

On the same ground floor of the gallery are two Crucifixion collages; works that the artist created by draping sheets of steel over delicate metal rods to form an abstract cross-like shape. Liu says he prefers to work with easily available, cheap industrial materials that have a ‘class connotation’. ‘They are natural to this artificial urban environment,’ he explains.

Sharing the same ground floor space is a colourful video work – Shapeshifting – inspired by the neon advertising of urban environments, providing a striking counterpart to the predominantly neutral silver art pieces nearby.

The theme of silver ‘formally orchestrates the whole show’, says Liu.  ‘Everything is related to it one-way or the other. It also reflects the colonial history of Hong Kong where silver was even used to buy opium. I don't claim to be a master of history but my work is a re-imagination of that.’

Upstairs, Liu’s newest works reflect his interest in architecture with thick tactile layers of oil paint applied like rough plaster to a canvas, and a series of three smaller-scale mirrored works placed on ‘found’ furniture.

‘It is the simplicity and straightforwardness of discarded things that interests me,’ he concludes.

INFORMATION

’Liu Wei: Silver’ is on view from 17 September – 24 October 2015

Photography courtesy of Liu Wei and White Cube

ADDRESS

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road
Central, Hong Kong

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Marc Quinn's solo exhibition 'The Toxic Sublime' is now on show at White Cube in Bermondsey. The theme of the show is nature derailed and despoiled. Pictured: Frozen Wave (The Conservation of Linear Momentum), 2015

The centrepiece of Marc Quinn’s new show at the White Cube, Bermondsey edition, is Frozen Wave (The Conservation of Mass), a kind of withered, weathered take on Anish Kapoor’s crowd-pleasing Cloud Gate, the giant, mirrored bean that sits in Chicago’s Millennium Park (Quinn makes clear though that no direct reference is intended. The pieces are of similar material but not intent). Almost 25 feet long and nine feet taIl, Frozen Wave dominates its allotted space. Most visitors on preview night were, inevitably, drawn to its smooth, polished steel side and perhaps even repelled by the creases and wrinkles that face the other way. 

The Conservation of Mass is the biggest, and most abstract, of a series of stainless steel Frozen Wave sculptures that are based on conch shells, eroded by seas and oceans until nothing is left but a thin, fragile mineral arc, a little wave. For Quinn they are a kind of accidental self-portrait, relentless and impervious natural forces leaving an odd echo.

The show in its entirety is called 'The Toxic Sublime'. And the theme, as the title suggests, is nature derailed and despoiled. Thirteen Toxic Sublimes appear here, crumpled aluminium sheets with dirty sunsets, mostly unrecognisable as such, bonded on their surfaces. They all start with the same garish sunset, a photograph on canvas. This photograph is sanded and gaffer-taped and then taken out into the streets to be branded by Thames Water manhole covers. These are then applied to the aluminium sheets, which Quinn batters and bends and twists into a sort of seascape.

They look like debris of course, but of what? In some, the ruined sunset comes off as nuclear. There are odd scrawlings which might make these artefacts. They are all toxic Turners, questioning whether we have the right to call anything sublime anymore, given our dumping and disrespect.

For a unique and exclusive take on 'The Toxic Sublime', check out the September issue of Wallpaper*, on sale come 13 August. Quinn has collaborated with us on a truly remarkable – properly sublime, perhaps – fashion shoot, featuring some of the works in the show and his new muse Jenny Bastet.

The Frozen Wave sculptures are based on conch shells, eroded by seas and oceans until nothing is left but a thin, fragile mineral arc, a little wave. Pictured: Frozen Wave (The Conservation of Culture), 2015

For Quinn they are a kind of an accidental self-portrait, relentless and impervious natural forces leaving an odd echo. Pictured: Frozen Wave (The Conservation of Energy), 2015

The Toxic Sublime – B(=_cUo-214!96c, 2015. They are made up of crumpled aluminium sheets with dirty sunsets, mostly unrecognisable. This photograph is sanded and gaffer-taped and then taken out into the streets to be branded by Thames Water manhole covers...

... these are then applied to the aluminium sheets, which Quinn batters and bends and twists into a sort of seascape. Left: The Toxic Sublime – 5$_5,)'^6$3Y]7w, 2015. Right: The Toxic Sublime – O8@=du5JPnf&Zx, 2015

ADDRESS

White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London, SE1 3TQ

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Larry Bell has been exploring the aesthetics of light and surface for over five decades. In that time, the New Mexico-based artist, who is now 75, has produced a masterful body work comprising sculpture, installations and collages that harness light with serene and haunting effect. A new exhibition, '2D-3D: Glass & Vapor' at White Cube Mason’s Yard, shows several stages of this oeuvre as well as new works.

The distinctive shimmering texture of Bell's work stems from his discovery in the 1960s of a process called 'thin film deposition', whereby surfaces are coated with metal alloys in a vacuum chamber. This method alters the way light is reflected or allowed to pass through sheets of glass or plastic, creating illusions of depth and colourful mists that expand into the gallery space.

Bell places experimentation and discovery at the center of his practice. 'Control', he says, 'is a state of mind, not a physical reality. To me everything is experimental in the studio and that is how the work grows.' Bell is drawn to the medium of light by its spontaneity, observing that 'light is free... in one way or another it is like time, it is everywhere at once'.

At the White Cube show, one can see the evolution of Bell's work from minimalist structures into arrangements of six-foot glass panels, whose exchanges of light occupy an entire room. There are also dazzling two-dimensional Vapor Drawings, as well as his new Light Knot sculptures – curving ribbons of polyester film, suspended like figures frozen mid-dance.

With many younger artists interested in the possibilities of light, Bell's work currently seems more relevant than ever. He is inspired by Sasha Vom Dorp and Marc Fichou, artists who have, he says, 'taken a serious step into the unknown, and brought out a sample of the unknown for me to see'.

ADDRESS

White Cube Mason's Yard
25-26 Mason's Yard
London, SW1Y 6BU

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The international appeal of artists represented by White Cube meant the gallery's expansion into São Paolo and Hong Kong was a given. Glyndebourne, home of the summer opera festival and idyll for rosé picnics? Not so obvious. Nonetheless when Glyndebourne heir and chair Gus Christie sought to expand the programme into visual art, White Cube signed on for a three-year partnership.

Eighteen months later and the 2015 season is upon us, opening this week with 'Poliuto' by Donizetti in the opera house and artist Georg Baselitz at the new White Cube Glyndebourne, designed by London architects Carmody Groarke.

It is not a pop-up, I'm advised, but a flexible temporary structure that will be disassembled in autumn (to dodge inclement weather and planning restrictions), then reassembled each spring through 2017. For the right blend of raw, contemporary style and compassion for the landscaping, Christie went to the go-to practice for show pavilions. David Chipperfield protégés Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke had caught his eye with their temporary Studio East restaurant, built 35m above the London Olympics site, and three consecutive pavilions for the Frieze Art Fair.

The 10x8m not-quite-white cube sits on the natural promenade from the car park to the theatre - a robust, engineered-timber frame sheathed in layers of polycarbonate cladding recalling the Frieze quarters. Raised on a podium of railway sleepers, it allows deep sightlines through a break in the hedges from the front entrance and views to the lake from the back. Groarke, who attended the recent hanging of Baselitz's gilt-framed works, says he envisioned 'a building within a building', with a deep, canopied terrace and ramp providing 'an interstitial space, with no abrupt transition between inside and out'.

Originally it was squat and flat-roofed, but ultimately the architects lifted the roof and tipped it against the dip in the earth, 'as a gestural uplift to the hills beyond'. A uniform series of neon-tube lights climb the peak on the inside - a touch of White Cube pizzazz in a building that, says Groarke, 'doesn't pretend to blend in'.

Yet nor is it meant to be provocative - though visitors, asked to share their picnic space with this experimental new occupant - may have other thoughts.

ADDRESS

Glyndebourne
Lewes
East Sussex
BN8 5UU

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The sleeping security guard is already the star of this year's edition of Frieze. He sits, we assume he sits there still, head propped against a wall of the Hauser & Wirth stand, snoozing oblivious, tweeted and Instagrammed, gone social, possibly even viral. It doesn't look like a happy sleep, or a tormented sleep or an active sleep, just a standard preparation for death sleep. Frieze can get you that way.

Visitors look at the tagged-up security guide and smile or think about a prod. Is he art or just a lazy sentinel? He is art of course - phew, no unpleasantness required then - actually Sleeping Guard by Christoph Büchel. And he is part of what is easily the most interesting and successfully conceived stand at the fair.

Curated by Mark Wallinger, a new signing for Hauser & Wirth, the stand is cluttered and domestic. Titled 'A Study in Red and Green', it is a take on Sigmund Freud's study in Hampstead and greater than the sum of its Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn, Subodh Gupta (amongst others) parts. It feels nocturnal, like the seemingly random-but-not-stops of a restless unconscious. Perhaps these are the security guard's dreams. Who knows what he has seen. There are other interesting things to look at, disorientating and random in their own way, but nothing as arresting.

Carsten Höller has created a kindergarten at the Gagosian stand. Which is nice. Cory Arcangel's carpet on the Lisson Gallery stand is a success. The gallery goes big on Arcangel's video pieces and Ryan Gander's concrete sculptures and to good effect. Thomas Dane's stand is well composed and I liked the paintings by Ella Kruglyanskaya, a New York-based Latvian, at the Gavin Brown stand which looked French and flighty and funny though no one else seemed much taken.

There is a strong showing from Brazilian galleries this year, including Galeria Luisa Strina from Sao Paulo and the excellent A Gentil Carioca from Rio. They are a welcome addition to the mix, even if most of the action is around the cluster of blue chips during the press and VIP opening (how 'V' is always hard to know. The Frieze caste system remains impenetrable.)

The experience (more of an 'assault' in the past) is also generally more civilised this year. BarberOsgerby's Universal Design Studio has designed the tent and the aisles are wide and there is more air in the air but still too few places to sit down and get your bearings. The VIPs - men in art scarves and art spectacles, tottering ladies in leopard print skirts with taut, tortured looking faces - are as worth watching as ever. And listening too.

The more abundant air is kissed, dinner arrangements made (and probably forgotten) before they wobble or glide back to their idling luxury sedans which will spend much of the rest of the day snarled and stuttering amongst other luxury sedans. While our security guard, happily or unhappily, remains oblivious.

ADDRESS

Frieze London
Regent’s Park
London NW1 4PJ

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British sculptor Antony Gormley's latest exhibition at Hong Kong's White Cube gallery is a continuation of the artist's lifelong investigation of spatial awareness using his trademark abstract iron and steel sculptures to transform an exhibition space into a 'psychic and physiological testing ground.' 

'It is,' he stresses, 'the opposite of putting objects of high aesthetic value in a shop and then asking people to take them home. It is instead about turning the space into a reflective experience so they can then go out onto the street and look at the environment in a different way.' 

The eleven works arranged throughout the gallery, including stairways and passages, include smaller standalone sculptures like 'Gut XIII', a disconcertingly unstable 'blockwork' that evokes the architectural metaphor of the body as a building, and 'Ease', an enormous iron sculpture designed to obstruct the gallery entrance. The standout piece is undoubtedly 'Murmur,' a multiple 'space-frame' that fills the entire ground floor space channeling viewers into a narrow passage between the walls and the frame's central void. 

'I think that art has to return us to our inner selves. We must think about the body less as an object that can be sexualized or idealized and more as a place, a location, a condition,' says Gormley.

The artist credits Hong Kong as the inspiration for the exhibition. 

'It is a very good place to think about the human habitat. Why has our species chosen to concentrate itself in these high density environments and what does that tell us about our relationship to our fellow man?'

Gormley, who has visited the city frequently over the past decade, is fascinated by the juxtaposition of the city's extreme built environment and untouched nature, elements he says are reflected in six new works created specially for the show.  Of these, 'Place II', an ethereal human form created from slender stainless steel bars and presented in the gallery's private viewing room, certainly captures Hong Kong's unique urban dichotomy.

Gormley recommends viewing the works away from the crowds that usually flock to gallery openings.

'In my view openings are the best way to ignore art. The whole principle is to use the show as a space and if there are bodies all over the place it won't work as well. It is the viewer's movement through the coordinates of the space of the gallery that is the real subject. It is what is happening within the viewer, not the objects in the gallery.'

ADDRESS

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

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As Hong Kong presents ART HK 12, its fifth international art fair – now under the Art Basel franchise and expected to draw even more visitors than the 63,500 last year – it is also celebrating its transformation into the de facto art capital of Asia. Thanks to an unprecedented boom in China’s art market and a growing demand for Western art (Christie’s Hong Kong sold £225 million in a week last autumn), several influential international galleries have opened permanent spaces timed to coincide with this year’s fair.

Explore the galleries making their mark on Hong Kong's art scene

‘There is palpable excitement about how the art scene is developing,’ says ART HK director Magnus Renfrew, who believes the combination of location, language, reputation and international culture has contributed to its status as an art hub.

Just a decade ago, the city was relatively provincial with a weak art infrastructure compared to traditional art centres. But recently a handful of galleries have introduced a rare pedigree of artists to the city. Ben Brown Fine Arts, which recently extended its Andre Fu-designed space, last week launched an exhibition by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti; the White Cube gallery, which staged a successful opening in March, unveiled Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom’. Meanwhile, the Gagosian Gallery has spent its inaugural year treating Hong Kong to Damien Hirst and, this month, Andreas Gursky’s first Asian exhibition.

The newest clutch of blue-chip galleries will likely up the ante still further. Parisian dealer Emmanuel Perrotin opens his vast 17th floor Galerie Perrotin with ‘The Nature of Need’, exhibiting the work of American neo-pop artist KAWS. ‘It is the perfect time to be opening in Hong Kong,’ says Perrotin. ‘The market is very exciting and we have a space that allows us to show exactly what we want.’ Striking interiors by Andre Fu make full use of the harbour views and natural light. ‘For me, art spaces are about creating experiences, so we flipped the circulation to the window side, creating free movement along the full-height windows,’ says Fu. ‘It is a quite subtle but effective use of the space.’

Spurred on by exponential growth in Asia, Sotheby’s is opening a sleek 1,400sq m gallery in Pacific Place, designed by local architects Richards Basmajian, and taken the entire fifth floor as an auction and lecture hall. The spaces were micro-designed with flexibility in mind. ‘Even the windows have panels to hang pictures,’ says David Richards. ‘With Sotheby’s the art works vary dramatically from traditional to cutting-edge modern, so the space had to be simple by necessity but details such as flexible lighting were critical,’ The gallery opens on the 19th May with ‘Hong Kong Blooms In My Mind’ by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, as well as an exhibit of French landscape painting from the19th and 20th centuries.

Also this week, Pearl Lam’s eponymous gallery presents its inaugural exhibition of Chinese abstract art, re-examined by contemporary-art scholar Gao Minglu and Paul Moorhouse, curator of 20th-century portraits at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Says Lam: ‘Contemporary abstract art is usually regarded by the West as second hand and derivative, but the Chinese see it differently. This exhibition will show a different perspective.’ The 350sq m new gallery in the Grade II-listed Pedder Building has temporary walls to create bespoke spaces for each piece. ‘The next exhibition will change completely. Windows will appear,’ says Lam, who was drawn to the building’s high ceilings and its paradox: ‘Outside is old but inside is new.’

Simon Lee Gallery opens this week in the same building with an exhibition of new works by American artist Sherrie Levine . Designed by Belgium-based Bataille Ibens, the gallery carries over the aesthetic of the Lee’s London gallery and acts as a project space. ‘We are adopting a different model to the conventional gallery,’ says Asia director Katherine Schaefer. ‘During the rotations in our space, mediums will range from painting, drawing and sculpture to multimedia installation and film.’

It’s not yet clear what benefit these international players will bring to Hong Kong’s emerging art community. Although they clearly have the potential to reshape the cultural landscape, local gallerists and collectors like Calvin Hui, founder of 3218, a loft-style contemporary gallery in Hong Kong’s Wong Chuk Hang district, have mixed feelings. ‘Many people say Hong Kong is the number one art market and there are a lot of opportunities, but I am still concerned about the size of the market. Tiny galleries will still find it hard to promote art.’

Adding to the burgeoning art scene in Hong Kong is a new gallery from London art powerhouse, White Cube. Collectors and artists swarmed in from all around the region for the opening night of the first exhibition, dedicated to British artists Gilbert & George, whose London Pictures series is also on show in White Cube's three London galleries.

Located on Connaught Road, the Hong Kong outpost is White Cube's first overseas venture. It takes over the ground and first floor of a 27-storey tower, by New York-based architect Robert AM Stern.

The gallery is a generous space of 550 m². London-based Maybank and Matthews Architects have captured the spirit and standard of White Cube, creating a clean and classic gallery, cleverly playing with light and shadow.

On the walls are 22 pictures from Gilbert & George's London Pictures series, which is based on posters from London newspaper sellers' posters they have stolen over the last six years. With slogans like 'My mate tried to murder me' and 'ex-soldier beat pal into coma', the collection is an epic survey of modern urban life in all its volatility, tragedy, absurdity and routine violence.

London Pictures is part of an ambitious exhibition programmed, devised by director of exhibitions Tim Marlow, working in association with Graham Steele, White Cube director of Asia, and Laura Zhou, the new gallery director, formerly of ShanghArt Gallery.

We caught up with Tim Marlow to find out his ambitions for White Cube Hong Kong.

Why Hong Kong and why now?

Hong Kong makes a lot of sense for number of reasons. It's a hub in the region for China, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea. And Hong Kong is interesting in itself, because of it's postcolonial culture; it's plan for the museum area in Western Kowloon; as well as its blooming art fair.

Why right now? Because it took us two years to find the right gallery space. The size of the gallery in Hong Kong is substantial, which matches the ambition of our shows.

What will be the focus of White Cube Hong Kong?

White Cube is fundamentally an international gallery. We want to bring the best international artists to Hong Kong. Now that we are here, we will be able to look for artists in the region too. But there is no solid plan yet to show regional work. We want to bring the best possible shows to Hong Kong, and that is the main direction.

What are your ambitions for the new gallery?

We are trying to develop the market for our artists. Serious collectors are emerging in the region, especially in Mainland China, and foundations are beginning to collect on a big scale. A lot of young collectors we have met are showing interest in Western art, which we hope to develop too. This is just the beginning of a new journey.

What do you think the gallery will contribute to the Chinese arts scene?

I would not put it in that way. But, judging by the number of people who came to the opening night, and to the talk I did at the British Council last week (which sold out three times over), people are very interested in what we are doing. Good artists and art are supposed to change the way you see the world. Art can be a powerful thing and we have created here a stage for powerful things to happen.

Why did you choose Gilbert & George for the opening gig?

I think all artists have an affection and respect for Gilbert & George. They have just made this large series of work and we suddenly realized what a brilliant opportunity to host its world premiere in Hong Kong. In the coming four months the show will be in London, New York, Brussels, Basel and Berlin too.

Also, Gilbert & George are great ambassadors for the art world and for British art. They were also the first major Western artists to have their solo show in Mainland China. It opened in 1993 at Beijing National Gallery, before travelling to Shanghai Art Museum. Many Chinese artists remember that show. Zhang Huan came up to Gilbert & George at the opening luncheon, and said, 'I saw that show in China. It was incredibly powerful for me.'

What are your expectations in terms of sales and response from the public?

The opening response to the Gilbert & George show has given us high hopes. The real hope, though, is to have a strong presence in the region, culturally and creatively, as much as commercially.

Who will be the next artists you bring to Hong Kong?

I can only tell you that the next show will open in early May, just a day before ART HK 12 kicks off.

ADDRESS

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

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