Publisher: The Studio Trust
Content: 254 pages, full colour
Language: English
ISBN: 0962514187 (Hardcover).
Dimensions: 11.0 x 8.7 x 1.0 inches
Price: Hardcover: US $29.99, UK £24.99
Editor: Michael Spens
Deputy Editor: Dr Janet McKenzie
Creative Director: Martin Kennedy
Vice-President: Miguel Benavides
To order your copy please contact studio@mwrk.co.uk
Introduction
This year Studio International expanded its coverage of the southern hemisphere. We featured the phenomenon of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art, which is driven by deep political and cultural necessity. The Aborigines’ pride in their culture and traditions in the face of their appalling treatment by white settlers from 1788 onwards has resulted in art with rare and powerful qualities. Studio International is committed to presenting contemporary Aboriginal art to an international audience, thus supporting scholarship in the field of Indigenous art in Australia, with its global implications for us all. From it, we can all learn and re-learn about our common humanity in an attempt to redress the wrongs of colonial history worldwide.
From Latin America came a significant article – an interview with the Director of the Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo, Ivo Mesquita. Mesquita made typically frank observations about present-day biennales, which he said have developed a ‘circuit of repetition’. This is of significance to other international biennales, which continue, amid commercial and media hype, beyond their original catalytic role. Indeed, the Bienal de São Paulo this year was distinguished by an entire floor without any art exhibits at all: The Void. Mesquita explained that large exhibitions needed to be pared down to create space for the vital critical dimension of exhibitions; size should be limited in order for there to be ‘a conceptual axis connecting the works’. But the question remains, how in future will the global biennale movement be resuscitated or replaced?
The year 2008 has been one in which society also peered into the void in economic terms. We have included in this Yearbook several critiques of individual or group artists’ work. One British artist, Damien Hirst, cannily perceived the dilemma of art galleries and the saleroom. He held his own auction of works at Sotheby’s, London, in a prescient and profitable venture, which also witnessed the operation of a new phenomenon, the ‘art hedgefund’. The timing of the sale, within a day of steep declines in world stock markets, could not have been better.
As the economic crisis took hold, it was surprising how a certain serendipity prevailed, as exemplified in the paintings of Peter Doig, and the installation spaces of Roger Hiorns, an inspired commission by Artangel in London. With hindsight, Hiorns’ Seizure (2008) carries intimations of impending disaster. Elsewhere in Studio International, photography is well represented, with the Hayward Gallery’s masterly display of Rodchenko images, and by the sublime naturalism of Nick Howard’s photographs from York and nearby, reminiscent in their theatrical referencing and irony of the visual language of the filmmaker Antonioni from the 1960s. Related here, too, are the moving stills from Derek Jarman’s excellent Serpentine Gallery show, together with Nina Kellgren’s frozen image of his friends Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton standing at Jarman’s grave in private memoriam of his stature.
Within the 2008 Yearbook one can readily make apposite connections from contemporary to historic works. For example, John Bellany’s exhibition of portraits, in the same volume as Lucas Cranach the Elder, reveal Bellany’s homage to the northern tradition in art and the abiding power of symbol, formal device and iconography, which, in spite of globalisation and the necessary redress of the imbalance of centre and periphery in culture (issues that are also addressed by Arthur Watson in remote Gaelic communities in Scotland), continues to link individuals both throughout the world and from different centuries. There are marvellous connections between the portrait Helen [Bellany] (1964) and St Helena and Self-Portrait (1966) and Cranach’s Portrait of Martin Luther (1525). We present different approaches by artists to the politics of war and peace: Richard Hamilton’s guntoting cowboy Tony Blair at the ready, trigger-happy for mass destruction with six-shooters, encapsulates that erstwhile warmongering image. American-born Australian artist William Kelly re-emphasises the longstanding social role of the ‘Artist as Peacemaker’, following Picasso’s own commitment. Kelly’s personal and literal revisiting of Guernica (1938) indicates how and where some artists still choose to go, whether commercially beneficial or not.
This unpredictable year has been one of bewildering transition. Creative sensibilities are stirring and new ethical tenets emerging, many free from curatorial predilections. New models are needed to replace the old and wilting stockades of the past half-century, aided by emerging networks of electronic communication and knowledge exchange. Studio International will continue to observe and report on these pivotal issues.
Michael Spens
Editor
Contents
Sharjah March Meeting 2024: Tawashjuat
This year’s edition of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s March meeting focused on collectives, collab...
Martin Boyce – interview: ‘You’re both inside and outside. There’s...
Martin Boyce’s show at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, offers three distinctive, in-between spaces for exp...
Hanna Bekker vom Rath: A Rebel for Modern Art
This richly documented show does justice to the feisty Hanna Bekker vom Rath, a German art collector...
Infinite Variety: Harold Cohen and Cybernetics in the 1960s
On the occasion of a show of Harold Cohen’s work at Gazelli Art House in London, we consider the p...
Through his sensitive and thoughtful works, Issam Kourbaj ensures the plight of those in his native ...
The English eccentric William Blake meets his German peers in a treasure-strewn exhibition that make...
Chronorama: Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century
Highlights from the golden age of photography, produced for fashion magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair,...
Thea Djordjadze: Framing Yours Making Mine
In this comprehensive show, Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze’s spare sculptural works emanate a sen...
Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Alberta Whittle and other artists from the African diaspora consi...
A post-apocalyptic landscape or an abandoned toolshed? This compact exhibition, by ceramics sculptor...
This show looks at how John Singer Sargent styled his sitters, insisting they wore certain garments ...
Francis Picabia: Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950
A career-spanning exhibition of drawings and watercolours shows the elusive modernist Francis Picabi...
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
The Royal Academy, founded at the height of the British empire, brings together more than 100 histor...
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You
As poetic as it is urgent, Barbara Kruger’s text-based work packs a weighty punch. Her methods of ...
Moon/King: The Work and Friendship of Phillip King and Jeremy Moon – 195...
Phillip King and Jeremy Moon met as students at Cambridge and remained friends until Moon’s death ...
A flurry of museum and gallery exhibitions flags a surge of interest in Korean art. The most compell...
Through paintings, works on paper and projections, this exhibition traces the evolution of AARON, th...
Gayle Chong Kwan – interview: ‘I’ve made a connection between displa...
Gayle Chong Kwan talks about using sand and sugar to make historic and contemporary connections betw...
Spanning seven decades of Yoko Ono’s groundbreaking work, from the 1950s to now, some done with Jo...
Leo Robinson – interview: ‘Human beings need meaningful symbols and na...
Leo Robinson, whose exhibition Dream-Bridge-Omniglyph is now at the London Mithraeum, considers his ...
Outi Pieski – interview: ‘Contemporary art museums in general are spac...
Small carved figures, knotted fringes and historic hats represent Outi Pieski’s Sámi heritage as ...
These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture
In this joyous and eccentric show, Hoyland’s jaunty ceramic sculptures are shown alongside equally...
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
The 50 artists in this formidable show have all used textiles to tell powerful stories of resistance...
Ronald Davis – interview: ‘Two artists who use perspective in their wo...
Ronald Davis talks about his art and how he started out in the 1960s, his friendship with Judy Chica...
Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus* and Warbur...
Spanning master plans and covert models, these two exhibitions conjure up a point in the early 1930s...
Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads
Repeatedly drawing the same sitters from among his circle of close friends, Auerbach conveys his sub...
Jacqueline Poncelet: In the Making
After years of resistance, Jacqueline Poncelet has facilitated a full retrospective of 50 years of h...
The Hayward Gallery’s spring exhibition is an effervescent playground of kinetically inclined scul...
This show celebrating the centenary of the local artist who became internationally famous includes m...
This major new show pays homage to Kngwarray, an Indigenous Australian who, though she only began pa...
Special issue 2004, Volume 203 Number 1026
Special issue 2004, Volume 203 Number 1026
Special issue 2005, Volume 204 Number 1027
Special issue 2005, Volume 204 Number 1027
Special issue 2006, Volume 205 Number 1028
Special issue 2006, Volume 205 Number 1028
Special issue 2007, Volume 206 Number 1029
Special issue 2007, Volume 206 Number 1029
Special issue 2009, Volume 208 Number 1031
Special issue 2009, Volume 208 Number 1031