http://www.art-soup.com en-gb art-soup.com 2011-11-1T00:00:00Z art-soup.com http://www.art-soup.com/page2.htm#105928 Thomas Danes Gallery in Londons Picadilly is host to a rather charming exhibition of Albert Oehlens new drawings. The gallery is a good fit for Oehlen neat and crisp his drawings look like they have easily slotted into space in this habitat almost as if they have grown organically from the building. It is a strange mixture of huge and tiny work but they do not sit awkwardly side by side one another. The smaller pieces are undoubtably more successful they are delicate and they somehow own up to their own fragility by use of collage and smaller scale in a way the larger pieces seem to be resisting. Not to say that Oehlens larger work doesnt have its own particular selling point the contrast between the impenitrable opaqueness of the black paint with the transcience of lightness of the charcoal is very interesting and the limited palette helps the marks create an explicit visual language that one can almost decifer but its tantalisingly kept at arms reach. There isnt that much to say a... 2011-11-1 18:57:54 http://www.art-soup.com/page2.htm#105919 The first impression I got of Tal Rs latest work when I was assending the staircase at Victoria Miro was how washed out his new paintings were. I couldnt have been more wrong. Tal Rs new work is more figartive and compositionally more mature in terms of balance of forms and the colour has the vibrancy of Gorky or Matisse. Although the tones are bright Tal R has the knowledge of paint to make them work and although at first glance they seem to boarder on naive art they are actually very complex pieces of work that are extremely self aware. Tal Rs work is rich with art historical references which is one of their more interesting aspects from the thick line present at the bottom of each painting as a nod towards colour field and sixties abstract in general to more specific references to early Rothko in the block forms of The Little Frenchman. The strange Victorianesque charactures take the viewer back to ideas of Goya and the grotesque whilest the magnificent Hermes features a Kandinsky... 2011-11-1 17:54:37 http://www.art-soup.com/page2.htm#105915 The Jerwood drawing prize this year is pretty much what can be expected of the Jerwood drawing Prize every year. Theres a handful of photorealistic pencil drawings a portrait or two some collage and a splash of video art thrown in as an after thought for good measure. Normally there are some real gems amongst the selection for example Minho Kwans epic detailed piece that secured the student prize in 2007 but this year it seemed even more than a damp squib than normal. With a record amount of entries you cant help but wonder why they didnt pick well better stuff. Thats not to say there isnt some good work here. Robert Battams Untitled had the meticulousness of an Eschder drawing the procise nature of a blueprint and the fragility of a collage. Ka Wah Lus Floating creature secret Joy 1 2 and 3 were an interesting tryptich delicate and ethereal the materiality of the ink on glass spoke of trying to capture the transcient and make it corporieal. The winner Gary Lawrence had created a gia... 2011-10-24 17:33:30 http://www.art-soup.com/page2.htm#102160 Normal 0 false false false ENGB XNONE XNONE Style Definitions table.MsoNormalTable msostylenameTable Normal msotstylerowbandsize0 msotstylecolbandsize0 msostylenoshowyes msostylepriority99 msostyleparent msopaddingalt0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt msopa... 2011-8-12 18:18:12 http://www.art-soup.com/page2.htm#102159 Normal 0 false false false ENGB XNONE XNONE Style Definitions table.MsoNormalTable msostylenameTable Normal msotstylerowbandsize0 msotstylecolbandsize0 msostylenoshowyes msostylepriority99 msostyleparent msopaddingalt0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt mso... 2011-8-1 18:12:27 http://www.art-soup.com/page2.htm#99463 Tracey Emin is an artist thats had so much exposure not only within the context of the illusive art world but throughout the general proletariat that when I heard there was a major retrospective of her new work I was suspicious that there would be anything there that I hadnt seen or heard before. I will before I begin admit my distrust in what I see as the shameless showboating of the YBAs and this was the attitude I had whilst walking through the doors of the Hayward Gallery. The show is as mindlessly selfindulgent as you would expect from an Emin retrospective but there are moments of genuine sadness too. She constantly depicts herself as no more than a spread pair of legs in her drawings sometimes not even with a head and in one of her more famous works Ive got it all 2001 there is a sense of a girl who cant quite believe her luck. Emin comments herself in the exhibition guide Im not known as a textbased artist but I should be and indeed she should words fly everywhere in this exh... 2011-7-30 15:42:53