Exhibition: Chris Moore, Catwalking

Chris Moore, Catwalking 2 December-10 February 2012
Kings Place Gallery

Born in Newcastle, Chris Moore moved with the rest of his family to London when he was four years old. He entered the world of fashion at the age of 18 and became a Vogue photographer’s assistant, working with luminaries such as Henry Clarke, Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton. His early career was spent documenting the intimidatingly exclusive Paris couture shows in the late 60s and continued with the advent of the Ready to Wear Collections in Milan, London and later New York in the 80s. By the mid 90s, with the expansion of the circuit to include menswear in Paris and Milan, photographing the catwalks became a full-time occupation.

Moore moved on, was represented briefly by the Camera Press Agency, but became a freelance photographer and has worked independently ever since. As a person he is extremely grounded and in appearance is unobtrusive, almost invisible. This ability to ply his craft unobserved might indeed, be part of the secret of his becoming ‘King of the Catwalk’, as he has been dubbed by the fashion industry. During his phenomenal career he has captured images of every conceivable catwalk event from the Paris
Couture houses of the sixties with Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin and Courrèges to the extravagant, theatrical spectacles staged by Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen.

In 2000, Moore launched www.catwalking.com the successful online photographic library which is used by all major fashion and broadsheet titles internationally during the fashion week circuits. His photographs appear regularly in every major newspaper and magazine including The Guardian, Observer, The Times, and Independent as well as Vogue and Harpers Bazaar and the International Herald Tribune.
This exhibition celebrates Moore’s remarkable career with a collection of his iconic images.

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From the Archive

Central Saint Martins MA 2011, Myrza de Muynck

3 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Myrza de Muynck, Central Saint Martins MA, 2011

Myrza de Muynck is a Dutch designer who graduated from the MA Fashion programme at Central Saint Martins London. Myrza de Muynck is based in London and was chosen as Vauxhall Fashion Scout’s One’s to Watch AW12-13. This enabled Muynck to have both a catwalk show and an exhibition space at the organisation’s prestigious Covent Garden venue of Freemasons’ Hall and also to be part of their Paris showroom. Her work has been featured in many magazine’s and blogs such as Vouge, Elle, Wallpaper, ID-online and POP magazine.

”Elsewhere, it was the very clever overhaul of a classic shell suit that caught our eye” – Says Myrza De Muynck. The womenswear designer added floral beading just beneath its knees and on to its blouson jackets – which came in pink, azure, lemon and plaid – to transform the humble sportswear attire like we’ve never seen. You could imagine wearing these and what’s more you could imagine wanting to – “striking the balance as they did between elegant, cool and casual’.’

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Artist: Ida Ekblad

18 September 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Ida Ekblad, Untitled 2012, Untitled, 2011 and Installation View, Untitled, 2011

Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad just finished her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Oslo this week. In the official press release her work is referred to as being “frequently process oriented and her artistic practice is often described as spontaneous and chance-based. Items seemingly discarded on scrapheaps as worthless are given new meaning through recycling in a work of art with other qualities and connotations. Her works oscillate between an unrestrained imagination and her familiarity with, and allusions to, an art-historical tradition.”

For this exhibition, Ekblad used the museum as her studio, producing more than 30 works in situ. These new works improvise a performative architecture out of industrial debris, found objects and shopping carts. Reference to John Chamberlain and Anthony Caro can be noted as Ida Ekblad present her version of scrap-hunting sculpture. As the shopping charts where rolled onto canvas and paint, each shopping chart has its own specific painting which is displayed later as a series of large scale paintings along the walls.

Also exhibited was Ekblad’s paintings of the past five years, in particular, are courageous demonstrations of the relevance and feasibility of an expressive artistic gesture. She works in a variety of media. Painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and poetry, simultaneously and without hierarchical distinction.

Ekblad works in a process-oriented manner, and her approach is often described as spontaneous and fearless. She creates installations, sculptures and collage- and assemblage-like pieces from fragments and objects that she finds along the roadside and at construction sites nearby the places she is working. Things that have apparently lost their value and been thrown away often acquire a new meaning by being re-used in a work of art imbued with other qualities and connotations.

Ida Ekblad (b. Oslo, 1980; lives and works in Oslo) is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2007, and at the Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles, USA, 2008. Still an emerging artist, Ekblad has already received international recognition participating in museum exhibitions around the world.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the National Museum in Oslo, Kunstmuseum Luzern and De Vleeshal, Middelburg. It is accompanied by a 160-page catalogue published by Distanz Verlag, Berlin, with poems by Ida Ekblad and contributions by Fanni Fetzer, Andrea Kroksnes, Quinn Latimer, and Barry Schwabsky.

Nasjonalmuseet presents Ida Ekblad’s first extensive museum exhibition. The exhibition continues the museum’s series showcasing younger Norwegian contemporary artists.

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Exhibition: Takesada Matsutani, A Matrix

28 May 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Exhibitions Main No Comments

Takesada Matsutani, A Matrix, 2013

Takesada Matsutani A Matrix, 18 May – 27 July 2013
Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row

This will be the gallery’s first solo show with Osaka-born, Paris-based artist, Takesada Matsutani and also marks the first time his works will be shown in the UK. ‘A Matrix’ features never before seen paintings from Matsutani’s early career, as well as recent organic abstractions in vinyl glue and graphite. In addition, the exhibition will include a performance of Matsutani’s ‘Stream, London, Hauser & Wirth’.

From the early sixties to the early seventies, Matsutani was a key member of the ‘second generation’ of the Gutai Art Association (1954 – 1972), Japan’s innovative and influential art collective of the post-war era. One of the most important Japanese artists working today, Matsutani’s paintings and performances from throughout his practice demonstrate the ethos of Gutai, translated into an artistic language that is uniquely his own.
In the 1960s, Matsutani began experimenting with vinyl glue, a material that first entered into mass production in Japan following World War II. With paintings such as ‘Work-62’, on view to the public for the first time in ‘A Matrix’, Matsutani deposited the glue onto his canvases and allowed it to run down the surface. Matsutani recalls ‘The glue began to drip and as it dried, stalactites formed, which looked like the udders of a cow’.

Inspired by the shapes of blood samples he had observed, Matsutani developed this technique further, using hairdryers, fans and his own breath to create bulbous forms reminiscent of the curves of the human body. Paintings such as ‘Work-63’ exemplify these early experimentations with vinyl glue, a material that continues to fascinate the artist to this day.
In 1966, Matsutani moved to Paris and began working at William Hayter’s renowned print-making studio, Atelier 17. When the Gutai Art Association disbanded in 1972, Matsutani was able to transition from the artistic style of his Gutai period into a radical yet consistent new body of work, informed in part by his experience at Atelier 17, in which he expressed a greater depth of understanding of pictorial space and composition.

Matsutani’s later paintings bring together the artist’s signature media, vinyl glue, with graphite. In a marked difference from the raw rendering of his early works, Matsutani carefully controls the glue as it moves across his canvases, making or deflating pockets of air and creating new ridges, wrinkles and crevices as the adhesive hardens. Matsutani then covers the surface in methodical, almost meditative, graphite lines. The shapes created resemble the unbridled energy of a crashing wave or the inside of a seed preparing to germinate, whilst the graphite reflects light, teasing out hints of texture, depth and volume.

‘Stream-10, 1984 – 2013, London’, one of Matsutani’s largest works, is a 10-metre sheet of paper which the artist covers in a blanket of graphite, leaving just one thin white line coursing through the middle of the paper. Matsutani then completes the work by throwing turpentine over the edge of the dense surface, quickly dissolving the graphite in a tremendous surge of energy and an act of cathartic liberation.

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Prada Marfa

16 March 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005

Prada Marfa is a permanently installed sculpture by artists Elmgreen and Dragset, situated 2,3 km northwest of Valentine, Texas, just off U.S. Route 90, and about 60 km northwest of the city of Marfa. The installation was inaugurated on October 1, 2005. The artists called the work a pop architectural land art project. The sculpture, realized with the assistance of American architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, cost US$80,000 and was intended to never be repaired, so it might slowly degrade back into the natural landscape.

Designed to resemble a Prada store, the building is made of adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminum frame, MDF, and carpet. The installation’s door is nonfunctional. On the front of the structure there are two large windows displaying actual Prada wares, shoes and handbags, picked out and provided by Miuccia Prada herself from the fall/winter 2005 collection. Prada allowed Elmgreen and Dragset to use the Prada trademark for this work. Prada had already collaborated with Elmgreen and Dragset in 2001 when the artists attached signage to the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City with the false message “Opening soon – PRADA”.

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Sculpture: Danh Vo

20 November 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Danh Vo, Oma Totem, 2009

Maybe everyday objects is the wrong term to use for my production because the way I refer to objects in my work is not about the everyday object in itself. Im interested in building up and sustaining a certain way of thinking which enables you to look at objects in a different manner. Thinking is the starting point for looking at things.

For example, my piece Oma Totem (Grandma Totem, 2009) combines a washing machine, a refrigerator, a crucifix and a television set, which all used to belong to my grandmother. The selection was made on the basis of a conceptual approach: these are the first things that my grandmother received in Germany. Thinking determined the sculpture not the fact that it was a fridge or a crucifix.

One of my earliest experiences of things not necessary being what they seem to be was my experience of vacation. Half my family lived in Germany, and the other half, including myself, lived in Denmark. Every summer, when all the kids had summer vacation from school, we went to visit our relatives in Germany. My family didnt really have an idea for vacation. In the summer, they would work either in the strawberry fields or peeling small shrimps that were delivered to and picked up from their homes. I think it was more about spending time together, but that meant work. This was my first idea of vacation, and I have only good memories of it. Like all the other kids returning sunburnt to school. We always look at things through our own history, our gender and social upbringing. Most everyday objects and conventions are very unfamiliar for me. And its through this empirical experience that I do what I do.

From Frieze d/e, Issue 2, 2011.

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