Exhibitions
Chiharu Shiota
Me Somewhere Else
28 November 2018 - 19 January 2019
Blain|Southern Gallery London
Simple things have been done to the extreme, I saw the Japanese style of beauty, which is so quiet, humble, and yet enormously powerful. The artist illustrates her inner world, memory and those forgotten time or dreams with soft threads, she uses the softest way to get into a viewer’s deepest mind. The spectacular visual and sensational experience is beyond language. I am impressed by the artist transformed one simple element into her own visual language and developing it in such a powerful way.
Tom Friedman
Always The Beginning
2 October 2018 - 3 November 2018
Stephen Friedman Gallery London
Tom Friedman, Simple Dream, 2018, Colour, 107.2 x 150.8cm
Tom Friedman, Self Portrait for Sugar Cubes Figure, 2018,
Coloured pencil on paper, 144.4 x 110.6cm
This exhibition by an American conceptual artist Tom Friedman suddenly came up in my mind. In the exhibition, Friedman expanded his sketchbook pages and used coloured pencils and watercolours to reproduce them in a photorealistic detailed style. The large-scale drawings of his sketchbook images really brought up my interested, I like the way he valued his sketches and transformed it as a piece of completed artwork.
​
The presentation of the drawings and the technique were very impressive. By looking back his work and the exhibition introduction, I hope I can find out why he would choose to use colour pencil to draw these printable images and what is the relationship between the technique and his concept.
Friedman's working style is located somewhere between comical and conceptual, he liked to reuse or redefine our daily life objects to reflect the mundane nature of everyday life. For this exhibition, Friedman reviewed and looked back a series of works in his sketchbook that he has accumulated over the past 40 years. The sketchbooks included his brainstorms, flow charts, and creative thoughts with his detailed studies and emotional doodles.
​
​In his well-known work 'Self Portrait for Sugar Cubes' (2018), he replicated the pixelated diagram on a much larger scale, with the original numerical calculations and doodles on the side. It is like the other works in this exhibition, he argues the original function of a sketch as a preparatory drawing, the drawings question the standard to judge the value or the quality of an image.
Simon Allison & Ted Larsen
METOUSIOSIS
27 June 2018 - 27 July 2019
Fold Gallery
Both artists are using found objects to create, redefining the original properties of the objects. The name of the exhibition “METOUSIOSIS”, which means a change in essence or reality.
I like to see different artists use their own way to ‘play’ with an object, see the same object from a different perspective. It is like the way I use the graph paper for colouring, like Simon Allison and Ted Larsen making abstract sculptures from salvaged material.
​
What attracts me the most in the exhibition is these objects hanging on the wall. There is no exaggerated brushstrokes or shapes, but still represent movements, naturally generated in the mind, and contain all the history of the object itself. The marks on the object allow the viewer to imagine how it is rubbed, bitten, separate apart and reassembled.