I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and don’t believe in art, without questioning either.
Damien Hirst, 1997
L&M Arts is pleased to present an exhibition of early medicine cabinets by Damien Hirst. Assembled together for the first time are the seminal Sex Pistols cabinets from 1989. Each cabinet takes its name from one of the twelve title tracks of the legendary 1977 debut punk album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.”
Works such as Bodies, Problems, Liar and No Feelings (all 1989) signaled a defining moment in art when these four were first shown at Hirst’s ground-breaking Goldsmith’s degree show in 1989. As Arthur Danto writes in the catalogue essay, Hirst’s “Medicine Cabinets constitute a constellation of still lifes that express and reflect the human body as a field of vulnerabilities and of hopeful medical interventions that have replaced the body as a narrative agent that artists must learn to depict in heroic stances.”
The exhibition also includes the first two cabinets Hirst ever made: Sinner (1988), in which the artist incorporated drugs from his grandmother’s medicine cabinet and Enemy (1988-89), both of which presage the Sex Pistols cabinets. Also on view is a monumental four-part cabinet The Sex Pistols (1996-97), shown publicly here for the first time and a range of Sex Pistols ephemera, including prints, posters and t-shirts from the seventies and eighties.
A fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Arthur Danto, James Frey and Steve Jones, including a catalogue raisonné of the complete medicine cabinets, will accompany the exhibition.
L&M Arts, New York
45 East 78 Street New York, NY 10075
Telephone +1 212-861-0020 Fax +1 212-861-7858
info@lmgallery.com
Hours: 10:00 am – 5:30 pm Tuesday – Saturday
or by appointment
October 29, 2010 by Kay
October 28, 2010 by Georgia
Until 30 October 2010 at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome
For over a month the Gagosian Gallery in Rome has been showing a collection of new sculptures by Franz West. The exhibition finishes on Saturday, so it’s the last chance to see this impressive show of the renowned Vienna-based artist.
From the press release:
Belonging to the generation of artists exposed to Actionist and Performance Art of the 1960s and 70s, West instinctively rejected the traditionally passive nature of the relationship between artwork and viewer. In the seventies, he began making a series of small, portable, mixed media sculptures called Adaptives (Passstücke). These “ergonomically inclined” objects become complete as artworks only when the viewer holds, wears, carries or performs with them. West has continued to explore sculpture in terms of an ongoing dialogue of actions and reactions between viewers and objects in any given exhibition space. His amorphous and highly endearing sculptures transform public spaces into sociable aesthetic environments while his furniture designs and subversive collages further challenge the boundaries between art and life.
In this exhibition of new sculptures, West takes basic shapes and transforms them into irregular large-scale constructions. His persistent playfulness with the principles of classical sculpture is evident in Ecolalia (2010), a group of seven painted totems built from papier-mâché, cardboard, polystyrene, and objects. He fashions each one into a precariously stacked form that rises out of a trash can or bucket for a pedestal, grappling with contingency and equilibrium to produce unexpected results. Some of them teeter almost three and a half meters high with alternating rectangular and circular forms while others evoke the shape of a funnel. They can be viewed from sofas that West has designed both for comfort and to provide alternative positions and viewing platforms throughout the show.
For more information about Franz West’s Uncle Chair or his book To Build a House You Start With a Roof, both available at Other Criteria, please click here.
For more information about the exhibition please contact Gagosian Gallery Rome at +39.06.4208.6498 or at roma@gagosian.com.
Guggi at John Rocha
15a Dover Street , London W1S 4LR
Until 25th November 2010
Guggi began his career as a musician with the cult band Virgin Prunes, notorious for their performative spectaculars on the European underground, before concentrating full time on painting. From the early tentative explorations in the mid 1980’s Guggi, primarily self-taught has evolved into one of the most accomplished and recognised painters of his generation.
Guggi’s most recent paintings mark a notable departure from the steady evolution of his work since he first exhibited his depictions of the common everyday objects in Kerlin Gallery in 1993. His distinctive motifs of bowls and other vessels portrayed with clean, neat lines have transformed through freer outlines giving his paintings the more spontaneous, instinctive energy of a painter truly confident within his practice. The structure of these paintings has become more informal and abstract creating a deceptive simplicity that heightens their stillness and meditative presence.
For photos from the exhibition launch and more images Guggi’s work, visit Sketchbook Magazine’s blog.
October 25, 2010 by Kay
Crucible will run from 1st September – 7th November 2010.
The exhibition will show over 75 works from 48 artists – including Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Daniel Chadwick and Sarah Lucas – a who’s who of contemporary British sculpture – from the “New Bronze Age” sculptors of the 1950s to current household names like Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley.
Crucible is a joint venture between Gallery Pangolin and Gloucester Cathedral. Most of the works were made in Gloucestershire, by the talented craftsmen working at Pangolin Editions foundry in the Stroud valleys, or by artists from Gloucester Cathedral. The Cathedral itself is a great work of art made in Gloucestershire by local craftsmen.
The exhibition will take place throughout the building and grounds, including the crypt and cloisters.
Entry to the exhibition will be free of charge.
Exhibition Opening Times
Monday-Friday 9.15 am-5.15pm
Saturday 9.00 am-4.15pm
Sunday 11.45 am-2.45pm & 4.00pm-6.00pm
Damien Hirst – St Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain
Angus Fairhurst – A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling
Marcus Harvey – Nike
Daniel Chadwick – White Mobile I
