Super Collectors: David Gainsborough Roberts | Christie's Magazine and the Guardian | September 2015
Rising stars of Chinese contemporary art | Christies.com | November 2014
David Gainsborough Roberts discusses his unique collection of pop culture memorabilia.
Read more>Rising stars of Chinese contemporary art | Christies.com | November 2014
From Ren Ri’s sculptures in beeswax to video installations by Morgan Wong — gallerist Pearl Lam selects five emerging talents to keep on your radar
Read more>
Captain Trips | Christies.com | November 2014
CSK40 | Christies.com | April 2015
Object lesson: Xavier Solomon | Christies.com | November 2014
Captain Trips | Christies.com | November 2014
Ahead of our Pop Culture sale, Maria Howard talks to the photographer who took the picture of the Grateful Dead frontman in his famous hat, and the man who came to own it
Super Collectors: Simon Costin | Christie's Magazine and the Guardian | September 2015
Art Director and set designer Simon Costin on macabre curiosities,
folk art and his love of flea markets.
CSK40 | Christies.com | April 2015
Open seven days a week, Christie’s South Kensington is the busiest saleroom in the UK, holding over 100 sales and offering more than 30,000 lots every year.Explore highlights from the last 40 years at Christie’s South Kensington.
Tales of the unexpected | Christie's Interiors Magazine | November 2014
Designer Harriet Anstruther — who loves to mix antiques and contemporary art, prints and colours — on why you need to be bold, bold, bold
Nicky Haslam’s Elements of Design | Christie's Interiors Magazine | January 2015
The renowned interior designer offers eight essential decorating tips from his latest book,
A Designer’s Life — and his picks from this week’s Interiors Sales
Interview with Victoria Meale | Christies.com | October 2014
From 24 October to 12 November acclaimed interior designer Victoria Meale, in collaboration with House & Garden, will be taking over the South Kensington windows with her top lots from the season’s sales. Victoria Meale is known for her elegant and sustainable interiors and recently designed the VIP Lounge for Decorex 2014.
A review of United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain the 1960s and 1970s at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds | The Burlington Magazine | October 2011
In 1985 Athens was named the first European Capital of Culture, to be followed by some of the continent’s most celebrated cities: Florence, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and so on, writes Maria Howard. But in recent years the selection panels have picked lesser-known destinations. Future European Capitals of Culture include:
Maribor, 2012: This Slovenian city shares the title with Guimarães next year. It boasts a 16th-century castle that houses a festival hall and Slovenia’s richest museum collection. The biggest event on the city’s calendar is the two-week Lent festival, a celebration of folklore and music on stages set up in the Old Town. The country’s largest ski area is nearby.http://maribor-pohorje.si/izleti-dogodki-zanimivosti.aspx
Kosice, 2013: Slovakia’s second-largest city grew as a result of Communist-built steelworks on the outskirts. These days it is a lively metropolis with interesting museums and a cosmopolitan feel. The main square, Hlavna ulica, is lined with rows of baroque and neoclassical palaces that lead to a 14th century cathedral. http://www.kosice.info/
Umeå, 2014: Known as Sweden’s “City of Birches”, cultural highlights include the Norrland Opera, an annual heavy metal festival, a contemporary art gallery and a sculpture park. Nearby is the Holmoarna, a group of islands where tourists can birdwatch and explore the protected woodland areas. http://www.visitumea.se/
Plzen, 2015: Despite this Czech city’s strong industrial character, it has many cultural attractions and a roaring trade in beer (the main export is Pilsner Urquell). Architecture is a mixture of gothic, communist brutalism and art nouveau. http://web.zcu.cz/plzen/
Malcolm Franklin RBSA | Exhibition catalogue, Galleria Nuovo Spazio, Udine | March 2011
Since the early 1990s Malcolm Franklin has been creating sculpture informed by masters such as Smith, Hepworth, Chillida and Noguchi. Like these sculptors he has produced pure forms which interact with their environment and materials in a way that renders them captivating in terms of positive and negative space as well as haptic qualities. Always a carver, never a modeller, Franklin creates this pure form out of contrasting materials, sometimes combining wood and granite so that his works become a dialogue between organic and inorganic. The sense of physical engagement with the object is always present, the surface of his sculptures as smooth and inviting as those of Brancusi or Canova.
In 1993 Franklin graduated from the University of Wolverhampton, having only dedicated himself to sculpture late in his degree, and gained a Master’s in Site-Specific sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art. He has said that his childhood on a farm in Gloucestershire, where he learnt to reuse parts of machinery and scraps of wood and stone, has informed his practice as much as the work of modernist sculptors. He was intrigued with the way these mechanic and organic forms would change as a result of use and exposure and this led him to explore the malleability of materials. The resistance of a hard medium such as stone or wood presented a challenge that he could overcome by carving and smoothing; the craftsmanship remains apparent while all signs of confrontation have been polished away.
This distinctly physical approach can also be seen in his direct carving method. Franklin does not use maquettes or models, rarely even working from a finished drawing. He prefers to work from an idea: as Henry Moore put it, 'inside his head – [the sculptor] mentally visualises a complex form from all around itself and identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realises its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in air.'1 The role given to the material becomes obvious when Franklin says that 'the block/material is chosen for its possibilities – it does not dictate the final design but adds to its form'2. The stone or wood's natural shape is taken into consideration alongside the design and so, without a formal plan, he is able to sculpt a form which becomes a synthesis of many ideas in harmony with the medium. The material continues to have influence throughout the process of carving: the direction of the sculpture will adapt itself to a twist in the wood.
In 2006 Tate Modern put on a large retrospective of the work of David Smith and it was in Smith's Voltri series that Franklin found a solution for the problem of horizontality in his work. The Voltri works are made from scrap metal, found at an old welding factory, where Smith worked for a month in 1962 in Italy. In Voltri XVI we can see the boxes that became integral to Franklin's works of the last few years, from Insomnia (plate 5) to Hermitage (plate 6), Elbow (plate 12) and Tredici (plate 1). This use of carved boxes developed into the circular, technically more ambitious, Hesper (plate 8) and Ishtar (plate 7), in black and white alabaster respectively. Here the influence of Noguchi is clear, but the evening star has turned into something mechanical, a wheel of solid forms with its negative space shining through with sudden accessibility.
Works such as Black Curve (plate 15) play with balance: the support abandoned, the freestanding sculpture has added kinaesthetic engagement, which makes it visually more compelling. Crank (plate 10) combines the two: it uses the idea of the weights that drive a motor’s piston enabling mechanical movement. The dark coldness of the granite reinforces the idea of the engine part, while the boxwood that fastens around it makes an unexpected contrast in such a mechanically inspired object.
Mimi Howard
London, March 2011
1H. Read, The Art of Sculpture, (Princeton, 1969), pp. ix-x
Norman Rockwell | Courtauld Reviews | March 2011
Norman Rockwell was a prolific illustrator who made his name on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post from 1916 to 1963. The exhibition's organisers claim his popularity lies in his 'heart-warming depictions of everyday life' and it is this America of apple-cheeked children and brave young soldiers that we all associate with his schmalzy technicolour photorealism.
Works such as The Party After the Party show how this twee sentimentality could sell lightbulbs as an advertisement for Edison Mazda, later to become General Electric, but Rockwell's illustrations are most effective as magazine covers portraying humorous situations that Joe Public could instantly relate to; a kind of 'it's funny 'cos it's true' approach to art. In the exhibition's exhaustive display of all 323 covers kids can be seen sticking their tongues out at passing cars, a sailor chats up a woman in front of a fancy restaurant while the fat cats look on, all in the same flat, advertisement style. It is only later, at the beginning of the 40s when the presence of the second world war can be felt and the Saturday Evening Post changes its layout, that Rockwell's pictures really become impressive. Gone is the standard white background and the obvious joke takes second place behind the artist's imaginative compositions in works such as The Bridge Game and Gossip. The latter is an interesting study of expressions similar to the 17th century italian artist Annibale Carracci's first experiments with caricature. Rockwell's admiration of old masters is clear in a 1960 self portrait where he is shown painting himself in front of a mirror; attached to his canvas are postcards of self portraits by Rembrandt, Durer and Van Gogh.
It is the illustrator's later works that are really worth seeing; portraits of Kennedy and Reagan and landmarks of the civil rights movement that show the greatness of the American Dream tinged with sentimentality but also the all important knowledge of what makes an image of everyday life instantly striking. For this Rockwell became beloved by his public and admired as an artist and not just an illustrator.
