Slap!

Robert Rauchenberg

Poster for Tate, Retroactive 1 & Rebus.

Thomas Allen

Thomas Allen selects the pulpiest of pulp paperbacks and then lovingly slices out a figure from the cover, gently folds it into position, and constructs a witty scene around it. Foley Gallery, New York. (Michael Foley).

2010 Trend Spotting

Reinterpreting Old Masters

-references to Vermeer, Chan-hyo Bae and his Elizabethan costumes, Karen Knorr as well as Laura Letinsky's still lifes. Artists taking aspects of the classics and reinterpreting in their own way. As life speeds by and we loose touch with our history, artists are finding inspiration in the past.

Cameraless Photography

-cameraless photography sees even more. In photograms, images are created by placing objects on large sheets of photographic paper and exposing them to light -- the simplest things are transformed into abstractions of startling beauty. Perfected by Man Ray in the form of rayograms. Floris Neususs's vintage silver gelatin Photograms. He further departs from the conventional photogram by developing his images using a brush, sponge, or rag dipped into developer and then wiped across the paper to produce a controlled, painterly plane. Neusüss does not fix his prints, allowing his works to constantly change colors over the years. He recently retired as Professor in Experimental Photography, University of Kassel, where he has taught since 1971. Work of other artists experimenting with old cameraless techniques seem to be on the rise.

Sublimity

-photography which sets to evoke the fragility of nature/environment. Awe of our natural environment. Veronica Bailey's polaroids of the tropics which are slowly disappearing from our planet coincides with the medium she uses in her piece. Theme of time running out but also that it is a cycle and that its alright. Nicolas Hughe's sea scapes speaks of the vastness of the sea but also what they can hide. Both soothing but tragic.

Reference to the Classics II

Laura Letinsky's elegiac photographs of detritus on a table-top are both elegantly prosaic and art historically resonant in their reference to Dutch vanitas still life painting of the Seventeenth Century. Letinsky's choice of objects is compelling for the potential of both implicit narrative and the creation of visually challenging compositions. Lyrical and formal, the subjects are dissolved by varied colours of light, often set off against white walls and tablecloths whose angled shadows and subtle textures add a further dimension to Letinsky's unusual perspectival presentation: a glass perched precariously by the edge of a tabletop, a fruit hovering above its expected visual plane or a wilted flower gazing at its younger self in the trompe l'oeil of a tissue box. The vectors of Letinsky's composition defy gravity, definitive narrative and even the arresting temporality of photography itself. (James Hymann Gallery, London Art Fair 2010)

Reference to the Classics I

The Music Room & The Passage

Karen Knorr has been making photographs since the early 1980s, using a documentary style that recalls earlier traditions of portraiture and painting. One of Karen Knorr's recent series explores the famously austere minimalism of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. This house, once built for wealthy patrons now luxuriates in its pristinely maintained, empty state as a museum of high culture. Unexpectedly, these spaces are occupied not by the foreseen human subjects but by birds, in playful transgression of the sanctity of this museum space.

Barry Cawston

The Books

Barry Cawston. Much of Barry Cawston's photography has both sociological and architectural elements and is why work for charities form the core of his photographic commissions. He travelled to Napoli to photograph an old building before it was torn down. Gorgeous colors and light. Although it is not about nature, makes us feel a sense of sublimity and fragility of life. Also about loosing the past and time, the end of print and other traditional methods of record keeping.