Lauren Dyer Amazeen

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  picks January 21, 2021

  Cecily Brown

  Cecily Brown is the first British contemporary artist commissioned by Blenheim Art Foundation to create a site-specific body of work for Blenheim Palace, an English country home built in the eighteenth century to reward the military success of the first Duke of Marlborough. Through this timely exhibition of paintings, drawings, monotypes, and a new textile, Brown addresses the portrayal and conservation of British ruling class heritage through images of soldierly valour and pastoral leisure.

  Examining traditional genres, namely battle and hunting scenes, from the Spencer-Churchill family’s English

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  print January 2018

  Martin Boyce

  Staged to resemble a spacious domestic interior, Martin Boyce’s exhibition “Light Years” expressed a poised interplay between standardized industrial materials and the refinement of high art. Three works that the artist compares to large Color Field landscape paintings (all works Untitled, 2017) anchored the overall installation. To create these, Boyce first applied beige primer to perforated steel panels, then layered on pale washes in rose, aqua, or yellow—colors selected from the German RAL system—yielding streaked and muted pastel fields. The effect is similar to that of the subtle

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  print May 2017

  Lubaina Himid

  Lubaina Himid has embraced her artistic practice as an organizer, a cultural and political activist, an educator, and a leader in the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s––a pivotal decade for British culture and politics. Alongside her own work, she curated exhibitions of other female black artists at a time when they were excluded from institutional recognition. “Unrecorded Truths,” the title of a 1986 group show she organized, exemplifies her lifelong quest to reveal the concealed histories of colonialism and the diaspora, and to assert black artists’ place in the Western art canon: “We

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  picks March 18, 2016

  “AV Festival 2016: Meanwhile, what about Socialism?”

  Commissioned by the Left Book Club to educate the public on the social and economic deprivation in England’s industrial north, George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier (1936) in two parts: For the first, he detailed his experience living with coal miners; in the second, he pled for social justice, a democratic socialism of equality and fairness, to challenge the privileged (like himself) to develop a political conscience. At a moment when socialism is one of the most searched words on Merriam-Webster’s site, Rebecca Shatwell, director of “AV Festival 2016: Meanwhile, what about Socialism?” (

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  print January 2015

  Cathy Wilkes

  Making installations that combine abstract paintings and both figurative and abstract sculptures with found objects and ones she has collected over the years, Cathy Wilkes disperses all these components into absorbing and mysterious tableaux. Through these sometimes haunting assemblages, the Glasgow-based artist examines issues such as femininity, sexuality, and motherhood, while experimenting with all sorts of media and materials and carefully composing disparate elements into eerie domestic scenes.

  Untitled, 2014, a new installation commissioned for “Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in

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  interviews August 12, 2014

  Moyna Flannigan

  Edinburgh-based artist Moyna Flannigan is known for her dark and humorous tableaus that reflect her keen wit. “Stare,” her latest body of work, is currently featured at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow as part of “Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Scottish Art,” which is on view through November 2, 2014. Here Flannigan discusses her new pieces and the mysterious female figures that occupy her canvases and works on paper.

  EVERYTHING BEGINS WITH DRAWING. For me, this is a fundamental stage of exploration, one about looking and taking a position from that. When I begin a new body of work,

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  picks March 12, 2014

  Kim Fisher

  Reflecting on the Los Angeles environment and culture, and its gradual and consistent transformation, Kim Fisher’s new paintings and large printed works on paper draw on her observations of the effect that heat and time have on materials within the intense climate where she lives and works. Applying oil paint with an airbrush onto areas of deeply dyed black linen canvas, Fisher creates shapes and imagery that seem to be scraps of pages from magazines and newspapers. In Magazine Painting (Faded Cream), 2013, some of these fragments appear torn and faded from the sun. In others, the artist uncannily

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  interviews October 21, 2013

  Haegue Yang

  Haegue Yang is a Korean artist based in Berlin and Seoul who is well known for working with mundane materials such as venetian blinds, decorative lights, and fans. Yang completed a three-month residency this past summer at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios, resulting in the production of her current exhibition, “Journal of Bouba/kiki,” which is her first solo show in Scotland and is now on view GSS’s exhibition space. The show runs until December 20, 2013.

  I WANTED TO DO this residency because I wanted a challenge: to be somewhere unknown without my team or my studio, and without the facilities and

• previews May 2013

  Karla Black

  Experimenting with the fragility of materials such as cellophane, powder, lipstick, and eye shadow, Karla Black creates visceral sculptures that convey vulnerability and uncertainty yet remain stalwartly poised on the verge of something extraordinary. The Glasgow-based artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the US will consist of a massive, site-specific work, Practically in Shadow, 2013. Black’s largest hanging polyethylene form to date will be suspended from the ICA’s thirty-foot ceiling and bathed in natural light from the surrounding skylights. On the floor below,

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  picks December 24, 2012

  Jim Lambie

  In this exhibition, titled “Shaved Ice,” Jim Lambie has arranged sixteen ladders at different angles throughout one gallery in an arrangement that might at first seem random. Installed from floor to ceiling, the ladders seem almost architecturally integral to the space, thus challenging preconceived notions of the set purpose and character of these everyday items. Lambie has placed mirrored inserts between their rungs, which results in compound reflections that are not immediately detectable, and he has painted the ladders in a rainbow of psychedelic colors that bounce off the mirrors and each

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  print December 2012

  Kelly Richardson

  Kelly Richardson’s uncannily evocative works are as haunting as they are beautiful. The UK-based Canadian artist works meticulously with advanced digital technology, interwoven with dramatic natural wilderness landscapes, to construct intricate imagery that projects a dystopian future in which shadowy technological developments and human negligence have permanently altered our natural environment. Her latest exhibition, “Legion,” brought together both new commissions and works created over the past decade, illustrating an intriguing evolution in her singular technological vision.

  The widescreen,

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  print November 2012

  Sarnath Banerjee

  Best known for his graphic novels Corridor (2004), The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007), and The Harappa Files (2011), Berlin-based Indian artist Sarnath Banerjee expanded the presentation of his cultural and historical research with “History is Written by Garment Exporters,” a collection of artworks consisting of drawings, prints, films, collages, sketchbooks, and appropriated items such as books and sneakers. Influenced by the oral cultures of third-world cities, imbued with a deep sense of the local, and interweaving the imaginary and the real, Banerjee holds a magnifying glass up to the