print October 1996

Mono 2000

EVER SINCE RODCHENKO PAINTED Pure Colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1921, artists have been reinventing the monochrome with cyclical predictability. While the form’s radical bloom (at least in its original sense) may have faded, the fact that a triumvirate of British twenty-somethings—Ian Davenport, Jason Martin, and Zebedee Jones—are taking the Modern classic out for another spin suggests that the form has something to say to the current generation. With solo shows in close succession, these painters could even be said to constitute a mini-movement.

A latter-day process artist, Davenport made his

print April 1996

Matt Collishaw

For his recent show at Karsten Schubert, Mat Collishaw transformed the gallery by painting the walls a dark red and splitting the room in two with a wire fence, into a space reminiscent of a Victorian-era red-light district. On either side of the fence, Collishaw had installed separate pieces. Both evoked a sheer delight in spectacle reminiscent of the early days of motion pictures and of late-19th-century optical devices, while addressing the urban poverty that is as prevalent today as it was in Dickens’ age.

One of these two works, accompanied by a recording of jaunty accordion music, comprised

print January 1996

the Turner Prize

THE TURNER PRIZE—Britain’s high-end talent contest for the country’s hottest young art stars—is fast becoming a national institution. Each November the shortlisted candidates are plucked from the international art circuit and called home to display their wares. As each contestant mounts a show at London’s Tate Gallery, the media kicks into gear to sort out their relative merits, and for a month Britain (of all places) is gripped by feverish debates on the making and meaning of contemporary art.

First awarded in 1984 to Malcolm Morley, the now £20,000 Turner Prize is granted each year to a British

print October 1995

the Class of ’95

DAMIEN HIRST, GARY HUME, Sarah Lucas, and Fiona Rae. London’s Goldsmith’s College launched a whole generation of internationally acclaimed artists in the late ’80s. Back then, conceptual artist and Tate Gallery trustee Michael Craig-Martin nursed Goldsmith’s future art-stars through their degree course. He left the college in 1985, but now he’s back as Millard Professor, heading up a staff that includes Simon Linke, Lisa Milroy, and Liam Gillick—all successful Goldsmith’s alumni who’ve gone back to school to help out with the new undergraduates.

This year the mood of the degree show alternated

print December 1995

Martin Maloney

☝ SHEEN MAKER

GARY HUME’s solo exhibitions at White Cube and the ICA were the London highlights of 1995. The cool of his earlier door paintings gave way to a funky new style, teasingly mixing abstraction and figuration, the highbrow and the low. With a deadpan mischievousness, Hume lifts and manipulates images from sources as disparate as the daily tabloids and the paintings of Johannes Vermeer and Petrus Christus; put through the processor of his graphic high style, poignant stock-schlock images—hands in the gesture of prayer, a child clutching a teddy bear, the smiling face of a woman—acquire

print December 1995

Elizabeth Wright

With her latest show, Elizabeth Wright brought grunge into the London art world. Dismissing the theatricality of the gallery’s minimalist decor, she constructed an installation reminiscent of adolescent all-nighters, filled with bags of chips, phone calls, and beer: the gallery looked like an apartment inhabited by a group of teenage boys. Elongated designer beer cans, each with their signature label, were lined up against a wall like trophies. A desk at the other side of the room mingled a shrunken Yellow Pages with a scattering of snacks.

Precise in its construction, the work was playfully