Frith Street Gallery

Golden Square

17-18 Golden Square, London W1F 9JJ
T +44 (0)20 7494 1550 ~ F +44 (0)20 7287 3733

Press

  • A CONVERSATION WITH DAPHNE WRIGHT ~ Robert Preece

    Published in Sculpture Magazine , March 2010

    Daphne Wright’s work maneuvers things into what her biographical statement calls “Well-wrought but delicate doubt.’ Shifting between ‘taughtness and mess,’ it sets ‘imagery, materials, and language in constant metaphorical motion.’ Using a wide range of materials and techniques-plaster, video, printmaking, found objects, and performance-she creates beautiful and rather eerie worlds that feel like the threshold to somewhere new. 

    http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag10/mar_10/wri/wri.shtml

    Related Artists: Daphne Wright

  • DREAMINESS AND MYSTERY ABOUND ~ Aidan Dunne

    Published in Irish Times , February 2010

    Irvine’s film chronicles a kind of vigil. She invited “a diverse range of women” volunteers to populate Foley Street through the darkness of one night.

    We get a sense of solidarity among the women in relation to the surroundings, impinging and vaguely threatening darkness. A strange, dreamy atmosphere prevails, and that is a recurrent feature evident in many of Irvine’s films. 

    http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0226/1224265192411.html

    Related Artists: Jaki Irvine

  • FIVE FOR 2009

    Published in artasiapacific, January 2010

    Revered in international art circles, the New Delhi-based trio Raqs Media Collective are recognized as unique cultural figures, simultaneously researchers, documentary filmmakers and new-media artists. Since their introduction to the art world in 2002’s documenta 11, Raqs have pursued cross-disciplinary interests, which remains evident in their slide-and video-illustrated-performances, such as those given in New York’s New Museum and Hong Kong nonprofit Asia Art Archive. 

    Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective

  • SLOWNESS’ PANEGYRIC ~ Massimiliano Gioni

    Published in Flash Art , January 2010

    In another work, ‘Still Life’ (2009), Dean filmed the sheets of paper where Morandi traced the position of his objects, moving them around in the search of the perfect composition. These sheets are crisscrossed with hundreds of marks and lines, showing the infinite possible combination that led to each still life. As far as I know, this is the first time they have been made public: an important contribution to art history, but also a unique testament to a lifetime devoted to painting. Morandi’s involuntary drawings - his “accidental Twomblys”, as Dean calls them- are the cartography of an obsession, maps of an immobile existence spent between the four walls of a studio, weaving arabesques in an attempt to sort out that infinite chaos that is life.

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • TACITA DEAN’S TATE CHRISTMAS TREE IS A BEACON FOR BRITISH ART ~ Jonathan Jones

    Published in The Guardian , December 2009

    Tacita Dean is an artist I revere. This year, she’s done the Tate Christmas tree; it is typical of her unostentatious and honest art. An ordinary Christmas tree stands in the entrance hall of London’s Tate Britain. Its only unusual aspect is to be lit by real candles, instead of electric fairylights. Lit every day at 4pm, the candles burn down as the sun sets. Time visibly passes.

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • A Tribute to Merce ~ Tacita Dean

    Published in Art in America, 23 October 2009

    I am in the unique position of still being able to work with Merce Cunningham. I encounter him daily, listening to him and taking my cues from him, as I spend my summer cutting the film we decided to make together last year. His death has meant I have lost the pleasure in imagining him watching it, so in that sense I have lost my muse, but the film cannot change as a result of this: it is about Merce and his dancers, in a particular place and at a particular time. I am just very sad that he will never see it.

    http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/a-tribute-to-merce/

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • Raqs Media Collective ~ Kathy Noble

    Published in Frieze, October 2009

    Raqs Media Collective are self-styled critics and polemicists of the globalized world, urbanization and political representation, making work that is multi-facited and hyperactive, including installation, exhibitions (most recently a section of Manifesta 7) and publications. ‘Escapement’ (2009), their installation at Frith Street Gallery, comprised 27 clocks, each allocated to a city and the hands set to their respective time zones. However the clock hands marked emotions rather than time - epiphany, anxiety, duty, guilt, indifference, awe, fatigue, nostalgia, ecstasy, fear, panic, remorse - as if each city was on a nietzschean treadmill, doomed to an eternal return of extreme feeling.

    Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective
    Related Exhibitions: Raqs Media Collective: Escapement

  • Thomas Schütte: Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany ~ Quinn Latimer

    Published in Frieze, October 2009

    [Thomas Schütte] has long pursued a multivalent practice that – though it grew of the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the early 1970s Dusseldorf, where Schütte studied under Gerhard Richter and Benjamin Buchloh – has spoken mostly to itself. That conversation, broaching biggies like power, modernity and monument-making, carries forth with an internal humour that the viewer readily identifies but cannot entirely understand. Obscure or not, it’s this humour – dry, dark, a bit jumpy – that ties together Schütte’s wide-ranging oeuvre.

    Related Artists: Thomas Schütte

  • PEEP SHOW ~ Jack Hutchinson

    Published in Twin , October 2009

    Forget words. Fiona Banner turns punctuation into art. She explores the problems and possibilities of written language. For Banner, it’s all about the space between words, the urge and failure of communication. The British artist’s public artworks have included bronze casts of giant full stops, to be used as seats or to lean against. They’re objects to pause against just as we pause in conversation. 

    Related Artists: Fiona Banner

  • Raqs Media Collective: Frith Street Gallery ~ Eliza Williams

    Published in Art Monthly, October 2009

    The 27 clocks in ‘Escapement’, which span both real and fantastical spaces, the world appears simultaneously larger than ever before and yet somewhat flattened. Even the face moving around the column seems impassive, a kind of every-person.

    There are many positives qualities to this homogeneity, however – it is reassuring to recognise the qualities that all human beings share, to emphasise that we all feel panic, have epiphanies, feel awe and indifference. This is especially true when looking at the clocks from war-torn cities such as Kabul or Baghdad, where it seems more important that ever to recognise the similarities between people, rather than to concentrate on the differences.

    Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective
    Related Exhibitions: Raqs Media Collective: Escapement