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 from 2008

  • Marlene Dumas’ disturbing portraits at Museum of Modern Art ~ Sara Rose

    Published in Associated Press, 25 December 2008

    Like most of her works, the stunning “Measuring Your Own Grave” (2003) is based on a photograph. Painted in black and white, a dancer takes a graceful bow, leaning over at the waist; we see the top of her head, her arms stretched, pushing against the edge of the canvas. It’s an innocuous scene, painted from what we can only assume was a happy moment, but Dumas’ title changes all that.

    http://www.projo.com/art/content/wk-dumas_show_at_MOMA_12-25-08_A2CKEV1_v13.6f1f777.html

    Related Artists: Marlene Dumas

  • An eye-popping passage to India ~ Adrian Searle

    Published in The Guardian, Monday 15 December 2008

    The exhibition also spills over into the education room, where the Raqs Media Collective has curated its own sub-exhibition… a cluttered arrangement of aluminium stepladders on which screens are mounted, displaying a confusing array of video and film imagery. All that hardware signals cutting-edge, information-superhighway modernity. The documentary film material they show highlights the collisions between traditional rural, religious Indian culture and a new industrial society.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/dec/15/art-india-serpentine-gallery

    Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective

  • Marlene Dumas Ponders Lust, Death in Hypnotic MoMA Show: Review ~ Linda Yablonsky

    Published in Bloomberg.com, 12 December 2008

    Working from news photographs as well as her own snapshots and Polaroids, Dumas takes on Big Themes—sex, death, birth, race, motherhood—without sensationalizing or sentimentalizing them.

    Her figures are anonymous but unmistakable, isolated in extreme close-up on monochromatic backgrounds and distinguished by blurred edges, bleeding veils of paint and physical characteristics that she distorts for emotional effect without resorting to caricature.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=akTIRWk6WQuw&refer=muse

    Related Artists: Marlene Dumas

  • Dayanita Singh ~ Natasha Degen

    Published in Frieze, 8 December 2008

    In ‘Dream Villa,’ the largest single body of her colour work shown to date, Singh explores the mysteriousness of ordinary spaces obscured in darkness. She exploits colour photography’s unique ability to reproduce gradations of colour and density in light, juxtaposing artificial lighting with moody night skies.

    http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/dayanita_singh/

    Related Artists: Dayanita Singh
    Related Exhibitions: Dayanita Singh: Dream Villa

  • Through the cracks of a mirror

    Published in ShahidulNews, 6 December 2008

    [Dayanita] had been questioning her own work for some time. Questioning her ’success’ at producing images that regurgitated the “India” the west already knew. She chose to become a mirror to herself, and in that process begin a journey that would create a window to an everyday world. An everydayness that other photographers had shunned.

    http://shahidul.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/through-the-cracks-of-a-mirror/

    Related Artists: Dayanita Singh

  • UNUSUAL PORTRAIT ~ John Hurrell

    Published in Eyecontact, December 2008

    “Killing Time” is an extraordinary portrait of an un-named possum trapper who lives in the Ureweras, working in remote areas of mountainous bush, British artist Bridget Smith films him in his house in Tokomaru Bay as he talks about his lifestyle and certain personal events. 

    Related Artists: Bridget Smith

  • Dayanita Singh / Dream Villa ~ Jan Dalley

    Published in Financial Times, 22 November 2008

    In her newest series, Dream Villa, [Singh] focuses once again on the empty places in this most populated of countries… and now, in a departure from her signature black and white, she is using colour - not to reflect the famously vivid Indian palette but, unexpectedly, to capture the shifting facets of the Indian night.

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/73e1657a-b838-11dd-ac6d-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1

    Related Artists: Dayanita Singh
    Related Exhibitions: Dayanita Singh: Dream Villa

  • THE EYE IN THOUGHT ~ Aveek Sen

    Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, India, 16 October 2008

    Dayanita Singh’s Sent A Letter (Steidl, 2007) grew out of what she describes as a “diary-like way” of photographing that she started around the year 2000. She would take photographs while walking around a city or travelling together with, or simply thinking about, a friend…

    http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081016/jsp/opinion/story_9971108.jsp

    Related Artists: Dayanita Singh

  • Craigie Horsfield and Tapestry ~ Carol Armstrong

    Published in Artforum, October 2008

    Related Artists: Craigie Horsfield

  • Oh So Quiet ~ Holland Cotter

    Published in The New York Times, 21 August 2008

    “Stillness” is about duration and change, which are the same thing and are also the substance of life and history. Ms. Dean’s film of Mr. Cunningham’s performance is about the sound and motion of history in action: the personal history of one man’s fidelity to the memory of another; the cultural history of a living artist transmitting and rejuvenating the creative essence of one who has died; the contemporary history of a younger artist preserving and honoring all this, and the two men (the piece is above all a portrait of Mr. Cunningham) in her art.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/arts/design/22dia.html?_r=1&ref=design&oref=slogin

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • Chantal Akerman ~ Rebecca Geldard

    Published in Time Out London, 4 August 2008

    A bevy of Belgian women smoking shows Akerman the filmic anthropologist at her finest: making art out of the way cinema handles the female subject…

    Related Artists: Chantal Akerman

  • Half a Man in a Halfway Hotel ~ Marinus De Rutter

    Published in Amsterdam Weekly, August 2008

    Related Artists: Fiona Tan

  • Tacita Dean, Dia: Beacon ~ Brian Sholis

    Published in Artforum, Picks, Summer 2008

    Much of Tacita Dean’s recent work in film has been portraiture, and her scrupulous attention has brought forth a range of engrossing characters…

    http://artforum.com/picks/section=us#picks20885

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • Recalling a Radical Aesthetic in Minimal Dance and Sound ~ Benjamin Genocchio

    Published in New York Times, 27 July 2008

    [Tacita] Dean’s installation looks amazing down here. Walking down the stairs from the museum galleries and stepping into the darkness, you can see only the flickering lights of the six projectors. They look like radiant stars in the night sky. As you get closer to each projection, the imagery comes into view. The soundtrack also begins to kick in, over and above the whirling hum of the projectors.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/27artswe.html

    Related Artists: Tacita Dean

  • Anya Gallaccio & Chantal Akerman, Camden Arts Centre, London ~ Sue Hubbard

    Published in The Independent, 24 July 2008

    Entering the main gallery is a mesmeric and moving experience. Text flickers across two curved screens to the strains of melancholy classical music. Fragile and ephemeral, the French words blur, as the viewer walks between the screens, then enlarge and dissolve like ghosts to become barely legible in the flickering light.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/reviews/anya-gallaccio--chantal-akerman-camden-arts-centre-london-875663.html

    Related Artists: Chantal Akerman

  • Jaki Irvine: Kerlin Gallery ~ Brian Curtin

    Published in ArtForum, July 2008

    Related Artists: Jaki Irvine

  • Smoke and mirror-images ~ Adrian Searle

    Published in The Guardian, 15 July 2008

    One of the pleasures of Akerman’s work - and this is especially true of the earliest of the three pieces in the London show, her 1972 Hôtel Monterey - is the idea that something is about to happen, or is happening just out of sight. The camera crawls unlit corridors and shadowy corners in the New York hotel. It lingers outside doors, waits for the elevator and hovers at windows. Back and forth the camera goes, a silent walker, a leading character in a movie without a plot.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jul/15/art.film

    Related Artists: Chantal Akerman

  • Exhibition Review ~ Martius Herbert

    Published in Art on Paper, July 2007

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Marlene Dumas, Measuring Her Own Grave ~ Patricia Zohn

    Published in The Huffington Post, 26 June 2008

    But she has asked herself, how do you paint the end of a relationship? How do you indicate without words, what two people have meant to each other? And she manages to do it, rendering the awful pain of separating from someone you thought you would be close to forever by juxtaposing the head of one lover on top of another, no longer side by side, looking in entirely different directions.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-zohn/culture-zohn-marlene-duma_b_108975.html

    Related Artists: Marlene Dumas

  • Marlene Dumas subject of MOCA retrospective ~ Christopher Knight

    Published in The Los Angeles Times, 25 June 2008

    “Leather Boots” (2000) shows a busty nude woman in profile squatting inside a narrow space and wearing only what the title says. A cascade of black hair tumbles down her back, and she’s framed by the black walls of what might be a peep-show booth. Yet her torso is backed by a vaporous veil of lovely sunrise color—peachy pink lifting into radiant yellow, which puts you in mind of the intimate intensity of a Rothko.

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-dumas25-2008jun25,0,4194446.story

    Related Artists: Marlene Dumas

  • Critics’ picks - visual arts ~ Sebastian Smee

    Published in The Boston Globe, 22 June 2008

    Since 1995, video artist Chantal Akerman has carved out a niche combining a sensual cinematic sensibility with formal aspects of video installation, including multiple screens, large-scale projections, and dissociated audio. Her glacial approach in “Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space,” a hypnotic show at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, takes some getting used to, but the rewards are great.

    Related Artists: Chantal Akerman

  • Figuring Marlene Dumas ~ Deborah Solomon

    Published in New York Times, 15 June 2008

    [Dumas’] paintings can be defined in terms of what she has rejected from her surroundings. She strips away anecdotal detail… until all that is left is a haunting gaze.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/magazine/15dumas-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=design

    Related Artists: Marlene Dumas

  • An Avant-Gardist’s Sparse Stories, in Film and Fragments ~ Ken Johnson

    Published in The New York Times, 13 June 2008

    Chantal Akerman is a hero of the avant-garde cinema. Her most famous film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), devotes more than three hours to observing a woman’s domestic routines before climaxing in, as accounts regularly put it, “an act of shocking violence.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/arts/design/13aker.html?8br

    Related Artists: Chantal Akerman

  • ‘Oh, Boy!’ New Art on the Underground ~ Kira Hesser

    Published in Londonist, 12 June 2008

    Artist Anna Barriball has been commissioned to design a series of posters for the underground, and the result is an enigmatic exercise in the art of typographic seduction.

    http://londonist.com/2008/06/oh_boy_new_art_on_the_underground.php

    Related Artists: Anna Barriball

  • Flash Art Review ~ Roy Exley

    Published in Flash Art, June 2008

    ‘Chomsky’s anecdotes, and the detailed information that he relays in a wide-sweeping vision of our decadent and deadly culture, hold the viewers in thrall… It is the compassion with which Chomsky delivers his statement and the depth of thought which underpins all his answers that irresistibly engenders a deep adoration for this man.’

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • A lingering look at the world ~ Sebastian Smee

    Published in The Boston Globe, 8 June 2008

    In defiance of the frenetic, fast-cut pace of MTV (which has leaked into almost every other form of popular moving imagery today) Akerman clings to a style of shooting that is unapologetically glacial. She favors long lateral takes from moving vehicles and extended frontal takes from a static camera. Her approach takes some getting used to, but the rewards are great.

    http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/06/07/a_lingering_look_at_the_world/

    Related Artists: Chantal Akerman

  • Juan Uslé’s miniatures make a big impression ~ David Pagel

    Published in The Los Angeles Times, 6 June 2008

    Yet each [painting] leaves viewers with so much room to maneuver—so much space to romp around in—that they reawaken those great moments in life when everyday responsibilities fall away and freedom whooshes in…

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-galleries6-2008jun06,0,4126691.story

    Related Artists: Juan Uslé

  • Life in Film: Raqs Media Collective

    Published in Frieze Issue 116, June - Aug 2008

    The members of Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) have been described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers and editors. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in local and international venues, locates them squarely along the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory – often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. 

    http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/raqs_media_collective_1/

    Related Artists: Raqs Media Collective

  • Giuseppe Penone ~ Lillian Davies

    Published in ArtForum, June 2008

    Related Artists: Giuseppe Penone

  • Massimo Bartolini

    Published in Contemporary Arts Society, April 2008

    Related Artists: Massimo Bartolini

  • Cornelia Parker’s Latent News

    Published in Art of England, April 2008

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Daphne Wright the body and its death cast ~ Laura Mansfield

    Published in Circa, Spring 2008

    Related Artists: Daphne Wright

  • Cultural Exchange ~ Peter Murray

    Published in Irish Arts, Spring 2005

    Related Artists: Daphne Wright

  • Cornelia Parker: interview ~ Ossian Ward

    Published in Time Out, 5 March 2008

    ‘I was cutting up headlines into phrases and [my daughter] began writing them out as part of her homework. She’s doesn’t understand what she’s writing yet – things like “Catastrophe is always elsewhere” – but we’re all bombarded with this weird concrete poetry now, either in the papers or in email spam.’ - Cornelia Parker

    http://www.timeout.com/london/art/features/4366/Cornelia_Parker-interview.html

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Art Review: Chomskian Abstract ~ Fiona MacDonald

    Published in Metro, 20 February 2008

    ‘She avoids straightforward diatribe, however, creating brief portraits of silence. Between Chomsky’s answers her voice is absent. Instead, we see Chomsky listening, blinking, nodding, gulping, flaring nostrils, pursing lips and adjusting his glasses.’

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Cornelia Parker is Out to Save the Planet ~ Rachel Campbell Johnston

    Published in The Times, 12 February 2008

    ‘Parker has always had an apocalyptic vision. “I suppose I have always been alert to the fragility of the world, and I have always been interested in addressing our fears of destruction,” she says. 

    http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3351184.ece

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Apocalypse Later ~ Cornelia Parker

    Published in The Guardian, G2, 12 February 2008

    What was the most important thing I learned from Chomsky? That capitalism compels us to work ourselves to death in order to stuff our houses with things we don’t need. Perhaps this is one thing art can do: create a new aesthetic, one of austerity.

    http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2255812,00.html

    Related Artists: Cornelia Parker

  • Massimo Bartolini ~ Iara Boubnova

    Published in Manifesta4, February 2008

    Massimo Bartolini creates real physical environments while being uniquely capable of relating them to some superior worlds. His installations include a special use of light and often sound. They are indeed rooms and spaces that, however, have immense tactile power.

    http://www.manifesta.org/manifesta4/en/projects/artist1361.html

    Related Artists: Massimo Bartolini

  • 3 Rooms

    Published in re-title.com, February 2008

    http://www.re-title.com/exhibitions/archive_DAmelioTerras1203.asp

    Related Artists: Massimo Bartolini, Cornelia Parker

  • Dialogues with the City ~ Laura Cherubini

    Published in Luceonline.it, February 2008

    ‘The artist has created an installation using light, immaterial element constituted by pure energy. The art-work will be on the facade of the MAXXI, in close relation with the new museum and with the city.’

    http://www.luceonline.it/eng/main.php?action=fullnews&id=117

    Related Artists: Massimo Bartolini