Daniel Culpan
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Articles by Daniel Culpan
Can breath be art? Liz Larner on sculpting with hair, lashes, leather – and international group exhalation
‘I had artists from all over the world breathe over petri dishes,” says Liz Larner. “It was a piece of international art made from breath bacteria.” The American sculptor is reminiscing about her 1988 work Every Artist Gave a Breath, a fragile and strangely evolving work of art grown on agar.
The Liverpool Biennial Finds Solid Ground
Frieze PublishingYes, email me reviews, offers, and opinions by artists, writers, and editors from Frieze Frieze EventsYes, email me Frieze Events Inc and Frieze Events Ltd’s global programme information including special offers and benefits The history of Liverpool is written in its rock, which can be seen everywhere from the famous Royal Albert Dock to the monumental red-sandstone cathedral.
Sadao Hasegawa Satisfies His Carnal Appetites
A naked, muscled youth appears to rocket into space in Sadao Hasegawa’s That Floating Feeling (1980). His body throbs magenta, while his face – impassive as a mask – is crowned by flamelike hair. Both human and ethereal, he exhales a stream of starry breath, while the tips of his fingers sparkle: flesh becoming cosmic. Commissioned by the Japanese gay magazine Barazoku, the image crystallizes many of the themes of the Tokyo-based graphic artist, who died in 1999.
An Interview with Gay Author Edmund White
For over fifty years, Edmund White has been the foremost chronicler of gay life. In his memoirs, novels and essays, the American writer has documented its shifting landscape. In 1982’s A Boy’s Own Story, , he wrote about growing up in the repressive American midwest of the 1950s, while City Boy (2009) dealt with the post-Stonewall liberation of 1970s New York.
Is the Serpentine Pavilion Project Running Out of Road?
‘Archipelagic Void’ by Minsuk Cho’s Mass Studies can’t shake off the jaded air of having a Kensington budget without the imagination to do much with it Archipelagic Void – the title of the latest Serpentine Pavilion – is, perhaps unintentionally, a perfect metaphor for the state of contemporary Britain. Beneath the restless quest for novelty, there’s a weary sense of something yawning and empty. No Blair-era triumphalism here (all dazzling grins and ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ ad nauseam).
The Subterranean Allure of Ryan Huggins’s Bathhouse Paintings
A column of frosted glass has been installed in the center of a. SQUIRE in London. The device transforms the gallery into a different kind of space, a more intimate one that brings you up close to the works. The gallery becomes an extension of the rooms depicted in the surrounding frieze of paintings, which are full of concealment and display, exhibition and restraint.
Ready Player Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Brathwaite-Shirley’s videogame installations ask us to confront our own demons, leaving us – ‘the players’ – questioning who we even are Enter the darkness. There, treelike pillars are studded with crucifixes and decorated in fabrics depicting videogame graphics.
Colombian Artist Luis Caballero Is Finally Getting the Recognition He Deserves
Though highly fêted in his native Latin America and adopted by France, the late Colombian artist Luis Caballero (1943–95) has remained woefully neglected in the wider art world. Following his untimely death from HIV/AIDS, Caballero’s auction market peaked in the 1990s, with sale prices averaging around $28,000 to $30,000. Today, his works are selling for up to $90,000.
Daniel Culpan on “Picture This: Photorealism 1966–1985”
A solitary 1962 Chevy gleaming in a Wells Fargo parking lot. The brightly lit bumpers of a pinball machine. Ketchup bottles shining in a deserted diner. All the classic scenes of postwar American capitalism, seductive and abundant, featured in the two-part show “Picture This: Photorealism 1966–1985.” Each of these thirty-seven paintings in oil and acrylic—taken from a collection of more than seventy works—is a high-fidelity re-creation of a photograph.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami at Victoria Miro Gallery | 16 Wharf Road
View of “A Making of Ghosts,” 2023. London Victoria Miro Gallery | 16 Wharf Road 16 Wharf Road April 14–May 13, 2023 In “A Making of Ghosts,” Kudzanai-Violet Hwami plays with scale and perspective to collapse emotional states. In Murikishi (all works 2023), one image of a sleeping man appears superimposed over another; each is naked, lounging with legs spread. The fleshy tones are choppy and halting, the paint’s texture mimicking a kind of digital malfunction.
Lynda Benglis Creates Sensory Illusions
Known for her alchemical handling of materials such as poured latex, knotted metal and sculpted wax, Lynda Benglis – whose new, self-titled show at Thomas Dane Gallery presents a collection of works being exhibited together in London for the first time – seems to freeze motion into visceral shapes that act against themselves. On entering the gallery, viewers are confronted by a hot-pink ovoid swelling on the back wall.
Daniel Culpan on Helen Chadwick and Penny Slinger
In “On Sexuality,” the pioneering early art of Helen Chadwick and Penny Slinger took double-barreled aim at consumer society’s reproduction of traditional gender roles. Dating mostly from the late 1960s and the ’70s, the photographs and videos on display exploded stereotypes of mass-marketed femininity. Slinger’s preferred method is the photomontage. Prints from her landmark work, 50% The Visible Woman, 1969—published in 1971—were displayed throughout the gallery.
Daniel Culpan on Martyn Cross
If the artist’s vocation is to be disciplined and solitary, alone with their tormenting visions, then what better model than Saint Anthony? The monastic figure in the desert, besieged by the devil’s temptations, has proved fertile subject matter for both artists and writers, from Matthias Grünewald to Leonora Carrington, the latter of whom came to that subject by way of Gustave Flaubert’s 1874 prose poem, illustrated by Odilon Redon.
Daniel Culpan on Garrett Bradley
Garrett Bradley’s Safe, 2022, submerged the viewer within a stream of perceptions through which the disorder of the outside world continuously inflects one’s inner space. Can safety ever be more than a transient state? What does being safe feel like, and what other feelings can it induce and exclude?
Daniel Culpan on Keith Cunningham
Keith Cunningham’s paintings are exercises in inscrutability. In art as in life, the Australian-born artist was driven by private obsessions and a desire for obscurity. Stashed in a spare room until Cunningham’s death in 2014, the seventy-plus oils on canvas or board featured in “The Cloud of Witness” are dense with macabre moods and ever-lurking violence.
Daniel Culpan on Lonnie Holley
You can learn a lot about a culture from what it chooses to throw away. In “The Growth of Communication,” Lonnie Holley attempted a subtle yet profound act of salvage, repurposing discarded materials to create a counterhistorical archive of silenced voices and dispossessed lives. Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama—a center for heavy industry in a former Confederate slave state brutalized by Jim Crow laws—Holley is both witness and translator of the Deep South’s fractious legacy.
For “Assembly,” Rashaad Newsome boldly transformed the Park Avenue Armory into a multisensory video game-cum-twenty-first-century reboot of Paris Is Burning. With the show’s title nodding toward a collective politics of radical reimagination, the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall became the stage set for a pair of videos that immersed the viewer.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Seasons (caa9fb36da5d789d55a6e4e33611), 2022, gesso and digital print transfer on canvas framed in aluminium, 32 x 39 3/4 x 1 1/2" London Amanda Wilkinson Gallery 18 Brewer Street 1st Floor March 9–May 6, 2022 The technology behind notorious “deepfakes,” generative adversarial networks (GANs) are essentially robot artists: two neural networks pitted against each other to generate copies of data.
Nicholas Hlobo at Lehmann Maupin | London
In the exhibition “Elizeni Ienkanyiso” (Xhosa for “On the Wave of Enlightenment”), the South African artist Nicholas Hlobo breathes life into a bestiary of animal forms, emblems of both instinct and survival. In the show’s titular painting (all works 2021), stripes of thick yellow and maroon acrylic surf across the circular canvas, which the artist has further embellished with. tentaclelike ribbons stitched into the surface.
Daniel Culpan on Rachel Jones
What’s in a smile? A blissed-out revelation of teeth? A flirtatious curve unloosed from language? An arc of ambivalence drawn through a face? In Rachel Jones’s exhibition “SMIIILLLLEEEE,” the Essex, UK–based artist enjoined the viewer to read the mouth as a place where identities (racial, cultural) are spoken and silenced. The opening room featured two large-scale canvases (each roughly five by eight feet) that exploded from the wall in monumental bouquets of intense color.
Daniel Culpan on Karlo Kacharava
Georgian artist and writer Karlo Kacharava was feverishly prolific. A polymathic figure living in Tbilisi of the late 1980s and early ’90s, he produced paintings, essays, poetry, and art criticism as if possessed by some secret knowledge that his would be a short life: He died in 1994 of an aneurysm at the age of thirty.
Daniel Culpan on Leon Kossoff
Annely Juda Fine Art A key figure of the London School, Leon Kossoff (1926–2019) captures the life force of the British capital—his birthplace and lifelong muse—in all its dolorous splendor. Never has a palette perhaps best described as “shades of gloom” (the dried-blood reds and rusts of postwar Victorian tenements, the gray-brown murk of the Thames) seemed so vigorous.
Robert Rauschenberg at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac | London
In “Night Shades and Phantoms,” the romance of American capitalism is evoked as a kind of ghost story: a terminal empire of signs and portents. The two eponymous series of paintings, both made in 1991, feature photographs of urban life silk-screened onto sheets of mirrored metal. The “Phantoms” capture the city, teeming, clamorous, and full of visual noise, in X-ray-like flashes. In Boundary, we see laundry strung outside of a South Carolina tenement and people clustered around a DO NOT ENTER sign.
Daniel Culpan on Christina Quarles
What is pandemic life but a reminder that we’re all bodies stuck in time and space? In Christina Quarles’s solo show “I Won’t Fear Tumbling or Falling/If We’ll be Joined in Another World,” the artist attempted to capture the warped conditions of our new reality—the claustrophobia and disembodiment, the longing to touch—in nine new paintings, all created between March and September of this past year. Quarles’s strange, fleshy forms are both recognizably human and not.
Daniel Culpan on Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) made an indelible mark on American life. It marked him, too. Born into a poor Black family in segregated Kansas, Parks saw the brutality of racial strife early on: He almost drowned, at age eleven, after a group of white boys threw him into a river. Pinballing through various jobs in flophouses and brothels, he bought his first camera at the age of twenty-five.
Arshile Gorky and Jack Whitten at Hauser & Wirth London | Savile Row
Arshile Gorky and Jack Whitten were both exiles who saw painting as a place. Gorky’s family fled the Armenian genocide when he was a child, eventually settling in New York City in 1920. Whitten, an African American born in segregated Alabama, inevitably experienced color as a more punitive index. Both artists suffused their work with a tension between the rural and the city as a space of self-reinvention, creating vivid sense impressions as buoyant and evanescent as butterflies in a net.
Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe Review: Fear and Loathing in a Mayfair Gallery
Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe take dystopian readings of American history and spike them with mind-melting drugs. For their latest installation at Marlborough London, they’ve trenched through the gallery’s vast two-floor exhibition space and built a labyrinth of 11 lurid bunkers, with the gallery staff atomized behind glass Tannoy booths.
“New Order: Art, Product, Image 1976–1995” at Sprüth Magers | London
“New Order: Art, Product, Image 1976–1995” surveys two seismic decades in British culture when style collided with substance and pop was art. The era was born from the two-fingered musical salute of punk. Karen Knorr and Olivier Richon’s photographic series “Punks,” 1976–77, captures the subculture in all its stylish spleen.
Guarding the Avant-Garde: David Lieske on the Hypocrisy of Collecting
David Lieske’s new show, ‘La Collectionneuse’, (2019), takes its inspiration from Éric Rohmer’s eponymous 1967 film – a tale of two friends entangled in a chess-like game of male egotism and obsession with a teenage Lolita figure. The exhibition – the artist’s third at Corvi-Mora – critically reflects on how these drives manifest in the art world. Eight shelves display various ephemera (books, magazines, journals) documenting work from Europe’s 20th-century new wave.
Requiem For A Vanished Future: How Derek Jarman Refashioned His Catholic Upbringing
The great tension in Derek Jarman’s work lies between the romantic and the radical. Born in 1942, his imagination was haunted by the idea of imminent apocalypse, erupting into such works as Jubilee (1978): a portrait of an anarchic, burnt-out Britain. Yet growing up in 1950s Kent, he was also imbued with an indelible Englishness: a complicated longing for a prelapsarian idyll – befitting, only perhaps, of the son of a man named Lancelot.
How Leigh Bowery Defined the Look of Gay Culture in 1980s London
Fergus Greer, “Leigh Bowery, Session III, Look 15” (1990) (image © Fergus Greer, courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery) LONDON — Disco terrorist. Queer monster. Modern art on legs. Impossible to pin down, Leigh Bowery was a monument to his own great, self-willed perversity. He turned his hulking body into a living canvas, onto which he transferred the wild contents of his head. Fergus Greer’s photographs attempt to capture Bowery’s many metamorphoses: a life lived as a look.
Dustan Revisited -
By Daniel Culpan. France is one of the few countries that cares enough about its writers to put them on TV — even if to damn, rather than glorify, its literary darlings. In the early ‘00s, the reigning enfant terrible of French letters, Guillaume Dustan, turned these on-screen inquisitions into a compulsive art form.
Sheida Soleimani at Edel Assanti
In “Medium of Exchange,” Sheida Soleimani dramatizes the play of domination and dependence between the US and oil-rich nations. Featuring an array of actors in caricature masks, her photographic collages are a visual assault: shock-and-awe metaphors megaphoned through a punky, DIY aesthetic.
“Land of Lads, Land of Lashes” at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac | London
At the margin of the margins, the three largely ignored female avant-garde artists of this exhibition carved out their own space of bold experimentalism in the 1960s and 1970s—in some cases, literally. Growing up in Poland in the twilight years of Stalin’s regime, Wanda Czelkowska began her career creating monumental Socialist sculptures. Though she later rejected this totalitarian aesthetic, its repressed energy teems beneath the surface of her raw Brutalist vision.
‘Fat, Sugar, Salt': Dale Lewis's Carnival of Brexit Britain
Dale Lewis’s ‘Fat, Sugar, Salt’ – his second solo show at Edel Assanti – depicts life in Brexit Britain as a distorted funhouse mirror: each new angle more grotesque and cruelly familiar than the last. Club Tropicana (2017) captures a teeming slice of life at a supermarket checkout. A woman in a hijab balefully pushes a shopping trolley, rubbing shoulders with a bearded white guy in Adidas sportswear. A bag of booze bottles clanks in one hand; his Spiderman-costumed kid hangs off the other.
Paola Ciarska at IMT Gallery
Paola Ciarska’s first solo exhibition in London is akin to a comic-strip reimagining of the British television game show Through the Keyhole. Her series of painstakingly intricate paintings—each not much larger than an A6 postcard—chronicles a series of rooms: the homes of friends, family, and acquaintances of the Polish-born, Newcastle, England–based artist.
Andrea Geyer | Frieze
Andrea Geyer’s work is an act of feminist archaeology. Unearthing the hidden legacies of female artists, activists and other visionaries, ‘If I Told Her’ – the German-born, New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition at Hales Gallery – constructs a fascinating mosaic of missing pieces from the history of 20th-century modernism. The walls are lined with a series of reworked photographs titled ‘Constellations’ (2017–ongoing), shown here for the first time.
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley at Tate Liverpool
In “We Are Ghosts,” Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley perform an antic kind of haunting: dark jokers leering from the unquiet slumbers of history. In their new video, In The Body of The Sturgeon, 2017, we’re plunged into the claustrophobia of the fictional USS Sturgeon at the end of World War II. The twelve-minute narrative is saturated with various fluids: You can almost smell the thwarted testosterone, the sweat, the ethanol swigged straight from the can by a desperate sailor.
Pepper-spraying drones will be used on Indian protesters
Shutterstock Indian police are to start using pepper-spraying drones to control unruly crowds of protestors. Officials described the drones as a "non-lethal but very effective" method of "mob control". According to AFP, police in the north Indian city of Lucknow, which has a population of two million, have already successfully trialled the aircraft and given them the thumbs up. The results of the tests were "brilliant" according to Lucknow police chief Yashasvi Yadav.
Microwave oven baffled astronomers for decades
Parkes Observatory radio telescope Shutterstock The source of strange radio signals that have left astronomers at Australia's most famous radio telescope scratching their heads for 17 years has finally been discovered. It turns out that it was a microwave oven.
Off-road trials for UK 'electric highways' due later this year
ShutterstockOff-road trials for "electric highways" designed to power electric and hybrid vehicles are set to take place later this year, it's been confirmed today by the UK government.ADVERTISEMENT The trials -- the first of their kind -- will test how the technology, which is designed to enable drivers of electric and low-emission cars to travel long distances without regular battery charging, will work on England's major roads and motorways.Andrew Jones, UK transport minister, said: "The...
Vinyl is now back in the charts with its very own UK Top 40
Shutterstock In our age of iTunes, digital downloads and on-demand streaming, the idea of giving vinyl records a spin might seem like a quaint throwback to a distant musical past. However, analogue music is alive and well in the year 2015. The UK’s Official Charts Company has announced the first ever Official Vinyl Charts, counting down the best-selling albums and 7-inch and 12-inch singles in Britain.
The flu vaccine that could destroy the virus
Saturday 8 October 2016Lancaster UniversityIt is one of the starkest reminders of the power of evolution, and in the arms race between medicine and influenza, humans don't always win.ADVERTISEMENT As winter approaches, millions of people are given a vaccination to protect them against flu – a minor inconvenience to ward off a potentially lethal disease.
Sensor-clad seals are tracking Antarctic ocean change in real time
Data that reveals the changes occurring in remote oceans surrounding Antarctica has been made available to the public for the first time ever -- and all of it has been recorded by an army of sensor-wearing seals. Since 2004, biologists from the Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole (MEOP) consortium have been gathering detailed information from some of the iciest and most remote oceans on the planet, many of which are almost impossible for humans alone to monitor.
CERN cosmic piano turns particle data into music (Wired UK)
Physicists at CERN have created a "cosmic piano" that uses particle data to create live music. Developed by Arturo Fernandez and Guillermo Tejeda as part of the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) project, the instrument -- which has been described as looking like a "fancy staircase" -- uses a detector pad to transform passing particles into musical notes. These charged particles are made when cosmic rays interact with molecules in the Earth's atmosphere.
Razor-toothed sea and river lamprey return to UK rivers (Wired UK)
A terrifyingly-toothed snake-like fish has been spotted in English rivers for the first time since the 1800s, following conservation efforts by the Environment Agency. River and sea lampreys, which lived 200 million years before the dinosaurs, are the world's oldest living vertebrates, the largest of which can grow up to 1 metre in length. These "living fossils" are particularly distinctive due to their unnerving appearance: rather than jaws, lampreys have a ferocious-looking disc of razor teeth.
ネコ視点で商店街を歩く「広島キャットストリートビュー」（動画あり）
広島県観光課は、キャットストリートビューを紹介する以下の動画のほか、「猫目線の街散策」動画をいくつか公開している。 日本は、ネコを駅長に任命したことですでに有名だ。しかし、この国のネコに対する愛着心は、次のレヴェルへと達したようだ。ネコたちの視点で街の通りを歩き回ることができるようになったのだ。 「広島キャットストリートビュー」は広島県が立ち上げた新プロジェクトで、尾道の街をインタラクティヴな地図にするというものだ。 尾道は、広島県の港町で、美しい寺とネコが多いことで知られている。実際、尾道には「招き猫美術館」もあり、「ネコの視点」に立った世界初のテクノロジーを展開するのに完璧な場所だ。 この地図は、「Googleマップ」で使われているのと同じような360度カメラを利用しており、商店街やその周辺地域を散策して、この街に暮らす11匹のネコたちを見て回ることができる。 地図上のネコアイコンは、その近くに住んでいるネコの紹介にリンクされている。また、万が一にも自分がいまネコの世界にいることをに忘れないように、マウスを合わせてクリックすると「ニャー」と鳴き声が聞こえる仕掛けだ。...
Explore this Japanese town using cat street view
Japan is already famous for appointing its very own cat stationmaster, and now the country has taken its enthusiastic embrace of all things feline to the next level: allowing you to wander the streets from a cat's perspective. Cat street view, a new project launched by Hiroshima prefecture, is an interactive map of the port town of Onomichi, famed for its beautiful temples -- and large population of cats.
Kansas farmer delighted after drone catches tiny fish
A Kansas farmer has filmed himself using a drone to catch a fish, before immortalising his quarry with a Snapchat portrait. In the video, Derek Klingenberg uses a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter, armed with a camera and fishing line, to hover over a lake. Using a fake worm as bait, the drone manages to snare a small bluegill fish before flying it back to shore.
computer algorithm can imitate Van Gogh and Picasso (Wired UK)
An algorithm that mimics the styles of some of history's greatest painters has been developed by researchers in Germany. In the study, which has been submitted to Nature Communications, a complicated mathematical code was devised in order to create a "convolutional neural network", capable of turning images into imitation works of art in just an hour.
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