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Articles by Philomena Epps
From the flower field to the infinity room: a story of Yayoi Kusama’s journey to becoming a superstar artist
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots, pumpkins and infinity rooms made her one of the most recognisable artists in the world, died at a hospital in Tokyo on 14 August. She was 97. Across a seven-decade career, Kusama worked in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, fiction and poetry. She began making these mirrored environments in New York in the mid-1960s.
How Nicola L. Sabotaged the Domestic
‘I Am the Last Woman Object’, the title of the first retrospective of the Moroccan-born French artist Nicola L. (1932–2018) in Europe, is borrowed from an early sculpture by the artist. Once displayed by the dealer Iris Clert in the window of a jewellers, Little TV Woman: ‘I Am the Last Woman Object’ (1969) is a subversive femme télévision, with a TV monitor in place of a stomach, and breasts approximated by padded cream vinyl drawers with nipple-like knobs.
It Takes Guts to Challenge Art-World Elitism
London's emerging artists and gallerists have long contended with rising rents and a diminishing number of spaces. In this dossier, frieze profiles four new galleries — HOME, Ginny on Frederick, Guts Gallery and Queercircle — that are cultivating communities and flourishing amidst the city's many challenges. Each month, Ellie Pennick, the 26-year-old founder and director of Guts Gallery, takes a moment to reflect and make sure that her actions are still in line with the core values of the gallery.
Cutting Up the World. A Conversation with Gray Wielebinski
Perhaps appropriately for an interview on a cold, dark, January evening, the first question I ask Gray Wielebinski is one about reflection. How has he metabolized the last year, which included a major solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, “The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low,” and his commission for the Selfridges Art Block, “Exhibition”?
Yoko Ono’s Memorable ‘Bottoms’
Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67) was banned by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in March 1967, before it was due to premiere at the Royal Albert Hall. Recorded at the London townhouse of the art dealer and poet Victor Musgrave, the 80-minute, 16mm, black and white film was an extended version of Film No. 4 (Fluxfilm No. 16) (1966), shot in her Manhattan apartment with a group of friends.
Nicole Wermers at Herald St
London Herald St 2 Herald Street November 24, 2022–February 11, 2023 Upon viewing Sandy Orgel’s Linen Closet, one of the room-sized installations exhibited at the legendary “Womanhouse” in Los Angeles in 1972, a visitor remarked, “This is exactly where women have always been—in between the sheets and on the shelf.” If Orgel turned to the upright figure of the display mannequin to explore the domestic, societal expectations of women, Nicole Wermers riffs on the art-historical trope of the...
Living in a Material World. Tenant of Culture in Conversation with Philomena Epps
In July, Camden Art Centre opened “Soft Acid,” the first institutional exhibition of Tenant of Culture (the anonym for the artistic practice of the Dutch practitioner Hendrickje Schimmel) in the United Kingdom. The research behind this ambitious, site-specific presentation was informed by the historic and contemporary processes used in textile production, and their wider relationship to consumer waste, mass labor, and environmental pollution.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster "Alienarium 5" Serpentine South Gallery / London
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster wants to know: “What if aliens were in love with us?” Influenced by her research into extraterrestrial life, the interior arrangement of the Serpentine has been altered to encourage and facilitate visits from these deep-space travelers. With the word “alienarium” suggestive of other enclosed, observational spaces — planetarium, vivarium, terrarium, aquarium, etc.
Penny Goring at ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
London ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London The Mall June 8–September 18, 2022 Penny Goring’s survey, titled “Penny World,” brings to mind words the late painter Paula Rego used to describe the lone protagonist of Girdle, 1995: “I thought of her as cast out, a sinner in the wilderness . . .
Esther Pearl Watson at Morena di Luna
Hove Morena di Luna 3 Adelaide Crescent May 21–August 28, 2022 Angels and aliens, saints and spaceships converge upon Morena di Luna this summer, blurring the distinction between divinity and conspiracy, imagination and belief.
Eileen Mayo & ArtReview: Panel Discussion (Zoom seminar)— Towner Eastbourne
Eileen Mayo & ArtReview: Panel Discussion (Zoom seminar) 5.00pm to 6.00pm, online 29 June Eileen Mayo: A Natural History, 12 February to 3 July 2022, Towner Eastbourne. Installation view. Photo by Rob Harris. Eileen Mayo, 1930 ©E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection. Strategic Partner: Join Towner Eastbourne for a special event to celebrate the exhibition Eileen Mayo: A Natural History.
Long Time No See: Trisha Brown's Set and Reset (1983) at Tate Modern
Dance Office is a column dedicated to contemporary dance and performance art. Collaboration is cocultivation. It’s the merging of two dreams into one. It’s life and death in the aesthetic zone. One entity makes an incursion into the possibilities/plans of the other — the choreographic into the visual, let’s say, and/or vice versa.
Lucy Stein at Spike Island
Bristol Spike Island 133 Cumberland Road September 25, 2021–January 16, 2022 In a reconjuring of the kingdom of Lyonesse, the mythical sunken landscape situated off the Cornish peninsula, Lucy Stein has installed a bathroom at the center of Spike Island’s galleries. Wet Room, 2021, was crafted using timber scenery flats common to theater set design, onto which a wall of hand-painted ceramic tiles has been adhered.
Sophie Barber at Alison Jacques
All is full of love, as Björk once sang (on a track she likened to “birds coming out after a thunderstorm”). At Alison Jacques, Sophie Barber has populated the gallery with lovebirds, both literal and metaphorical. Her bright, bucolic presentation—accented by the tongue-twister title “How Much Love Can a Love Bird Love, Can a Love Bird Love a Love Bird” (a riff on the old faithful, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck…”)—plays with scale, mixing canvases great and small.
Utopian Erotics: Women Artists of the 1960s and ’70s
Paris, 1966. Nicola L. (then Nicola) exhibited The Screen for Three People: Homage to Alberto Greco (1964–66), the first of her ‘Penetrable’works. These encouraged participants to incorporate their bodies into the artwork. Comprising three stretched, white, rectangular canvases, the piece was designed to enable individuals to push their heads, arms and legs through various openings, their limbs protruding through the taut fabric, as if they were wearing the painting like a second skin.
The Politics of Looking at Portraits of the Incarcerated
Hatty Nestor’s study of ethical portraiture is an effective form of consciousness-raising, demonstrating an assertive, political urgency How Chelsea Manning sees herself. By Alicia Neal, in cooperation with Manning, commissioned by the Chelsea Manning Support Network, 23 April 2014. Courtesy Chelsea Manning Support Network and Alicia Neal; Public Domain.
Exploring the economy of exposure in the work of Yushi Li
by Philomena Epps View Gallery 5 Photos 1 of 5 Exploring the economy of exposure in the work of Yushi Li The artist portrait (collector 1). 2019 @ Yushi Li. Source: 2 of 5 Exploring the economy of exposure in the work of Yushi Li The artist portrait (gallerist 1). 2019 @ Yushi Li. Source: 3 of 5 Exploring the economy of exposure in the work of Yushi Li The Feast iniside.
Lindsey Mendick at Cooke Latham Gallery
London Cooke Latham Gallery 41 Parkgate Road April 15–May 21, 2021 Lindsey Mendick’s exhibition “Hairy on the Inside” prompted me to revisit Angela Carter’s so-called wolf trilogy: the final stories in The Bloody Chamber (1979), the British author’s collection of transgressive, feminist revisionist fairy tales.
Joanna Piotrowska stages images of violence and vulnerability in her latest monograph
Reading Time: 5 minutes Stable Vices collates three bodies of work that collectively address the complexity of power dynamics, and modes of oppression and control, through enigmatic black-and-white images With her eyes closed, and facial expression neutral, a woman points her right index finger at her left eye. In the following image, she uses the same hand to signal towards her clavicle. And, in the next, her finger appears to tap the inside crease of her elbow.
Ron Nagle at Modern Art Helmet Row
London Modern Art Helmet Row 4-8 Helmet Row September 10–December 12, 2020 This exhibition’s eponymous Lincolnshire Squire, 2018, is not a noble medieval courtesan, as one might speculate, but rather a pint-sized sculpture. As is typical with Ron Nagle’s practice, some titles are red herrings, while others playfully experiment with alliteration and punning.
Saying No to Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo’s 18th and latest novel, The Silence, is brimming with rhetorical questions, most of which can be answered with a simple no. ‘Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?’ No. ‘Is Europe one impossible crowd?’ No. (It’s several.) ‘Isn’t it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout?’ ‘Do a select number of people have a form of phone implanted in their bodies?’ No, no.
California Counter-Culture Through the Eyes of Mary Heilmann
Little Mondrian, Mary Heilmann A new London exhibition charts the brilliant career of the west coast-born artist whose work is infused with 1960s psychedelia June 08, 2016 Who? Born in California in 1940, Mary Heilmann studied ceramics, literature, poetry and sculpture in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Berkeley, before moving to New York in 1968.
Artists’ Artists: Part Four
Shawanda Corbett nominates Elizabeth Catlett’s Madonna (1982) For you, my child, anything Shelter may not be kneeled and kneeled on top of you And shelter may not be searched they searched on you And suppose shelter may not be reached behind they reached behind me you And suppose could oppose the blue shaped or black shaped with silver or brass or clothed They took shelter and opposed what is reached behind shelter and returned to mine. Shawanda Corbett is an artist who lives in Oxford, UK.
The Fire This Time
What’s the relationship between art and disaster? A fire starts, it moves from room to room and then engulfs a building. People are trapped inside, people throw their children out of the windows. A scene drawn from Dante’s Inferno: ‘The more I looked up,’ an eyewitness to the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London said, ‘floor upon floor, endless numbers of people. Mainly the kids, because obviously their voices, with their high pitched voices – that will remain with me for a long time.
‘The Social Dilemma’ Offers Fake Solutions to Real Problems
A new subgenre of documentary is emerging, one in which young, white, semi-retired tech workers voice their regrets for having built the digital platforms that rule our lives. In well-rehearsed paragraphs, our heroes tell similar stories. First, they dropped out of a top-tier university, usually Stanford, overeducated in computer science and undereducated in everything else.
Jia Zhangke Paints a Nuanced Portrait of China’s Economic Boom
‘What trouble did Father have to save enough money for such a costly, unnecessary, luxurious white shirt?’ muses Chinese novelist Liang Hong in Light of Liang Guangzheng (2017).
Olivia Erlanger "Home is a Body" Soft Opening / London | | Flash Art
Olivia Erlanger, 5:13 PM, 2020. Evian plastic tile, resin, HDU foam, wood, MDF, polyester paint, plexiglass. 50.8 × 50.8 × 25.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London. Photography by Theo Christelis. Olivia Erlanger, 5:13 PM, 2020. Detail. Evian plastic tile, resin, HDU foam, wood, MDF, polyester paint, plexiglass. 50.8 × 50.8 × 25.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London. Photography by Theo Christelis. Olivia Erlanger, “Home is a Body,” installation view at Soft Opening, London.
Appreciation Society
It’s 4:46am, but my body thinks that it’s morning, which is why I’m standing in a kitchen in the East Village, eating bran flakes in the dark. It’s minus six outside and yesterday I walked six miles, what, with one thing and another, dropping back into the stations of a semi-discarded life. I went to the Andy Warhol show at the Whitney, which was a revelation, even though I sincerely believed I’d seen everything he’d done.
Life as Someone Else’s Fantasy: Stephanie LaCava’s ‘The Superrationals’
Stephanie LaCava, The Superrationals, 2020, book cover. Courtesy: The MIT Press Mathilde, an American girl with a Gallic name and an extremely chic dead mother, is the jeune fille at the centre of The Superrationals, a sharp, epigrammatic meta-novel by the memoirist and essayist Stephanie LaCava. She is ‘beautiful’, but in a ‘funny-looking’, ‘alien’ way; she has ‘the body of a dancer’, slim and streamlined, but she lacks a dancer’s grace.
The BBC, the Tories and Television
On 15 October 1970, BBC One broadcast their first Play for Today (1970–84). Replacing The Wednesday Play (1964–70) – for which Ken Loach, Dennis Potter and Peter Watkins produced well-known works – the series enabled new and established writers and directors to make anything from insular family stories to sweeping tales of national decline. The week-on-week sense of surprise was the point: the only requirement was to create something about contemporary Britain.
On Our Radar: Highlights from Frieze Week
Olivia Erlanger at Soft Opening, London Olivia Erlanger has furnished Soft Opening with the trappings of an aspirational household – plants, Evian bottles, an Isamu Noguchi coffee table – all replicated in miniature and magnified under Plexiglas dome-eyes. Made during lockdown and taking the form five uninhabited rooms, ‘Home Is a Body’ continues the LA-based artist’s investigation into the psychic terrain of domestic life with a newfound, eerie slickness. The show is on view until 7 November.
Akeem Smith’s Art for the Next Century
‘To me, it’s a success already,’ Akeem Smith tells me ahead of his first solo show, ‘No Gyal Can Test’, which opened at Red Bull Arts New York in late September. In one of the many signs of our unpredictable times, the launch party for ‘No Gyal Can Test’ was held in March at China Chalet – the legendary Manhattan Chinese restaurant and nightclub – before the exhibition was delayed and Chalet permanently closed. The gathering ended up being an unwitting send off to the restaurant itself.
Artists’ Artists: Part One
Hurvin Anderson nominates Handsworth Songs (1986), directed by John Akomfrah, produced by Lina Gopaul and Black Audio Film Collective Handsworth Songs is an objective look at the Handsworth riots that took place in Birmingham, UK in 1985 and coincidentally centres around the place I grew up. On the one hand I have a deeply personal reaction to the film, recalling as I do the riots themselves and recognizing faces and locations.
What Ray Johnson Can Teach Us about a Good Postal Service
From his early studies at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s to his untimely death by suicide in 1995, Ray Johnson had an intuitive understanding of the latent potential for communication that could be uncovered once easy comprehension was bracketed in favour of playful chance encounters and associative logics.
When Was the Last Time You Did Nothing?
In 1967, Bruce Nauman made his ten-minute, 16mm film Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square.Using a Sony Portapak camera borrowed from the gallerist Leo Castelli, Nauman recorded himself slowly traversing lines of masking tape tacked to the floor of his studio. Stepping one foot in front of the other, and with an overstated sway of his hips, he repeatedly paces the boundaries of his temporary square.
Kyle Chayka on Patreon and New Artistic Funding Models
Specially commissioned illustration by Anna Haifisch, 2020. Courtesy: the artist The art world has depended on patronage arguably since the first paint was daubed onto cave walls: someone with more power, authority or capital enabled someone with less – the artist – to execute their work. At first, compensation might have been access to the cave; but, over millennia, it evolved into the bestowal of money.
Breaking the Art World's ‘Closed Circle’
It’s easy to forget how recently artists of colour gained real visibility in the art world, and how hard they had to fight for it. Only three decades ago, in 1987, Howardena Pindell delivered her pivotal report, ‘Art (World) & Racism’, at Hunter College in New York, demonstrating that the US art world – ‘museums, galleries, auction houses, collectors, critics and art magazines’ – was complicit in systemic racism, operating as a ‘closed circle’ that largely excluded artists of colour.
Forever at Frieze Masters 2020
in Frieze Masters | 02 OCT 20 From Paul Cézanne to Barbara Kruger, Sir Norman Rosenthal selects stellar artworks from the Frieze Masters 2020 edition of Frieze Viewing Room in Frieze Masters | 02 OCT 20 Forever is a new section of Frieze Masters specially curated for Frieze Viewing Room by Sir Norman Rosenthal.
"Our ashes make great fertilizer" PUBLIC Gallery / London
Rebecca Ackroyd, Direct Lines, 2019. Epoxy resin, steel, polyester resin, fibreglass. 80 × 130 × 56 cm. Courtesy of the artist and PUBLIC Gallery, London. Anousha Payne, The snake maiden (stronger than a leaf), 2020. Stoneware ceramic, plywood and metal. 170 × 109 × 7 cm. Courtesy of the artist and PUBLIC Gallery, London. Harminder Judge, Untitled (eye over waves over rock), 2020. Plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim, oil, wax. 177 × 90 × 4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and PUBLIC Gallery, London.
50 Years of Land Art
On Christmas Eve 1968, astronauts on the Apollo 8 Moon mission took the first photographs of the Earth by someone not on it. William Anders’s Earthrise, the best-known image, immeasurably altered humanity’s consciousness of its environment, but it also changed forever the way landscape was viewed in art. When Earthrise was taken, Land Art (or Earth Art) had already been named, theorized, critiqued and contested.
George Michael’s Homecoming
If an artist installed an enormous mural of my hometown’s most famous son, Ozzy Osborne would loom large over central Birmingham. In Kingsbury, Brent, the painter Dawn Mellor has rendered a portrait of a musician of a slightly different palette – the 1980s heartthrob and bona fide gay icon George Michael. No more stale and difficult-to-relate-to public interventions here – finally, something meaningful to have faith in amidst the misery of COVID-19.
A Slew of Shows Celebrates Surrealist Women
In IMAGO: Méret Oppenheim (1988) – a feature-length portrait of the German-born Swiss artist by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Anselm Spoerri – Oppenheim (voiced by British actress Glenda Jackson) reflects on her experience within the Surrealist circle of Paris.
Charles Saumarez Smith on the Changing Fashions of Exhibition Design
One of my last pleasures before going into lockdown was visiting ‘Art on Display 1949–69’ at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. It was an unusual opportunity to reflect on the ways works of art are displayed in museums and temporary exhibitions. The layout of an exhibition is something that is curiously ephemeral and not much talked about, but it shapes how artworks are looked at without the visitor necessarily noticing.
Curator Bonaventure Ndikung on Why Germany’s Struggle against Imperialism Is Far from Over
This autumn, as Germany celebrates its 30th reunification, the Humboldt Forum was set to open in a reconstructed City Palace – and, with it, the controversial symbol of a Christian cross on its cupola stemming from Germany’s imperial times. Is Germany’s imperial history feeding reactionary fervour?
What Quibi Gets Wrong About Why We Look at Our Phones
During quarantine, streaming media represent our best chance of getting a glimpse of the outside world. You can find the latest statistics – infections, deaths, layoffs – through the news or on Twitter but, for narratives that take place further than 100 square feet away, many of us are still turning to that old standby, television. Non-essential workers have two principal choices to exert agency over their surroundings during lockdown: what to eat and what to watch on a screen.
Isa Genzken "Window" Hauser & Wirth / London
Isa Genzken, “Window”. Installation view at Hauser & Wirth, London, 2020. Photography by Alex Delfanne. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth Zürich / London / Los Angeles / New York / Somerset / Menorca and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne / Berlin / New York. © Isa Genzken / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Isa Genzken, “Window”. Installation view at Hauser & Wirth, London, 2020. Photography by Alex Delfanne.
X6 Dance Space (1976–80): Liberation Notes | | Flash Art
Dance Office is a column dedicated to contemporary dance and performance art. “X6 Dance Space (1976-80): Liberation Notes”. Exhibition view at Cell Project Space, London, 2020. Courtesy of Cell Project Space, London. “X6 Dance Space (1976-80): Liberation Notes”. Exhibition view at Cell Project Space, London, 2020. Courtesy of Cell Project Space, London. “X6 Dance Space (1976-80): Liberation Notes”. Exhibition view at Cell Project Space, London, 2020. Courtesy of Cell Project Space, London.
Lauren Gault at Gasworks
Lauren Gault, C I T H R A, 2020, Lycra, wood, steel, Jesmonite, bolus gun, rice bone, glass, dimensions variable. London Gasworks 155 Vauxhall Street January 23–March 22, 2020 In 1907, the Irish-born inventor and scientist Martha Craig published an esoteric science-fiction novel titled The Men of Mars under the pseudonym Mithra, a name that invoked the ancient Roman deity and cult of Mithras.
France-Lise McGurn "Percussia" Simon Lee Gallery / London
France-Lise McGurn, “Percussia”. Exhibition view at Simon Lee Gallery, London, 2020. Photography by Ben Westoby. France-Lise McGurn, “Percussia”. Exhibition view at Simon Lee Gallery, London, 2020. Photography by Ben Westoby. France-Lise McGurn, “Percussia”. Exhibition view at Simon Lee Gallery, London, 2020. Photography by Ben Westoby. France-Lise McGurn, Sleepover (Kisses), 2019. Acrylic and ink on sugar paper, spray and marker on glass. 29 1/8 x 38 3/4 x 5/8 in. Photography by Ben Westoby.
Jiří Kovanda, Kissing Through Glass 2007
1 of 8 Jiří Kovanda Kissing Through Glass 2007 Performed as part of UBS Openings: Saturday Live – Actions and Interruptions, Tate Modern, 10 March 2007 Photo © Tate Jiří Kovanda Kissing Through Glass 2007 Performed as part of UBS Openings: Saturday Live – Actions and Interruptions, Tate Modern, 10 March 2007 Photo © Tate Jiří Kovanda Kissing Through Glass 2007 Performed as part of UBS Openings: Saturday Live – Actions and Interruptions, Tate Modern, 10 March 2007 Photo © Tate Jiří Kovanda...
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