Anthony Gormley @ White Cube/Bermondsey

This exhibition is not to be missed!

Anthony Gormley

White Cube Bermondsey

28th November 2012 - 10 February 2013

White Cube Bermondsey is pleased to present ‘Model’, an exhibition of major new works by Antony Gormley. Challenging the physical possibilities of the gallery space, this ambitious exhibition investigates our experience of architecture through the body and of the body through architecture.

Made in direct response to the space of the South Galleries is the vast, new work Model (2012), which is also the title of the exhibition. Fabricated from 100 tonnes of weathering sheet steel, the work is both sculpture and building, human in form but at no point visible as a total figure. Visitors will be able to enter the work through a 'foot' and journey through its inter-connected internal chambers, the sculpture demanding that we adjust our pace and bend our bodies to its awkward yet absolute geometry. The experience of this analogy for the 'dark interior of the body' is guided by anticipation and memory and the direct and indirect light which penetrates the structure and which leads us on, as if through a labyrinth.

The central corridor of the gallery will hold new sculptures built of solid iron blocks whose uncompromising orthogonals belie their emotional punch. Propping up the architecture, articulating a corner or lying flat on the ground, these dark works test the bounding condition of the space. Their sculptural language is highly reduced, in some cases so schematic that the body form is rendered purely abstract, but without any loss of human empathy.

The exhibition also features a selection of Gormley's working models, installed on a series of tables. Revealing processes that can be both playful and disciplined, the installation suggests a workshop full of ideas and procedures, methods and materials. 

These works, together with a series of new expansion pieces, create an exhibition which powerfully extends Gormley's exploration of the body as a site of transformation.

Andrew Holmes @ Plus one gallery

The Plus One Gallery is exhibiting the hyper-realist paintings of Andrew Holmes, demonstrating his interest in the impact of ‘an oil hungry civilisation’. The artist has recently constructed a mobile sculpture in California from four ‘Ford Thunderbird Landau Coupes’ built in the 1970s, the era of the first oil crisis. Entitled ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, the sculpture plays upon the mythological story in which the horsemen come to announce the end of the world. The paintings included within this collection express a continuing descent into corruption and poverty and include four drawings representing different aspects of the four horsemen - Victory, War, Pestilence and Death. The artist’s skill with coloured pencil is enviable and visitors to the exhibition can expect to be impressed by dramatic drawings of motor vehicles, rendered in minute detail.

Andrew Holmes

“Andrew Holmes is Britain‘s leading SuperRealist artist. He is also an architect and one of the original Richard Rogers four-person practice, a long time unit master at the Architectural Association and latterly at the University of Westminster. For three decades he has been working on, …, a 100-picture series called Gas Tank City. It records the storage tanks, trucks and trailers of the highways of the West Coast desert and that artificial urban oasis, Los Angeles, which Holmes has visited annually since he was a student at the AA. These, says Holmes, have replaced such traditional buildings as the barn and have, in some ways, become architecture. If that sounds like an echo of Reyner Banham and Archigram and Cedric Price and their interest in architectural transience and mobility, that is because it is. But it is also to put too architectural a gloss on his work which is sheerly beautiful. Holmes says anyway that the early Rogers connection is more relevant. ‚The truck epitomises more what those early ideas were originally about‘: simple steel construction, ready-mades, ad hoc-ness, design-as-accruing.”

http://www.realisticpictures.co.uk/

Two Projects

Max Lamb's Hexagonal Pewter Stool & Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter project





An important point that should be made is that both these projects were developed by the designers whilst they were at University and the themes raised have continued to be the key polemics for both, going some way to prove that your interests explored whilst a student needn't be discarded in practice.

Neighbourhoods

Tom has found an interesting video by Vera Danilina, which portrays 'two contrary places that are connected by stylistic features. It is about the metropolis New York City (USA) and the provincial Dessau (GER)'