Chiharu Shiota’s Uncertain Journey (Installation View)

Chiharu Shiota’s Uncertain Journey, on view at Blain|Southern Berlin through the 12th of November, is an awe-inspiring meditation on memory, fate, and belonging.  Evocative and beautiful, this installation fills the gallery’s main atrium with a swarming mass of red yarn that creeps up the walls and envelops the viewer in a network of red.  Entering into the space, one is swept up in a ghostly web that spreads between the forms of skeletal boats.  Shiota is known for her immersive installations, such as The Key in the Hand (2015), in which she creates new visual planes as if she were painting in mid-air.  The artist has created this site-specific installation in Berlin eight years after she last exhibited in her home city, reprising a body of work that earned her impressive attention at last year’s Venice Biennale. (more…)

Mat Collishaw, This is Not an Exit(Installation View), Courtesy of the Artist and Blain|Southern Photographer: Matthew Hollow, 2012

British artist Mat Collishaw places his work in systems of fluctuation, layering meanings and interpretations until the weight of the work’s collected implications collapses in on itself.  In his most recent show at London’s Blain|Southern, the artist has continued in this tradition, offering a collection of large-scale oil paints that negotiate between hedonistic excess, abstract figuration and cultural subterfuge. (more…)

Francesco Clemente, Mandala for Crusoe (Installation View), via Blain|Southern Gallery

For the first time in seven years, painter Francesco Clemente is having a show in London, titled “Mandala for Crusoe,” at Blain|Southern’s recently opened Hanover Square location. Born in Italy, Clemente divides his time between New York and Varanasi, a city on the banks of the Ganges River in northern India, and the works in this exhibition reflect this diverse international influence.

(more…)

Image: Installation shot, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, “Wild Mood Swings,” 2009-10 – Nihilistic Optimistic, all images courtesy of the artists and Blain|Southern, Photographer: Peter Mallet

After the private viewing this evening in London, Nihilistic Optimistic, a sculptural illustration of oppositional and complementary forces by Tim Noble & Sue Webster – their first major solo exhibition in London since 2006 – will open to the public on October 10th  at Blain Southern Gallery in London’s Hanover Square. Six large-scale sculptures constructed from wood scraps and other discarded materials, “fracturing things up – splintering things. So the mind has to wander in a different way…” continues the artists’ “investigation of self-portraiture.”

(more…)