The Contemporary Art Society tour (CASt) is London’s original and most popular gallery bus tour, taking place throughout the year and offering an inspirational navigation of the city’s most exciting galleries. Designed to be convenient and affordable, the breadth of these tours is unrivalled making them perfect for every graduation of contemporary art collector and enthusiast. CASt is not to be missed.
Below is the itinerary for the coming CASt. Please contact us to find out more.
Tom Woolner
Tintype, 18 St Cross Street, EC1N 8UN
www.tintypegallery.com
During January 2012, London-based artist Tom Woolner has made a new sculptural installation on site at Tintype. His practice has recently taken the form of performance-based events with live work made for The Barbican, London and a residency and commission for Site Gallery, Sheffield. However, he used this month-long project as an exercise in exploring his work in sculpture and drawing, developing his playful, cartoon-dumb language, both in, and for, the space.
Caroline Achaintre: Trip-Dip
Arcade, 87 Lever Street, EC1V 3RA
www.arcadefinearts.com
The onomatopoeic title Trip-Dip sets the tone of Caroline Achaintre’s second exhibition at Arcade, which plunges visitors into the world of ceramics – albeit a deceitful one. Indeed, this new series of works daringly reaches beyond the assumed limitations of clay to reveal a surprisingly malleable, versatile and illusionistic substance.
Selma Makela: Cosmic Ray Weather Station and Other Paintings
Solar Do-Nothing Machine and Other Films by Charles & Ray Eames, Anna Barriball, Rachel Lowe and Christina Mackie
PEER, 97 & 99 Hoxton Street, N1 6QL
www.peeruk.org
Selma Makela’s small, intensely worked canvases and works on paper are as much about the process and materiality of animating the ground on which she paints as they are about the frozen, harsh and beautiful landscapes, which have been her abiding subject for a number of years. Toughness and vulnerability are both embedded in Makela’s work – qualities that are knowing indications of the harshness and fragility of the environments we live in – and the impact of our presence on and in the landscape.
The programme of short films consider – in a very general way – notions of the fleeting and the transient, and how these qualities can intersect with moments of epiphany where the extraordinary and the new are recognised in the everyday. All of the films are rooted in the real but equally focus on the abstract possibilities of representation. They deal with the use of natural elements and simple scientific phenomena as both subject and material for making work – sunlight, water, gravity, velocity, viscosity, reflection, transparency, temperature.
Renee So
Kate MacGarry, 27 Old Nichol Street, E2 7HR
www.katemacgarry.com
So works with ceramic and wool, creating sculptural and knitted portraits that suggest a multiplicity of lineages and styles. Her ceramic busts are built piecemeal from the base upward, borrowing conceits from military and aristocratic portraiture, theatre costuming, and ritual masks of ancient civilizations. Often crowned by curled wigs that seamlessly descend into honeycomb beards, So’s faces are structured by browlines reminiscent of gladiator helmets and facial features scoured into the clay surface like primitive artifacts.
Steve Bishop: Buildings Are Heavy
Supplement, 31 Temple Street, E2 6QQ
www.supplementgallery.co.uk
Supplement is proud to present the second solo exhibition at the gallery by the London based artist Steve Bishop.
Brian Griffiths: The Invisible Show
Vilma Gold, 6 Minerva Street, E2 9EH
www.vilmagold.com
Filling the gallery space with concealed cuboid structures, Griffiths considers whether an exhibition can be an absurd feet of invisibility. H. G. Wells’ protagonist in The Invisible Man (1897) attempts to hide his transformation from the world through excessive bandaging and disguise. His attempts are futile of course, for in the end he succeeds only in becoming more conspicuous by the very effort of his concealment. Likewise, it might transpire that Griffiths’ attempts to cloak his exhibition in skins of beige tarpaulin only serve to make its invisibility all the more explicit. The show will be of ‘readymades’, of sorts: The mass produced multiple in the form of the cuboid metal frames, and what Griffiths refers to as the ‘fabricated found object’ in the form of the tarpaulins covering them; these being singular, touched, expressive yet understated surfaces.