Intrinsic Dialogue
Recommended article from the current issue of Aesthetica.

Produced by Art and Theory Publishing, Contemporary Swedish Photography is an overview of the stunning imagery being captured by Swedish artists. The book reveals the significant contribution Sweden has made to contemporary visual art, beginning with legendary practitioner Christer Strömholm and including today’s wide range of eminent photographers. Showcasing over 50 individuals, the volume reflects a vast range of artists with differences in age, background and education, and variety in approaches to shooting documentary, experimental, advertising, fashion and fine art imagery. The carefully curated selection does not summarise the past, but instead develops a conversation between the contributors, highlighting the groundbreaking style associated with image-making in Scandinavia. This collection of photographs includes works from Maria Friberg, Denise Grünstein and Petrus Olsson, amongst others. The images are extracted from Contemporary Swedish Photography, which is available to buy at www.artandtheorypublishing.com.

Issue 62: December/January - Out Now

This issue of Aesthetica focuses on the idea of the unconventional. It’s a celebration of practitioners who are experimenting in their field by working in interdisciplinary ways and introducing concepts from other areas of art and design into their work. We take a look at Anne Collier’s show at MCA Chicago and how she is critiquing commercial photography. Frank Gehry’s surreal architecture is explored in a major retrospective. The nature of lighting design is discussed in Lightopia. Artist Reiner Ruthenbeck contemplates the geometric form at London’s Serpentine Galleries. Photographers Emily Shur and Joël Tettamanti explore location, while Todd Hido captures light in an atmospheric way. The rising stars of Swedish photography are surveyed, and we also present an overview of Guy Bourdin’s fashion photography. Eugenio Recuenco uses narrative devices to create dramatic images. Bryn Higgins’s film Electricity tells an affecting story of self-discovery. Also, there is an opportunity for you to watch films from this year’s Aesthetica Short Film Festival. The last words go to Julie Cockburn who is using found photography in new and exciting ways.

1. Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology Available to Order Now

The Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology is a celebration of outstanding poetry and short fiction, which promises to stimulate, intrigue and inspire you long after reading. Comprising of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2014 winners and finalists, this compelling collection of work unites established and emerging literary talent from across the world. Covering a broad range of themes, this anthology invites you to explore the different facets of contemporary life, resonating on many levels. This is a collection you can return to over and over again, which will ignite your passion for new writing.

To order your copy for just £7.95, visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/shop

The Creative Writing Award 2015 opens for entries in January. For more information, visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/creativewriting

2. Aesthetica Short Film Festival Open for Submissions

Having firmly established itself as one of the most exciting site-specific cinema experiences in the UK, the BAFTA Qulaifying Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFF) promises to return bigger than ever in 2015 following the overwhelming success of this year’s edition in November. The four-day event transforms 15 of the most historic and iconic places in York into pop-up cinemas, screening the best in independent film from across the world.

In 2014, Best Animation and overall Festival Winner went to Alan Holly’s beautifully hand-drawn film Coda. BAFTA-nominated director Michael Pearce took home the prize for Best Thriller with his sensational film, Keeping Up with the Joneses starring Maxine Peake (Silk, Shameless) and Adeel Akhtar (Four Lions, The Dictator) while the characterful The Wolf, the Ship and the Little Green Bag by Kathryn MacCorgarry Gray stole the heart of the viewers to win the People’s Choice Award.

The ASFF team are now looking for new films for 2015 and are inviting submissions from emerging and established filmmakers pushing the boundaries of short film to new and exciting levels. Not only will finalists have the chance to present their film to a range of industry insiders and thousands of festival attendees, there are cash prizes up for grabs and the opportunity to appear at other UK festivals with the ASFF guest programme tour. In previous years films have toured to Bath Film Festival, The Hepworth Wakefield, Underwire in London and various other locations across the UK and abroad. Films of any genre in under 30 minutes long are accepted and full details of the entry process can be found at www.asff.co.uk/submit. The deadline is 31 May 2015.

3. Aesthetica Art Prize 2015 Opening for Submissions

The Aesthetica Art Prize opens for entries this January, offering both budding and established artists the opportunity to showcase their work to a wider, international audience. Now in its eighth year the award is a celebration of contemporary visual art, inviting artists to submit imaginative and innovative work that shows creative originality and technical skill.

The Aesthetica Art Prize is a fantastic opportunity to develop your presence in the international art world. Prizes include £5,000 Main Prize, £1,000 Student Prize courtesy of Hiscox, a group exhibition and editorial coverage in Aesthetica Magazine, which has a readership of 180,000 worldwide.

Categories for entry are: Photographic & Digital Art, Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture, Painting & Drawing and Video, Installation & Performance. For more information, visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/artprize

1. London Art Fair

Business Design Centre, London
21 – 25 January

London Art Fair is the UK’s premier Modern British and contemporary art Fair. The 27th edition of the Fair brings together over 100 carefully selected galleries from the UK and overseas, with two curated sections, Art Projects and Photo50, running alongside the main Fair. On Thursday 22 January the Fair stays open until 9pm, providing visitors with the opportunity to enjoy evening performances, talks, film screenings and complimentary drinks.

Photography highlights from exhibiting galleries include: Flowers Gallery, showing work by Simon Roberts, Ed Burtynsky and Nadav Kander; James Hyman Gallery, which will be exhibiting photographs from Jon Tonks popular Empire series, and BREESE LITTLE with a series of original images from the 1961–1980 NASA space programme. Photography Focus Day takes place at the Fair on 21 January, when audiences can make the most of the visit through joining talks and tours from the likes of Simon Baker, Photomonitor, PhotoVoice, Jean Wainwright, ArtTactic, Mary Rozell and Sheyi Bankale.

Art Projects features a selection of emerging contemporary art from across the globe. It includes large-scale installations, solo shows and group displays, alongside an extensive film and performance programme. Art Projects has established itself as an important international platform for new galleries to present the most stimulating contemporary practice. Curated by Anna Colin, Dialogues returns to Art Projects for a second year. With many of the invited galleries and artists working together for the first time, the section promises a unique exhibition of critical conversations around shared ideas or a common aesthetic.

www.londonartfair.co.uk

Image credit:
Hassan Hajjaj, Installation Le Salon, Institut des Cultures d'Islam, Paris, France, 2010

2. Jan Schoonhoven

David Zwirner, New York
9 January – 14 February

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of works by Jan Schoonhoven at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location. The show features an extensive group of the artist’s sculptural wall reliefs and works on paper from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s in what is the first significant presentation of the artist’s work in America in over a decade.

Regarded as one of the most important Dutch artists of the late 20th century, Schoonhoven is recognised for his innovative and systematic investigations into light, form, and volume. Despite spending the majority of his life in Delft, the Netherlands, where he worked from 1946 to 1979 as a civil servant for the Dutch Postal Service, Schoonhoven rose to artistic prominence as an active and influential member of the international avant garde. Beginning in the 1950s, he played a central role in theNederlandse Informele Groep (Netherlandish Informal Group) and the Nul-groep (Nul Group)—which were affiliated with the European Informel movement and the ZERO Group respectively.

Rejecting illusionism and subjective expression, the group of artists shared a collective interest in exploring the essential, objective forms and properties of art. Schoonhoven in particular developed a highly unique body of work that centred on a sustained investigation of serial abstraction, the monochrome and the grid. In their carefully structured yet sensitively rendered forms, the artist’s works have been fittingly described as “cool, strictly ordered, [and] well considered… but also familiar, humane, and intimate.”

www.davidzwirner.com

Image credit:
Jan Schoonhoven, Thin Ridge Cardboard – Second One, 1965, painted cardboard relief on board in artist’s frame. Copywrite Jan J. Schoonhoven; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London.

3. Dancing Light / Let it Move You

Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Until 8 March

A photograph is a photograph, and a dance is a dance: stillness versus movement. At first sight these two art forms might seem to be poles apart, but the exhibition Dancing Light, currently on display at Huis Marseille, proves the opposite. Along with film and video, photography turns out to be an ideal way to illuminate the characteristic emotionality and transport of dance – its “primal power” to move us. In Dancing Light the “dark undertone” that is characteristic of both flamenco and butoh, and which unites seemingly incompatible opposites such as joy and sorrow or hope and despondency, is linked to many different manifestations of both photography and dance.

To unravel the mystery at the heart of dance the exhibition takes inspiration from flamenco and its concept of duende, that intangible and ineffable moment of rapture when the chemistry between flamenco musicians, dancers and audience bubbles up and overwhelms everyone. Duende (literally “elf” or “spirit”) is an untranslatable concept, a mysterious force that is manifested in the combination of certain sounds, words and gestures.

Dancing Light captures the raw expression of flamenco in photography and in moving images: from the flamenco legend Vicente Escudero, who used film in the early 20th century to establish a dialogue with modern art, to the extremely individual dance expression of the flamenco dancer Antoñita La Singla, born deaf, whose unique energy was captured in the early 1960s by the photographer Xavier Miserachs.

www.huismarseille.nl

Image Credit:
Kazuo Ohno, premiere of Admiring La Argentina Naoya Ikegami, Tokyo, 1977, courtesy Naoya Ikegami and sprout-curation

Artists’ Directory

The Aesthetica Artists’ Directory is a global network of artists engaging with the professional art world. In print, online and in digital, we have created a forum for discussion and interactivity where artists, galleries, collectors, critics, curators and enthusiasts can meet and discover the best in emerging art from around the world.

View the Artists' Directory at www.aestheticamagazine.com/directory
or for information visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/about-the-directory

Interview with Painter and Sculptor Maggi Hambling, Wall of Water at the National Gallery

Known for her sculptures Scallop (2003) and In Conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998), Maggi Hambling has established herself as one of Britain’s most significant and controversial painters and sculptors. In her latest exhibition Wall of Water, Hambling returns to the National Gallery to celebrate her work in painting, with a vivacious presentation of contemporary seascapes inspired by the gigantic crashing waves the artist experienced at Southwold, Suffolk, in 2010. Running concurrently with the more conventional work of  Norwegian artist Peder Balke (1804-1887), the Wall of Water series bursts with a painterly restlessness, and features exuberantly coloured canvases alongside a group of abrupt, stark monotypes. Aesthetica speaks to Hambling about her ongoing motivations as a painter and sculptor working in Britain.

A: Can you explain the initial idea behind Walls of Water?
MH: There is no ‘idea’. The paintings are my response to unnervingly high waves that I encountered challenging the sea wall at Southwold, Suffolk, late in 2010. The sea wall appears along the bottom of all the canvases and monotypes, and the waves themselves become another wall, of water. A subject chooses me and I try to be a channel for the truth of it.

A: One of the works responds to Amy Winehouse’s death. What was it about her that inspired you to produce a painting?
MH: I find Amy Winehouse’s voice extraordinary, in its power, vulnerability and nakedness. Her life is in that voice and when she died, tragically young, I felt compelled to paint her. I first worked for some months on a large (4 ft x 3 ft) portrait head, and then a painting of her tiny figure, performing in a huge space (again vertically 4 ft x 3 ft). Neither painting worked so both were destroyed. After the second destruction, I took out a new canvas of the same size, turned it horizontally, and by then the subject was so engrained inside me, that the painting painted itself. It is my response to the colour of her sound, her movement and her spirit.

A: These pieces react to the movement of the sea, do you often find nature inspires your practice?
MH: The North Sea off the Suffolk coast got me by the “short and curlies” on 30 November 2002, during the pause between making the maquette for Scallop and then the sculpture (Scallop was unveiled on Aldeburgh Beach in November 2003 — my celebration of Benjamin Britten). The storm I had witnessed that morning was the subject of my first North Sea painting and the series continues, most recently in the Walls of Water. During the 1980′s, the Suffolk sunrise had been my subject, during the 1990′s, the human loss, and then waterfalls joined my sea paintings as the source of my more recent work.

A: When producing these pieces did you consider the space they would be presented in at all?
MH: No, I just painted them. I had no idea when or where they might be shown. Wall of Water VIII formed part of my installation, You Are the Sea at SNAP (Art at the Aldeburgh Festival) in 2012, and will feature in my forthcoming exhibition War Requiem & Aftermath, opening at the Cultural Institute at King’s College London in early March 2015. I began making Walls of Water again in monotypes in 2011, and these were shown at the Hermitage in 2012. When the National Gallery invited me to show my Walls of Water, I selected eight of the large works (over 6 ft x 7 ft) to surround the visitor in Room 1 — making an environment of crashing waves.

A: What do you have planned for next?
MH: The Wall of Water series continues. But I am not a fortune-teller; my work responds to whatever moves me in life — a death, a newspaper photograph, anything that demands a response. My installation War Requiem, shown at SNAP in 2013, has been purchased by The Monument Trust for Aldeburgh Music and will be reinstalled at Snape Maltings for April 2015, coinciding with War Requiem & Aftermath at the Cultural Institute. The new Aftermath sculptures began after War Requiem as a result of suddenly seeing the possibilities in pieces of dead wood I had collected for several years. A work chooses when to be made, just as a subject chooses me.

Maggi Hambling, Wall of Water, until 15 February, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN. For more information, visit www.nationalgallery.org.uk.

War Requiem & Aftermath will run from 4 March until 31 May, Cultural Institute, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS. Additional details can be found at www.kcl.ac.uk.

Image Credit:
Maggi Hambling, Wall of Water I (2010). Courtesy of the artist and the National Gallery.

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