Michel François’ works ‘Panoptique’ are now on show at Halle Verrière, Meisenthal, France.

“I like the edges, borders, thresholds. I like to be able to crystallise the moment where everything can tip from one side to the next and suggest the possibility of a transgression, a passage. Many of the works I imagine express that, and seek to fix the relative inconstancy of a moment or of a sometimes indiscernible limit.” - Michel François

On view until September 2021. 

Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex is a new documentary commissioned by Firstsite to accompany their exhibition of the same name, currently on show in Colchester. 

The exhibition, Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex, runs until 5 September 2021 at Firstsite, Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester, Essex, CO1 1JH.

For his first major public gallery exhibition in the UK for almost a decade - and on the 20th anniversary of one of his most famous works, ‘Break Down’ - Landy has produced a series of ambitious new commissions based on the history of Essex and his fascination with the county’s contemporary portrayal in popular culture.

Visitors to Firstsite can also see ‘Michael Landy’s Break Down: 20 Years’, an archive exhibition of previously unseen documentation, video footage, drawings and ephemera from Landy's ground-breaking 2001 work.

Exhibition dates: 26 June - 5 September 2021

Paul Pfeiffer and Languid Hands will be in conversation with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa on 1 July at 7pm GMT, in ‘Figuring the Invisible: anti-Blackness, Art & Testimony.’

To follow Anne Anlin Cheng, what happens when we ‘shift our attention away from the visibility of race to its visuality?’

What happens when we attend to the strategic modes of appearance within the visible developed by racialised subjects, or modelled to us through their art? What happens when we consider racialised forms of visuality and aurality as tactics designed not solely to evade racialised violence, but as methods of manifesting and mobilising subaltern histories, and embodied forms of knowing?

How should we respond to the grammars of black performance – in word, image and sound – as practices of knowing? How do we respond to the ongoingness of truths known to racialised subjects that are nevertheless inadmissible within the normative strictures of ‘proof,’ or the standard forms of documentary practice?

These questions will be taken up in a discussion between Paul Pfeiffer and Languid Hands, moderated by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, in a panel that centres around a screening of Pfeiffer’s ‘The Long Count’ (I Shook Up The World, 2000), Caryatid (Broner, 2020), and Languid Hands’s Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace (2019).

Pictured: Paul Pfeiffer, ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (15)’, 2004. 

A new large-scale painting by Cecily Brown will go on display in November 2021 as part of The Courtauld Gallery’s most significant modernisation project in its history. 

The work has been specially commissioned for the curved wall of the historic 18th century staircase, and will reflect Cecily Brown’s deep interest in the paintings in the Gallery’s collection. 

The commission revisits the early history of the building. In the 18th century a painting by Giovanni Battista Cipriani occupied this same location when this part of Somerset House was home to the Royal Academy of Arts.  

The commission has been supported by The Garcia Family Foundation.

Pictured: The Courtauld at Somerset House. Photo: Benedict Johnson

Congratulations to Steve McQueen and the Small Axe team for their 6 BAFTA wins.

Malachi Kirby - supporting actor
Jacqueline Durran - costume design
Jojo Williams - make up and hair design
Shabier Kirchner - photography and lighting: fiction
Helen Scott - production design
Gary Davy - scripted casting

Pictured: MANGROVE featuring Malachi Kirby, Small Axe. Credit: Des Willie/BBC/McQueen Limited

Michael J. Prokopow's Contemporary Painters Series monograph on Hurvin Anderson is published today.

This monograph is the first comprehensive overview of the career to date of British artist Hurvin Anderson (b.1965).

Anderson is known for painting loosely rendered 'observations' of scenes and spaces loaded with personal or communal meaning. Anderson's painting style is notable for the ease with which he slips between figuration and abstraction, playing with the tropes of earlier landscape traditions and 20th-century abstraction. His paintings of barbershop interiors, country tennis clubs and tropical roadsides teem with rich brushwork and multitudes of decorative patterns or architectural features, at once obscuring and adding to underlying ruminations on identity and place.

Drawing on interviews with the artist, Michael J. Prokopow offers a critical assessment of Hurvin Anderson's painting practice.

Image: Hurvin Anderson, Last House, 2013, oil on linen, Monsoon Art Collection © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Richard Ivey.