Antony Gormley: Fit For All

November 5, 2016November 5, 2016

The Turner Prize-winning sculptor talks to PORT ahead of the closing weekend of his White Cube exhibition, ‘Fit’

The human form has been at the centre of Antony Gormley’s work for nearly 35 years. During this time, he’s established himself as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary sculptors, gaining recognition for Angel of the North, a 20m-tall figure that towers over those travelling to and from Tyneside, the 100 cast iron statues that comprise Another Place in Liverpool, and, more recently, his instantly recognisable pixelated men.

His new show, ‘Fit’, sees the London-born artist return to the White Cube, Bermondsey – a follow up to his 2012 White Cube show ‘Model’ – to create a series of site-specific sculptures set across a labyrinth of 15 chambers. ‘Fit’ can be viewed an amalgamation and an extension of the ideas presented four years ago, which urge viewers to consider their relation to the built environment while also touching upon notions of belonging and displacement

Here, we chat to Gormley about the story behind the show, why he enjoys watching viewers of his work, and why “all art is made to be seen”.

How did the idea for ‘Fit’ form?

We started with 100 objects that we had made over the last two years laid out on a grid on the floor, and then started getting rid of them. We realised that while the notion of the objects fighting against each other was a lovely demographic idea and that, actually, they communicate with each other in very particular ways. What was eventually best was to allow pairs or singular objects to have their own space, giving each space its own sense of secrecy through experience. One thing led to another, in a very organic way.

How much time do you spend time observing the audience interacting with your art?

The works are, in a way, instruments of activating space. Until somebody comes in and shares the space and the object by moving through it and in it – sensing their own scale and movement in relation to these objects that are also places – there’s no exhibition. It sounds a bit creepy, doesn’t it, but I do like to watch people negotiating the work. I think it would be stupid not to do so.

I think that, in a sense, human behaviour and imagination have to be part of the raw material of what I’m working with. I’m not interested in creating experiments on human cognition. However, I consider this exhibition a’test site’ and I have to be able to register how people are engaging and using the works and spaces that I make.

Do observations like this affect the way you will approach other projects?

Not really. I think everything is about research and experimentation. For example, ‘Horizon Field’ in Hamburg involved quite large numbers of human interactivity and participation, and I still need to learn from it.

I haven’t got any prescriptive principles or philosophies about this, but it seems to me that there is no end to the possibilities that sculpture offers us in terms of reflective instruments, and that is what I’m interested in.

‘Horizon Field’ was my last really big democratic project, and consisted of a huge platform hinged 7.5m above the floor. It would register the movement of one person by the collective, and vice versa. I think that’s a pretty good model for a kind of hyper-attentive membrane, in other words a proprioceptive instrument for the collective body to sense the individual, and the individual the collective. I’m looking forward to exploring that idea more.

What is the relationship between the human body and the materials that you have used for this exhibition?

The three major materials used are steel, iron and concrete. All of the materials are a part of our built environment, and the show explores the relationship between the living, biological body and the secondary body of architecture. Often, I’ve replaced the representation of the biological body with the second body of architecture, so it seemed right to use those common architectural materials.

There seems to be an element of play present in ‘Fit’. Can you tell us about that?

I think the whole show invites us to be like children. The blocks are reminiscent of LEGO, and that in turn makes us question how our world is built. I guess that, through all of it, I want the viewer to also be a participant. The biggest way this can be done is by interacting with the 15 individual chambers, each of which serves as singular catalysts for contemplation. The collective experience of them all is where the viewer can then reconcile their own feelings and thoughts that may have arisen during their time here.

If you had to choose one particular piece from the exhibit that you think really strikes a chord with the audience, which would it be?

That’s difficult, but I think probably ‘Passage’, because it’s simultaneously an object and an experience. It’s a metaphor that’s very obvious to people.

'Passage' by Antony Gormley — ‘Passage’ by Antony Gormley (2016)

Much of the privately commissioned work you’ve made in the past is often still visible to and accessible by the public. To what extent do you consider your work to be ‘public art’?

My answer is always that all art is made to be seen. It wants to be shared and wants to belong to everyone, in a way. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a fallacy to make a distinction between art and public art.

Up until the 17th century, most art was made as a contribution to the collective life of a city or place, and I feel that is still its identity now. Here we are standing in a private gallery where all of these works are for sale, but the door is always open to all. I’m hoping that as many of these works as possible will end up in the shared world.

Sculpture in particular is a communal entity. It takes its natural place in shared spaces, and that’s what I love about it. You can make something, put it on the street, or on a mountain or on a beach, and people can either engage with it or completely ignore it. For me, that’s still the biggest challenge and pleasure – just to make something, put it in the world and see what happens.

‘Fit’ Runs at White Cube Bermondsey until 6 Nov 2016.

Additional text Drew Whittam

10,000 hours: Don McCullin

July 7, 2016September 20, 2016

British photographer Don McCullin discusses his astounding career in war reportage, from his first commissioned image to ‘going digital’ on his 80th birthday

I never had an interest in photography. While I was in the air force I bought this camera called a Rolleicord, which was completely inappropriate for reportage. Despite that, I travelled around Nairobi with it for a couple of days and took a few pictures, but looking back, they were really amateurish.

When I came back I put the camera in a chest of drawers and never had any interest in it, so I decided to pawn it. It was in the pawn shop for months before my mother encouraged me to get it back again. I knew a gang of local boys who were involved with something quite violent: the murder of a policeman. During the build-up to the trial they said, “Why don’t you go and get your camera and take some pictures of us,” because they knew their story was all over the newspapers. I ended up taking this picture of them in a derelict building, which was at the bottom of the street where I grew up.

mccullin website 5 — Photography Laurence Ellis

At the time, I had a job taking photos at an animation studio in Mayfair and the people I worked with said, “Why don’t you take that photo to the Observer newspaper?” Eventually I did – lo and behold, they commissioned more photos from me, which were all published. People started to phone me up at work and offer me every job in England: in television, newspapers and magazines. But the funny thing is, I wasn’t really a photographer.

The first work I made that had the inkling of war was during the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. I was in Paris with my wife on a slightly late honeymoon and I saw a photograph in the paper of an East German soldier. He was jumping over the barbed wire into the West, while wearing his full military regalia and Kalashnikov rifle. I asked my wife: “When you go back to England, would you mind if I went to Berlin?” So she said, “Of course not.”

mccullin website 1 — Photography Laurence Ellis

I have always shot in black and white because I think it’s much more powerful than looking at colour. But I made the switch from shooting on film to digital because I’ve just passed my 80th birthday and I am not going to be standing in a dark room for much longer. I’ve been doing that for 60 years and I’m beginning to get chest wheezes and pains because of it. Can you imagine? Doing that for 60 years, I might as well have been smoking three packs of fags a day!

I think that if you are creating you should never follow the rules. Not working for another photographer has meant that I have always had my own identity. When you work for someone like David Bailey or Irving Penn, for example – who was a great photographer – you could potentially be stifled by their fearful reputation and alleged tantrums. I have made my own journey in life; I wasn’t relying upon other people.

I hate calling myself a war photographer because I don’t always want to be pigeonholed. I would like my legacy not to be seen as ‘war’, but as having a greater width that happened to be funnelled into war. Photography should be about discovery and it should be seen in a much more diverse way. But you can’t divorce yourself from seeing tragedy like I have seen. It’s impossible. If you do you shouldn’t be doing it…

Interview Joel Meadows

Photography Laurence Ellis

Don McCullin’s work will be exhibited at Le Rencontres D’Arles in a show entitled‘Looking Beyond the Edge’ until August 28 2016

Peggy Guggenheim: An American in Florence

July 4, 2016August 24, 2016

PORT heads to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence for an exhibition charting the life and collection of one of the greatest pioneers of modern art – Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim beind a sculpture by Antoine Pevsner, 1950s © Photo Roloff Beny / National Archives of Canada

In 1940, as the Nazis were closing in on Paris, the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim was still living in the French capital. She had arrived in the 1920s, drawn to the city from her native New York by the Parisian avant-garde, and stubbornly refused to leave the artistic milieu of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso she had entered through her marriage to the Dada artist Laurence Vail.

Peggy had become well established as a collector by the time war swept across Europe, regularly buying work from her friends, both to support their careers and to satisfy her addiction for art, and even as she was preparing to leave the continent for New York she bought Bird in Space (1932-40) by the Constantin Brancusi. The Romanian sculptor’s poignant evocation in bronze of a bird taking flight would be one of many hundreds of works, along with many of the artists who made them, that Peggy took with her when she returned to her native New York in 1941 – saving both from destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Left: The Gentle Afternoon (Le Doux Après-midi)
Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), 1916. Oil on canvas, 65.3 x 58.3 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553.
Photo by David Heald © Giorgio de Chirico, by SIAE 2016 – Right: Bird in Space (L’Oiseau dans l’espace)
Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), 1932–40. Polished brass, 151.7 cm high, including base, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553
Photo by David Heald © Constantin Brancusi, by SIAE 2016

Fittingly, Bird in Space is one of the first works encountered at the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation’s latest exhibitionL: From Kandinsky to Pollock: The Art of the Guggenheim Collections. The show charts the pioneering collection that, along with works acquired by her uncle Solomon, Peggy built both in Europe and America – a story that follows the evolution of modern art through the free, stylistically experimental moment of the 1920s and 30s, the Second World War and the first American art movement of international importance.

“She changed the Americans with the Europeans when she moved to New York in 1941”, explains the curator of the exhibition, Luca Massimo Barbero, the assistant curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, when I ask him about the significance of Peggy’s collection. “Then, when she came back in 1947, she changed the Europeans with the Americans.”

Housed in the Palazzo Strozzi – a vast palace in the centre of Florence that dates back to the height of the Renaissance – the exhibition has a particular significance as it sees the return of 25 artworks from one of Peggy’s first exhibitions on her return to Europe, shown in 1949 in the basement of the palace, the Strozzina, before she found a permanent home for her collection in Venice.

Box in a Valise (Boîte en-valise)
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), 1941, leather valise containing miniature replicas and color reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one photograph with graphite, watercolor, and ink additions, 40.7 x 37.2 x 10.1 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553
Photo by Sergio Martucci © Succession Marcel Duchamp, by SIAE 2016

Although she did not initially set out for Europe with the intention of becoming a collector, it was a role that Peggy, having inherited part of the Guggenheim mining fortune after her father died heroically in the sinking of the Titanic, quickly fell into. With the guidance of Duchamp and Nelly van Doesburg, Peggy began collecting formally and, after the short-lived Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London, she set herself enthusiastically to the task forming a museum of modern art. By the end of her time in Europe, she was buying a painting a day.

Travelling back to New York, Peggy was accompanied by what was perhaps the greatest collection of modern art at the time – spanning Picasso’s quick etchings produced to raise funds for the Spanish Civil War, the surrealist paintings of Peggy’s future husband, Max Ernst, to Duchamp’s conveniently portable La Boîte-en-Valise (miniature reproductions of Duchamp’s iconic and pioneering conceptual works in a briefcase). These works joined the rest of Peggy’s collection at her new gallery, Art of This Century. When it opened in 1942, it was the first place many young American artists had encountered the European avant-garde.

Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst in the Surrealist gallery of Art of This Century, New York, 1942 ca. Left to right: Max Ernst, The Kiss (1927, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), and Zoomorphic Couple (1933, Peggy Guggenheim Collection). Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

“The gallery was open for only five years and it changed the history of American painting”, Barbero explains. “New York was ready for the new kind of art that Peggy brought from Europe, but her real strength was in believing in very young and fresh artists such as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell – a new generation .”

No artist, however, demonstrates Peggy’s effect on the arts – in enabling a transatlantic cultural exchange and in promoting artists – better than Jackson Pollock.

“If you look at Pollock’s early work, you can really see the influence of European surrealism”, Barbero explains, “but more than that, Peggy was the only one believing in Pollock at the time”. It was a belief that continued throughout Pollock’s life, with the artist being the only person to have a contract with Peggy and, after his untimely death in 1956, Peggy cemented Pollock’s status as a vital component of Abstract Expressionism by donating his works to libraries, museums and universities in America, as well as showing his works for the first time in Europe at Palazzo Strozzi, much to the chagrin of the local Florentines. “It was a complete scandal,” Barbero says, smiling.

Left: Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock in front of Mural, commissioned by Peggy to Pollock for her house in New York (1943, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, Gift Peggy Guggenheim). © Photo by George Kargar – Right: Peggy Guggenheim at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni with Alexander Calder, Arc of Petals (1941, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), behind her Jean Arp, Overturned Blue Shoe with Two Heels Under a Black Vault (1925, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), Venice, early 1950s. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Photo Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche. Gift, Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, 2005

Walking through the exhibition, past masterpieces from every period of the European and American avant-garde – from Georgio de Chirico’s 1916 The Gentle Afternoon to Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No.110, Easter Day from 1971 – it is clear that, perhaps more than any artist, no one had a greater influence on the history of modern art than Peggy. Although born into money and, compared to the artists she befriended, had a relatively ‘easy life’, it is quite possible that without Peggy’s patronage and support, many of the artists that are today regarded as pioneers of a new, experimental art, would never have found success.

Unlike her uncle Solomon, who collected from a distance, Peggy immersed herself in the avant-garde, her impassioned collecting a consequence of an insatiable lust for art and, ultimately, for life.

“She came to Europe in order to understand the avant-garde, and understanding means to live,” says Barbero. “She thrived in the melting-pot the avant-garde… never trying to please anyone and always informing the next generation.”

From Kandinsky to Pollock: The Art of the Guggenheim Collections runs until 24 July 2016 at the Palazzo Strozzi, Piazza degli Strozzi, 50123 Florence

Daydreaming With Stanley Kubrick

July 1, 2016November 6, 2016

Musician and dj James Lavelle talks to PORT about curating a new exhibition at London’s Somerset House that celebrates the legacy of Stanley Kubrick

Curated by James Lavelle, DJ and artist and founder of Mo’Wax record label and British band UNKLE,Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick is a new exhibition of works by contemporary artists who have been asked to shine new perspective on the iconic film director and his oeuvre. Viewers will be immersed in a multi-dimensional Kubrick experience, containing a wide variety of mediums and a soundtrack created specially for the event by Lavelle.

Here, Lavelle discusses the journey from music to curation, the impact 2001: A Space Odyssey had on him as a teenager, and Kubrick’s influence on his own music.

6. © Warner Bros. Pictures

You already have some curatorial experience behind you, having curated Meltdown Festival in 2014. How does one go from being a musician to an art curator?

It’s always a similar process – the way I make records comes from sample culture, so making music is like putting on a show. It’s a giant collage of trying to put unusual things together that somehow work. Djing is also creating a cohesive flow through different people’s arts, so it’s a similar process, whether it be music or culture.

Which film from Kubrick’s repertoire stands out for you and why?

2001: A Space Odyssey is the first Kubrick film I experienced as a young teenager. It was a life-changing experience for me and opened me up to his world; it heavily influenced my first album Psyence Fiction too.

The theme for this exhibition is based on Stanley Kubrick’s legacy. What sparked the idea?

I started the ‘Daydreaming’ series about five years ago, where I collaborated with artists and music from UNKLE. I wanted to take that idea into the Kubrick world, where artists and creatives from a wide range of influences and techniques could come together to create something special. Kubrick’s legacy is incredibly unique in that his impact is incredibly broad: from film technique through to set design, the language and the posters. It’s an extremely rich canvas to react to – I don’t think there are many other visionaries who had such a diverse influence on the world.

Left: 9. © Warner Bros.
Pictures, Right: 7. © Warner Bros. Pictures

How influential has Kubrick been for you, musically?

Hugely. He had such a unique way of using music and was incredibly progressive. For example, using classical music in a science fiction film and he was also the first person to use electronic music in a horror film. His musical process was so innovative and has been a massive influence for me and many others that I have worked with.

Since Kubrick passed, who have been the filmmakers that have caught your eye?

For me, the most interesting directors that spring to mind would be Paul Thomas Anderson, Jonathan Glazer, Alejandro González Iñárritu. As far as new directors, I would be really interested to see what Chris Cunningham would deliver as a feature film.

What part of the exhibition are you most excited for?

I am excited for the exhibition as a whole – it is very much about the whole experience rather than one piece. I am incredibly proud to be working with such amazing artists.

What is next for you?

Next for me is releasing a new UNKLE record and seeing where that takes me, as well as hopefully touring the Kubrick show.

Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick at Somerset House from July 6 until August 24 2016

Interview by Cécile Fischer

James Lavelle will also be performing with UNKLE on 17 July as part of Summer Series at Somersethouse.org.uk

Massimo Vitali: Life’s a Beach

May 24, 2016May 24, 2016

As a new exhibition of his beach photography opens in London, Massimo Vitali talks to PORT about the divide between documentary and art in contemporary photography

Standing three metres high on a purpose-built scaffold, Italian photographer Massimo Vitali scans the scene in front of him. Families, couples and groups of friends have arranged themselves on the beach below, sitting on towels or standing in the sea, indifferent to the quietly industrious artist and his assistants, who are busy setting up the large, cumbersome 11×14 camera. They hoist it into place, fixing it to the scaffold and sliding in the film, and leave Vitali to do his work. Without framing his shot, he opens the shutter.

It’s a “dance”, as Vitali calls it, that he has performed all over the world during the past 20 years, from his native Italy to Turkey and Brazil, invisibly recording those seeking the sun and an escape from the responsibilities of their daily lives. It is, as he tells me when I meet him in London, a form of social research – an artistic recording of place and people at leisure.

As his new exhibition of beach photographs opens at the Ronchini Gallery in London, Vitali speaks to PORT about why he swapped the drama and action of photojournalism for “non-events”, how his photographs function as a document of our times, and how using antiquated technology means he can hide in plain sight.

Massimo Vitali, Piscinão de Ramos, Brazil, 2013, chromogenic print on Diasec, 182 x 226 cm, courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery

You worked for some time as a photojournalist. How does that experience inform your work as a fine art photographer?

I don’t really believe in photojournalism; I think that contemporary photography has a better way to look at reality. I don’t want to concentrate on a little bit of drama when 10 feet away there is something else going on, which contrasts with the drama that the photojournalist may be focusing on. My idea is just to move back, to try to see everything in a much wider setting.

What interests you about normal life over the subjects you were capturing as a photojournalist?

In my pictures I look for non-events, because non-events are part of our daily lives. If you wanted to show what was life is like now to someone in 50 years’ time, it doesn’t really help to tell them what the Prime Minister once said, for example – it’s an event for that moment.

It doesn’t explain how we are and what we think. If you go to a place where you have a group of people who are enjoying their lives and nothing really happens, you have so many more clues as to what people are thinking, and what we are made of.

Massimo Vitali, Cefalu’ Orange Yellow Blue, 2008, direct analog print on Diasec mount, 180 x 230 cm, courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery

What clues do you look for in particular?

The clothes people are wearing, for one, but you also have the way people move, the way they divide the space and the other objects they bring to the beach. There’s also the grouping of people – I think that people group together in different ways from one year to the next. I find it very interesting. It’s not my job to explain these things, but I hope one day there will be people who take my pictures out and use them as a way to understand what was happening at that time.

How much do you let the scene play out in front of you and how do you attempt to frame it?

I’m really loose about the framing because I want to point out that reality runs on the right and the left of the frame. I frame it because my lens ends there. Reality doesn’t stop at the end of the picture, it goes on.

Massimo Vitali, Catania Under the Volcano, 2007, chromogenic print on Dibond, 152.4 x 182.8 cm, courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery

How do people react to being photographed by you?

At the beginning, 20 years ago, people would sometimes ask when I was putting the scaffolding up and they were mostly worried about whether it was television. When they found out it wasn’t television they didn’t care. Today the problem is non-existent because they don’t know what I’m doing…they don’t understand, even if you explain it to them. It’s so far from their world and their reality of taking a photograph on their phones that they don’t care.

Once I had been on a beach shooting all day, with nobody paying any attention. Then, for some stupid reason, I took a little camera from my assistant and walked around the beach, taking pictures close up. People really resented me taking their picture. They were aggressive when I was on the beach but they don’t care if you’re up on the scaffold.

Massimo Vitali, Cala Mariolu Coda, 2014, lightjet print from negative scan on photographic paper, Diasec mount with wooden frame, 180 x 220 cm, courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery

What’s the significance of you using a complicated analogue setup instead of a more convenient, modern one?

The difference between my picture and somebody else’s pictures is in their making. It is documentary photography, but it is also art and my real artistic contribution is the performative act of making the picture. I make a little dance and afterwards I get a picture that I sell, but the selling is secondary.

The real moment of creativity is when I take the picture. That is the important moment…it’s the key moment, because before that you need a van, the equipment, the assistants, the food the night before, etc. You have to coordinate, you have to put people together, you have to talk with everybody, you have to listen to what one says to the other. This little crew becomes like a small community and the pictures come out because all this works together.

You’ve been shooting these pictures for over two decades now. What conclusions have you drawn from your social research?

I notice many things, but it shouldn’t be me who analyses the images. I do my work and somebody else should interpret these pictures. I give some solid, big chunks of rocks and I put them on top of one another, but I don’t know where this wall is going – somebody else has to direct it.

Massimo Vitali runs at the Ronchini Gallery, 22 Dering Street, London until 18th June 2016

China’s Contemporary Art Village

March 2, 2017April 28, 2017

PORT heads to central China to discover the K11 Art Village – a new initiative of artists residencies incubating the next generation of young Chinese artists

Left: The K11 art village in Wuhan, China, Studio, Li Dapeng – Right: 2015 K11 Artist’s: From Left to Right:
Liu Chang, Wu Shangxuan, Wu Hui, He Rui, Kim Seung-in, Wu Qing, Cai Kai

In 1979, three years after the death of Chairman Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, his radical program of sociopolitical change, a group of artists mounted an impromptu exhibition on the railings outside the China Art Gallery in Beijing. Organised by the Stars group, whose members included a young Ai Weiwei, the show celebrated individuality and democracy in the face of the “drab uniformity of the cultural revolution,” in the words of abstract painter Ma Desheng. However, the day after the exhibition was hung, the city police ordered the artists to take it down.

Their subsequent protest march won the artists the right to show their work and their exhibition, viewed by 80,000 people, marked a watershed in Chinese art, breaking away from the restrictive figuration of the state-sanctioned socialist realist style. Although the Stars were forced by the state to disband in 1983, their achievements led to the groundbreaking 1989 China Avant-Garde Exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, the Political Pop and Cynical Realism movements of the 1990s, and the meteoric rise in curatorial and commercial interest in Chinese art, both locally and internationally.

The K11 art village in Wuhan, China, main entrance

Today the Chinese contemporary art market is the fastest growing in the world – surpassing the US in reported art sales in 2011 and with auction house leaders Sotheby’s and Christie’s opening in Beijing in 2012 and Shanghai in 2013, respectively. As China increasingly relaxes its relationship with the West, this growth in the art market appears set to continue. Yet, without a system to incubate and provide opportunity for young artists, such a fertile market risks exhausting its local talent.

“There are so many good artists coming out of China at the moment,” explains Adrian Cheng, a Hong Kong-born businessman and founder of the K11 shopping centres. “But if they have no opportunities, no platform, no one will ever hear about these artists. That’s where the K11 Art Foundation comes in.”

Despite the incredible success of Chinese contemporary art in the past few decades, the K11 Art Foundation (KAF) is one of the first initiatives to specifically nurture emerging talent in China. Founded in 2010, the KAF is a not-for-profit organisation that commissions emerging artists, giving them exposure alongside established artists, and by providing a platform for young curators. Following the ‘Art Malls’ in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which aim to widen an understanding of both domestic and international artists (exhibitions have included Claude Monet and Salvador Dalí) in the Chinese population, and a collaboration with major European institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the artist residencies at the K11 Art Village in Wuhan forms the next step in the KAF’s mission.

Left and right: Segmented Landscape, solo exhibition by Liu Chuang at the K11 Art Village – images courtesy of K11 Art Foundation

Wuhan is a two-hour flight west from Shanghai and its 10 million inhabitants make it the most populous region of central China. Positioned as a hub for artists from across greater China, the Art Village offers nearly 1,000sqm of space, divided into 11 studios and a gallery, for its year-long artists-in-residence programme. For Cai Kai, a video artist, his studio is an essential part of his creative process, providing a private, quiet place where he can concentrate on his work. “At the moment my video art is not profitable and I have to supplement it with design work,” he says, above the hum of the projector screening his films. “But if I didn’t have this space, I would find it difficult to make art in the first place.”

Cai Kai, Dissected Light, 2014, Projection installation, Dimension variable, Courtesy of the artist

Upstairs is the studio of Chen Shunlong, who keeps himself busy with the books, materials and tools he uses to make his abstract work, which is inspired by traditional Chinese techniques. “I’m very grateful for this studio”, he tells me when I ask what the Art Village means to him. “I have much more freedom than if I was with a gallery – I’m not contractually obligated to make work… I can experiment here”. Like Cai, he supplements his artistic career, lecturing at the nearby Hubei Polytechnic University, but he hopes to be able to continue professionally as an artist once he has completed his residency. “My work has really developed here and recently I had an auction of my work in Hong Kong which went very well, so I’m optimistic.”

Left: Chen Shunlong, Return 1, 2013, Experimental woodcut (gypsum sculpture), 184x122x10cm, Courtesy of the artist – Right: Chen Shunlong, Return 1, 2014, Woodcut, 184x122x10cm, Courtesy of the artist

Walking through the clean, wide corridors that separate the studios, yet to be decorated by an aggregate of paint drips and dented by trollies ferrying materials and artwork, I was struck by the absence of a political aspect to the work of the resident artists, when it had been so central to establishing contemporary art in China. Instead, what emerges from the work of these young artists, there is an emphasis on exploring the self, the individual, the nature of personal identity – perhaps a consequence of being raised under China’s one-child policy and reflecting the country’s increasingly globalised position in the world.

The personal over the political is a theme that runs through the work of He Rui, who explores a personal sense of reality and identity through performance and installation work. In one piece, for example, he returned to his hometown to take a stone, 1.8m in diameter, and polished it to the size of a pebble. In another work entitled Soulmate, He made a mould of his body, cast it in ice and, over the course of eight hours, naked and shivering, he embraced the sculpture until it melted and eventually collapsed. “I wanted to create a dialogue with my soul”, he explains.

He Rui, Soul Mate, 2015, Digital video, 4 minutes 58 seconds, Courtesy of the artist

In the few years that the K11 Art Village has been offering residencies, artists have already found success, exhibiting not only in Beijing and Shanghai, but in Norway, the Netherlands, Japan and at the Venice Biennale in Italy. It is clear that the Art Village plays an important role in incubating the next wave of young artistic talent in China. In giving artists the crucial time and space necessary to experiment and develop their style, and, by bringing together some of this vast country’s brightest young artists, the Village could come to engender new movements, shaping the future of Chinese art and therefore art around the world.

“We want to expose Chinese artists, domestically and internationally, we want to build a platform,” Cheng says. “But we also want to say Chinese artists are not just about China –it’s about being global. Art is about global, it’s not about being limited by one boundary or border.”

The Art of Fashion: Missoni Art Colour

May 17, 2016

PORT speaks to Luca Missoni about his new exhibition at the Fashion and Textiles Museum that charts how, for the past 60 years, the luxury Italian brand has found inspiration in early 20th century European art

The Forms of Fashion installation of Missoni garments dating from 1953 to 2014 at MISSONI, L’ARTE, IL COLORE, 2015

For the past 60 years, the luxury Italian clothing brand, Missoni, has been finding inspiration in the company’s extensive archive of Futurist, Abstract Expressionist and Orphist artwork – driving innovative new patterns and approaches to weaving.

Founded by Ottavio and Rosita Missoni in 1953 after the two met at the 1948 London Olympics, where Ottavio competed as a sprinter, the brand has since become a standard-bearer for luxury textiles and colourful knitwear. With such a long, rich history, Missoni’s archive needs constant attention – a responsibility that falls on Ottavio and Rosita’s son, Luca, now the artistic director of the Missoni Archive. His latest project, Missoni Art Colour, is a retrospective of Missoni’s work in the context of early 20th century European art, on show at the Fashion and Textiles Museum in Bermondsey, south London until 4th September 2016.

Left: Sonia Delaunay, Untitled, 1936, 64×46 cm, gouache on paper – Right: Ottavio Missoni, Senza titolo, 1971, 73 x 73 cm, acrylic on board. MISSONI, L’ARTE, IL COLORE

Now, six decades after first opening for business, Missoni has changed relatively little. “You can adapt the content to contemporary times,” Luca explains. “The way it looks may vary each season depending on the fashion but the overall concept, the aesthetic which emerges during textile development, is always at the core of our work. The first excitement is designing the textiles – that’s the speciality, the nature of the work. Then the fashion is the game, the environment.”

The exhibition showcases how artists such as Lucio Fontana, Sonia Delaunay and Gino Severini created art that brought about a new way of thinking about image, colour, composition and fabrics: “a new vision,” as Luca says. It also presents the unique process that Missoni used to knit artworks into textiles. There are over 60 works hung throughout the show – half of which are by Ottavio – plus previously unseen textiles, drawings, wall hangings, paintings and patchworks.

“My father liked to work on graph paper during the early 70s, then later he started the patchwork studies,” Luca says. “It was a way to understand how you conceive a textile, a composition of a weave.”

Left: Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, 1984. Photograph by Giuseppe Pino – Right: ‘La sala degli arazzi’ installation of Ottavio Missoni’s patchwork of knitted fabrics at MISSONI, L’ARTE, IL COLORE, 2015

In the main room, 42 mannequins stand in formation, rising up to the ceiling on platforms, each adorned in Missoni pieces that, in some cases, date back to the brand’s earliest days in the 50s. But Missoni Art Colour is not the brand’s first retrospective.

“We did one in 1978, which was our 25th anniversary,” Luca tells me. “My mother realised that we should look back on the brand, so she starting asking around friends and relatives, people who had old Missoni clothes and eventually gathered all these old pieces.”

Asked whether Abstract Expressionism and Futurism were the main art movements that influenced Missoni’s collections, Luca responds with certainty: “Definitely! They were important in a conceptual way – how colour and pattern could be perceived and experimented with. So my parents proposed that kind of vision into everyday clothing, not just costumes for a ballet or theatre.”

Enrico Prampolini, Composizione, 1952, 80×115 cm, oil on masonite

An artist who had a big effect on the Missoni aesthetic, in particular Rosita, was the Ukrainian-born French artist Sonia Delaunay, who (with her husband Robert Delaunay) formed the Orphism movement – a pure form of abstraction with a strong geometric sensibility and bold colours.

“Sonia Delaunay had an amazing influence on my mother’s formation,” Luca says. “Sonia’s use of geometry, line, shape and colour pushed Rosita to use the movement as inspiration for her textiles.”

Ottavio Missoni, Untitled, 1973, 173×98 cm, acrylic on board

As this exhibition makes clear, the breakthroughs of the Abstract Expressionist and Futurists artists in the beginning of the 20th century laid the foundations for the arts of the post-war era. As Luca explains, his parents were lucky – starting their business when they did, and finding such inspiration in the art of the recent past, they were able to make the most of an extremely “fertile, artistic and cultural situation”.

Missoni Art Colour runs until the 4th September 2016 at the Fashion and Textile Museum, 83 Bermondsey Street, London, Se1 3XF

Ways of Seeing: Hans-Ulrich Obrist

April 15, 2016April 18, 2016

Superstar curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist features in the second of five films profiling creatives at the top of their fields

Hans-Ulrich Obrist may well be the most famous curator working today. In November 2009, he was listed as number one on ArtReview’s list of the most important people in the art world, and his work as artistic director of London’s Serpentine Gallery has seen him play a vital role in developing and shaping contemporary art today. In 2008 he published A Brief History of Curating, the first comprehensive study of his field, while at the same time he has worked to widen participation in the arts at the Serpentine with the themed Marathon series and the annual architectural commission, the Serpentine Pavilion.

Here, in the second film from ourWays of Seeing series, exploring the unique perspectives of six influential creatives, Obrist, sporting Paul Smith opticals, muses on what being a curator means in the 21st century.

See below for more from the Ways of Seeing series.

Hans-Ulrich wears acetate opticals PAUL SMITH at DAVID CLULOW

Film Credits

Director Dean G Moore
Producer Anthony Le Breton
Director of Photography Chris Ferguson
Editor Tom Sweetland
Creative Direction Black Sheep Studios
Styling Alex Petsetakis
Styling Assistant Amii Mcintosh
Grooming Liz Daxauer at Caren using Tom Ford Grooming
Port Production Director Nick Rainsford

Rolling Stones : Off The Hook

April 2, 2016April 1, 2016

Gered Mankowitz, trusted photographer of the Rolling Stones, shares memories from his early times on tour with the band

When we started planning Off The Hook I was keen to try to mount an exhibition that was different to any other show I had done of my photographs of the Rolling Stones. I wanted the scale to be different. We are presenting everything big – from the panoramic print of Mick, Keith and Brian in the back of the limo taking us into New York City in October ’65, to a giant contact strip of three of the infamous Between the Buttons out-takes, taken on Primrose Hill in November 1966.

My first session with the band was in early 1965 and included taking passport photos that were intended for their US visas. After a day shooting the band, taking pictures that would end up on album sleeves, single-bags, adverts and in the press, I found the challenge of taking these passport portraits far more intimidating than any other part of the entire day. The results stayed hidden for decades. Now, over 50 years after they were taken, I believe they have an innocence and an honesty that we never could have imagined at the time.

The Off the Hook exhibition runs at the Snap Gallery from the 1st April until the 28th May

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider and the Cells

March 22, 2016April 11, 2016

Ahead of the Guggenheim Bilbao’s new Louise Bourgeois exhibition, we speak to the late artist’s former assistant and friend, Jerry Gorovoy, about her extensive body of work

Louise Bourgeois inside (Articulated Lair) (Coll.: MoMA, New York) in 1986 Photo: © Peter Bellamy © The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid

Sometimes an Artist is seen with a capital A – a solitary figure, glorified as somewhat of a magician. We often ignore the web of helpers around the artist – those who promote and protect the work.

Louise Bourgeois was an Artist – articulate, witty, mysterious and extraordinary. A video of her peeling a tangerine on YouTube, cutting a figure with a flick of a scalpel, has been watched 78,000 times. There are films of her smashing sculptures, claiming to be a ‘wild beast’, discussing philosophy, family, the past. Always mischievous, she once avoided an interviewer’s insistent questions by hiding her face behind a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and abandoning the bewildered journalist in her studio.

In these films, there is often a voice off-screen mediating and continuing the conversation. To this voice, there is no ‘No Trespassing’ sign raised. This is Jerry Gorovoy – Louise Bourgeois’s long-term assistant and friend, and the greatest promoter of her work.

In and Out, 1995 Metal, glass, plaster, fabric and plastic Cell: 205.7 x 210.8 x 210.8 cm Plastic: 195 x 170 x 290 cm Collection The Easton Foundation Photo: Christopher Burke © The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid

They met in New York in 1980, when Louise was 68, and somewhat unknown in the art scene. Jerry explains, “She had an underground reputation for various reasons – for her own psychological frailty and the art world at the time. When I met her it was the end of Greenbergian formalism. The relationship to image-making, sexuality, politics was coming into the fore. And Louise came into the forefront at that point.”

Spider, 1997 steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber, silver, gold and bone 449.6 x 665.5 x 518.2 cm Collection The Easton Foundation Photo: Maximillian Geuter © The Easton Foundation/ VEGAP Madrid

Their friendship began unpromisingly – with a fight. As a young gallery assistant, Jerry had the opportunity to produce his own show, in which he included one of Louise’s sculptures. Upon seeing her work in the gallery, she was displeased at it’s placing. Jerry took her for a cup of coffee, calmed her down, and on the way back to the gallery, she fell on the cobblestones. Jerry helped her up. Later on, he was invited to her house, discovering decades of extraordinary work. He went on to work continuously with her for the next thirty years and now runs the Easton Foundation that is responsible for her collection.

Without Jerry, Louise might not be as well-known as she is now. He explains that for her, showing and exhibitions were always secondary to the emotional spark that fuelled the work. “Louise had trouble showing – if you look at her career, she had three shows in the 40s, and then she didn’t show for another 11 years,” he says. “She didn’t need to have an exhibition. Louise needed to make the work to stay alive.”

Cell (The last climb), 2008 Steel, glass, rubber, thread and wood 384.8 x 400.1 x 299.7 cm Collection National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Photo: Christopher Burke © The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid

In the new exhibition at the Bilbao Guggenheim, Louise’s series, Cells, which she began in her eighties and continued until close to the end of her life, are exhibited together. “With the Cells, it was the first time that she started to incorporate objects that belonged to her with things that she had made,” says Jerry. The cells are enclosed – often the viewer can only see shadows, reflections, blurred views through a cracked window. The result is affecting – the viewer becomes hungry for detail, each gaze contains another secret, something possibly missed. Louise was a very controlled artist – even in a gallery she wanted her work to retain the intensity it gains from asking the viewer to enter a small room, to focus in a large space. “She developed this architecture to encase. She set up the coordinates to control the poetic, symbolic world that she created,” says Jerry.

Walking through the gallery, there are repeated motifs, symbols. It becomes like walking through a dream – a dream that doesn’t drift away, but settles solidly in the mind. The cells are the definition of uncanny – a world familiar and strange at once. As Jerry tells me, the start of a work for Bourgeois was always emotion. “The start is autobiographical. Louise always said the emotions she’s dealing with are universal – fear of being rejected, fear of being different, fear of being abandoned. The idea of jealousy. These are all pre-gender emotions.”

Cell (Choisy), 1990-93 Marble, metal and glass 306.1 x 170.2 x 241.3 cm Collection Glenstone Photo: Maximilian Geuter © The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid

Louise is often seen as a feminist artist, although she did not call herself one. Her work is extremely personal and often focusses on female sexuality and motherhood. Jerry explains, “There’s a consistency in the emotional and psychological tenor – you’re dealing with the problems of a woman and her anxieties. She did not like the surrealists – because she always said surrealists use women as objects. Louise always said she wanted to make the woman a subject.”

Louise Bourgeois grew up in France, daughter of an unfaithful father who had an affair with her live-in English tutor and an ill mother. Louise’s work often evokes a child’s perspective – each object has the charm, the strangeness, of an object that would appeal to a child. It is almost like the cells are boxes pulled from beneath a bed, a collection of hidden treasures. “They’re objects that had meaning for her. The perfume she wore throughout her life – Chalet Mara. The scent brought back memory. The tapestry – she came from a tapestry family. These are things that held meaning for her, that she thought had value,” says Jerry.

Red Room (Child), 1994 (detail) Wood, metal, rubber, fabric, marble, glass and mirror 247.7 x 426.7 x 424.2 cm Private Collection, courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Maximilian Geuter © The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid

Jerry often slips into the present tense when discussing the work of Louise, who passed away in 2010. It is easy to see why – the work feels very much awake. The objects do not seem dusty or static, rather, it as if they have just been tilted, or straightened, by an unseen hand.

“Louise always said she was on an itineraire unique, or a journey without a destination. She wasn’t always going in the right direction. She didn’t know where she was going. She’s not starting with a concept. She’s not interested in honing a style, she’s not interested in repeating herself. It’s like a diary – she’s recording how she’s feeling at that particular moment, that particular day. I feel that she was very honest in that way. And unafraid.”

Cell II, 1991 (detail) Painted wood, marble, steel, glass and mirror 210.8 x 152.4 x 152.4 cm Collection Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Photo: Peter Bellamy © The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid

Louise Bourgeois, especially towards the end of her life, suffered from anxiety. She did not often leave her Brookyln studio (a converted sewing factory, many parts of which are included in the architecture of the cells).

“One of the things for Louise was that, when you’re very fearful, it was almost like camouflage. You blend into the world. When you’re anxious, the inside world and the outside world become the same. They merge.” Jerry says. “What you’re projecting – your mind, anxiety, it becomes overwhelming. And you can’t distinguish between what’s coming from inside you and from without.”

“Louise always said if you confess everything, then you have nothing to fear,” says Jerry. As we pass the Passage Dangereux, I note a miniature spider in the corner, one I had not seen before. Jerry explains, “The spiders are a relationship to her mother but also to her own body. The threads – you build your own architecture. That’s what the web is about. Someone breaks the web, the spider will rebuild it,” he pauses. “She continually rebuilt her own world as a way of surviving.”

Passage Dangereux, 1997 Metal, wood, tapestry, rubber, marble, steel, glass, bronze, bones, flax and mirrors 264.2 x 355.6 x 876.3 cm Private Collection, courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Maximilian Geuter © The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid

“Towards the end one of my roles was to say, “Okay, you do the work, I’ll take care of the exhibition. You don’t need to.” She’s always said being anonymous was great – she described herself as undisturbed. It saved her from falling into what she saw as a trap for other artists.”

There are always multiple narratives coexisting in a Bourgeois work – a child’s perspective, the adult analysing those emotions and, finally, the artist translating the emotion into image, into story, into the abstract. The iconic spider that Louise is most famous for is a symbol for so much – the mother, the spy, the weaver. Perhaps most apparent – the spider is a protector. Louise valued protection. And Jerry, in his lifelong commitment to her work and vision, could perhaps be the most valuable spider of her collection.

The exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence; the Cells, will run at the Guggenheim Bilbao until September 2016

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