New Art / Tommi Toija

July 29, 2009 | New Art | by Gerry Mak |

The child-like figures in Tommi Toija’s sculptures and installations have a certain Mr. Bill-like quality about them with their blank eyes and perplexed expressions. Read more

New Art / Katherine Mangiardi

July 7, 2009 | New Art | by Ilana Kohn |

I learned of the work of New York artist Katherine Mangiardi from the Merchant’s House Museum of all places. So appropriate. Mangiardi’s paintings of lace are unbelievably haunting, like the delicate, filmy fabric of a ghost, or like the painfully decaying lace of an antique dress. I also found her fabric installations at various historic museums around the East Coast rather beautiful. I find the idea of being able to set up an installation in a historic house pretty intriguing. Read more

New Art / Mark Dean Veca

June 13, 2009 | New Art | by Ron English |

This is at last the artist the 1960s was desperately trying to produce. Mark Dean Veca’s installations electrify galleries and museums with an ethereal pop ecstasy the previous generation only dreamed of. This is the drug we have all been waiting for. Read more

New Design / Jaime Pitarch

November 22, 2008 | New Design | by Gerry Mak |

Jaime Pitarch’s sculptures and installations made from found objects and discarded junk — furniture, clothes pins, kitchen knives, electric guitars, cocktail umbrellas — as well as video elements, are sort of 21st-century Dada pieces that defy gravity and rattle our conception of the physical universe. Driven by an incessant need to question reality after a traumatic attempt to save a drowning woman in 1996, Pitarch minimalist aesthetic belies the nearly tantric approach he has to his work. Read more

New Art / Mosstika

November 21, 2008 | New Art | by Francis Andrews |

Edina Tokodi is a Hungarian artist strutting her stuff on the streets of Brooklyn, using a few licks of moss to create largely nature-focused imagery. The works adorn both the exterior and interior of buildings – she’s done a number of installations – but it’s her new take on street art that is raising eyebrows. A little quirk: the moss continues to grow after she’s fixed the piece. That’ll bring the streets alive if anything does.

Cool Travel / Britain’s poshest squat

November 20, 2008 | Cool Travel | by Francis Andrews |

I’m all for squatting. The thought of hundreds of houses standing empty in London, because the owners can’t be bothered either to fix it up and sell it, or lease it, or because they’ve got too much wonga to limit themselves to one house, just sounds plain greedy. So it was with delight that I learned that a group calling themselves Da! Collective had made their home in a £6 million mansion in London’s uber-exclusive Mayfair area, and are (allegedly) in the process of turning it into a walk-in art installation. It’s been reported all over the UK news, but still no word from its owners who are holed up in the Virgin Islands. Poor them. Similarly, I was equally chuffed to hear of these guys who are turning squatting in London into a conscientious business.

New Art / Jan Vormann

November 19, 2008 | New Art | by Julia Hennock |

A brick of any other kind would look as sweet, believes artist Jan Vormann. She began filling crumbling walls with multi-coloured Lego bricks in Bocchignano, a little village close to Rome, and was then invited to continue her rainbow reparations in Tel Aviv and Yaffo. Beautiful appropriation or ugly sacrilege?

New Events / Trailblazers reach Sydney

November 16, 2008 | New Events | by Michelle Wilding |

The controversial and multifaceted International contemporary art exhibition Trailblazers hits Sydney this month. Boutwell Draper Gallery will grace multimedia works by pioneering Australian, American and European artists from November 19 onwards. I’m thrilled to see groundbreaking pieces by Ben Frost, Kill Pixie, Copyright and Cleon Patterson [above], to name a few. The vast array of paintings, photography, sculpture, installation, video and digital arts is on display until December 13. C’mon, you know you want to culture your soul.

New Art / Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Over The River project

November 13, 2008 | New Art | by Francis Andrews |

In the same vein as Andy Goldsworthy, the landscape for Christo and Jean Claude is a canvas. The husband and wife team, renowned for their 1969 piece — Wrapped Coast — and early 1980s Surrounded Coast series, are still going strong with their project in Akansas entitled Over the River. The sketches are ambitious, but that’s never deterred them before. What they plan is the suspension of fabric panels over the Arkansas River, following its changing course for over 5.9 miles, ‘interrupted by bridges, rocks, tress, and bushes and for aesthetic reasons, creating abundant flows of light.” The project will be unveiled (or veiled?) during a period of two consecutive weeks between mid-July and mid-August of any given year in the future, in 2012 at the earliest.

New Events / Roger Hiorns

November 7, 2008 | New Events | by Francis Andrews |

There’s a cool little exhibition going on in London at the moment. In an abandoned apartment in the south of the city, Roger Hiorns has turned the idea of sculpture inside out, covering the walls of a room with copper sulphate solution which, after a few weeks, transformed into bright blue copper sulphate crystals. Whether there’s any political message in covering a room in crystals in Elephant and Castle, certainly one of London’s less affluent neighbourhoods, has been left open to debate.

New Trends / Fawad Khan

November 6, 2008 | New Trends | by Gerry Mak |

Though his colourful murals, installations, and drawings look playful and whimsical, at the heart of Fawad Khan’s work is a dark and complex political struggle with violence and identity that takes place through, on, and in, public vehicles. The New York-based artist was raised in Pakistan and speaks of being ridiculed when he was a child as he boarded a bus in Karachi for being born in Libya. The vehicles Khan renders and replicates are not only symbols of place and authority (the New York City cab and the US mail truck) and gathering places (public buses), but also have become weapons, as the constant news of car bombs reminds us every day. Read more

New Events / Patrick Blanc’s Melbourne Vertical Garden

September 9, 2008 | New Events | by Zolton |

Patrick Blanc’s first public Vertical Garden installation in the Southern Hemisphere is an initiative undertaken as part of the Melbourne International Design Festival. Read more

New Events / David Byrne’s Playing the Building

June 16, 2008 | New Events | by Gerry Mak |

I recently got to see David Byrne’s installation piece, Playing the Building, at the Battery Maritime Building in lower Manhattan. It was opening day, but I got there on the early side, and everything was pretty well organized, so it wasn’t too difficult or slow to get in. The piece is pretty straightforward – it’s an antique organ that is attached to the building via an array of pneumatic and electrical tubes that connects each key to a pipe, pillar, or metal beam. Read more

New Art / Joshua Harris on his subway grates artwork

April 15, 2008 | New Art | by Marcos Chin |

New York-based artist Joshua Harris makes movable sculptural artwork out of plastic bags, harnessing the air from subway grates to give them a sense of life. Read more

New Art / Maya Hayuk

April 14, 2008 | New Art | by Kate Barnett |

The home page of artist Maya Hayuk’s website is confronting. So many choices, each so nicely presented in their own little square. Read more