March News

For one fleeting moment, Los Angeles, seemed to be the centre of Great Western Studios life in February. A collision of unexpected coincidences. Sean Alexander had some work in the first show in LA to be put together by Adrian Palengat since Apart traded in life on Portobello (via life on Westbourne Grove) to life just off Venice Beach. If Sean was there then that explains why Alice Tait (soon to be Alexander) was there. Joining the private view for the show were Jo Ratcliffe, Felicity Warbrick and Lizzie Deshayes. The latter 2 being there courtesy of Lizzie's company, Fromental, installing some of their wallpaper.





Later in the month, ex-Great Westerner, Toby Ziegler had a solo show with Patrick Painter also in LA; and the city has also fairly recently been made the home of also-ex-Great Westerner, Sarah Stitt. For Sarah's take on Hollywood life you can read her excellent blog here.

It turns out that Sean's work in the exhibition has been attracting the attention of another ex-pat.



Still on foreign soils, the work of Fromental was featured in the April edition of Elle Decoration in the home of a Milan stylist.



Back in London it is David Ben White month. His work is featured in a 3 man show entitled Planetarium at APT Gallery in Deptford which runs until March 24th.



In collaboration with Justin Hibbs he has also co-curated another exhibition, Working Space, at the Arts Gallery at 65 Davies Street, W1. This group show of 5 artists, including David and Justin opens on Monday March 17th and runs until April 18th; it is open Monday - Friday from 9.30- 18.30 each day.



Mary Grant is heading (north)Westward again for the Art Ireland Fair, and will be exhibiting works that she did when she was last in Kerry.



The ever expanding slew of Art Fairs includes the Affordable Art Fair which is on this weekend (March 16/17) in Battersea Park. Foss Fine Art will be featuring Liza Campbell's dark, comic boxes on their stand.

Also taking place this weekend, but in sunnier climes, is the Transforming Spaces tour in the Bahamas; while I don't quite understand how it works, Lynn Parotti's work will feature somewhere along the way.



Last months Sound and Vision event at Abbey Rd Studios featured work by Kate Gibb and Tommy Penton and was reported in the Independent.



Meanwhile, the second, house and home collection by Toast, once again features Brickett Davda's work. Their classic, muted tableware found a place in April's edition of Country Living.



Lastly a request of assistance:

Westminster City Council is developing a new Strategy for Arts & Culture. A consultation draft can be found on the following page of the council's website.

We welcome your comments on the draft. There are consultation questions at the beginning of the document for you to respond to. The deadline for all responses is 20th March 2008. Please send comments to cfergusson@westminster.gov.uk with the words ‘Strategy Consultation’ in the subject heading.

February News

The London Art Fair came and went last month - Great Western Studios artists that I saw at the fair but missed off last months preview included Estelle Thompson at Purdy Hicks and Jan Coutts on Quantum Contemporary's stand.

Emily Young filled the role of featured artist of the fair with her monumental piece howl sited outside the venue and according to the Islington Gazette, the local chatterati are clamouring for the work to be permanently sited there.



The White Cube press department swung into full action last month to promote the show of Darren Almond's work at their Hoxton Square site. With the might of the gallery behind him the press was wide and far-reaching. Breathe deeply . . . there were articles in . . . Art Review, Time Out, the Independent, Vogue, Evening Standard and a very favourable review by Adrian Searle in the Guardian.













The concurrent show at Parasol Unit on Wharf Road is on until March 30th. Alongside the exhibitions there are no less than 3 catalogues/monologues on Darren hitting the bookshelves. Terminus is available from Amazon, and the other 2 are available from White Cube and Parasol respectively.

Jeremy Dickinson has an exhibition of New Paintings opening at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo. The show runs from March 8th until April 5th.



In lands not quite so far away Olivia Musgrave currently has a show with Jorgensen Art in Dublin. The show opened on February 12th and runs until March 1st.



Laura Green was triumphant in the Artsway Open exhibition coming away as the winner with the promise of a solo show there later this year. She has also been shortlisted for the Guasch Coranty International Painting Prize in Barcelona.



Brickett Davda's work is still the darling of the interior stylists - their bud range was first designed back in 1998 and still crops up in glossy magazines with amazing frequency.





The Untitled Gallery are once again featuring Faye Haskins' work in a show at the Adam Street Members Club, which lies just off Strand. Don't pick me up on this, I'm right, the road is Strand not the Strand - check out wikipedia if you don't believe me. Anyway . . . although the show featuring Faye's work is already up and in full swing the private view is on February 19th.

The private view for Rachel Schwalm's inaugural show at Beaux Arts on Cork Street took place at the end of January - textile/design wonderwoman Neisha Crosland bringing a dash of celebrity to the proceedings. Rachel's show is up until February 23rd and has an accompanying catalogue.



Sophie Smallhorn's work for the new offices of Body and Soul in Clerkenwell is featured (and bastardized for their graphic design inspiration) in this months onoffice magazine. A niche publication - but a niche that occasionally comes up trumps.



At the city out post of Jake Miller's East End Approach Gallery is a group painting show which includes a number of Neal Tait works.



Lastly, David Ben White is taking part in a 3 man show titled Planetarium at APT gallery in Deptford. The show opens on March 6th and runs until March 26th.

January News

The New Year news starts with a further look back at Open Studios - Sam Robinson, studio archivist extraordinaire, took the pictures below.















Not documented in quite the same way was the Great Western Studios carol sing-a-long held in December. It was quite a night - I don't suppose many other staff Christmas parties could boast being serenaded by Jonny Borrell, the bassist from the Libertines and Bronagh Gallagher from the Commitments - this isn't to say that they outshone the resident studio choral talent, which was both broad and largely unexpected.

The London Art Fair Opens later this week at the Business Design Centre in Islington. The show will include work by Rachel Schwalm on the Beaux Arts stand, Cristina Rodriguez on the Art Movement stand and David Worthington on the Crane Kalman stand.



Outside the fair will stand Howl, a new piece by Emily Young, who is represented inside the fair by the Fine Art Society.



Rachel Schwalm also has a solo show with Beaux Arts opening at the end of January in their Cork Street gallery. The show opens on January 30th and runs until February 23rd.

Darren Almond has two major solo shows opening on the same night this week. At Parasol Unit his show, Fire Under Snow, runs from January 18th through to March 30th. His show at White Cube, in Hoxton Square, is titled Moons of Iapetus Ocean, and runs from the same date until February 23rd.





A slew of reviews will no doubt follow and will appear here in the next newsletter - in the meantime, ahead of the pack, you can read about his White Cube show, courtesy of The Times, here, and a short entry from the Guardian Guide below.



A group show at Tate Britain, as part of the Art Now programme, will feature work by Katy Moran. Titled Art Now: Strange Solution the exhibition opens on February 1st and runs until April 13th.






Purdy Hicks Gallery has work by Estelle Thompson in their current group show, Tipping Point, alongside paintings by Estelle are works by Agnes Martin and Barry Thompson among others.



Giles Phelps and Chris Burridge, aka Slipmode, have been very busy boys. They have been working with Albion Brand Comnmunications on a multi-client project for 3, Skype and Hutchinson which featured on 600 still advertising sites across the country together with some animated sites as well.



They have also been working on a 20 minute documentary film about, local superstar photographer, Jürgen Teller for Specialten.



Faye Haskins has a solo show with the Untitled Gallery at the Adam Street Club which runs from February 4th until March 2nd.



Finally, Blue Curry, is in a group show (setups, situations, solutions) at Popopstudios in the Bahamas until February 10th . . . if you happen to be in the area.

December News

Open Studios on December 1st & 2nd was a roaring success - we had to operate a one-in one-out policy on car park spaces on both days, the building was relatively warm for once, and, from what I can gather, quite a lot of sales were made. Further photographs will be updated to the website, but a taster of the event is shown below.






Huggermuggers, one of our guest exhibitors, have written of their first Open Studios experience on their blog - read all about it here.

Grove magazine featured a lovely piece on the event in their December issue - profiling 9 people who were exhibiting at Open Studios: Mole Browne, Jo Ratcliffe, Lisa Jones, Jacqui Roche, William Warbrick, Mary Grant, Pip Hackett, Dan Hopwood and Huggermuggers.



Away from the studios Mr Lisa Jones Cards aka Edward Underwood has work in a group exhibition at Camden Arts Centre called Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring. He finds his work exhibited alongside such illustrious names as Lynn Chadwick, Hans Coper, Alberto Giacometti, Jenny Holzer and Franz West.



Mrs Lisa Jones Cards, aka Lisa Jones, has had some recent press in Japanese magazine Spoon.




If your German is good enough you can read about Open Studios, and the work of Julie Goldsmith, Melissa Hunt and Sandra Shashou in the article from Stern Magazine below. The tenet of the piece is an exploration of shopping destinations in London that are off the beaten track of most tourists.



Katy Moran's gallery Stuart Shave/Modern Art have given Katy the prestigious honour of having a solo exhibition of her work at the Basel Art Fair Miami Beach, which took place at the beginning of December. In the back log of reading that I put aside when gearing up for Open Studios I also came across an article on the Art Market in Wallpaper which featured one of Katy's paintings.





Natasha Laflin has work in a group show at Subway Gallery which opened on December 6th and runs until January 5th. If you haven't been to the Subway Gallery before then you might need some direction - it is in the subway (see what they did there) underneath Edgware road if you are transferring from one of the Edgware Road stations to the other.



While some couples may have made mixtapes for each other back in the early days of courting (and in the Eighties/Nineties - surely it must be cds and mp3 files now?) - Zakee Shariff and Al Fingers are continuing this fine tradition - Al has produced a mixtape in response to Zakee's recent Stardust collection - you can listen to his selection on his website or purchase it from Juno Records.



Liza Campbell has work in a show held at Cavaliero Finn in Dulwich leading up to Christmas.

The far-reaching talents of Jo Ratcliffe have recently been requistioned by the Hong Kong shopping mecca that is Lane Crawford. Jo's Christmas dressing of the shop includes a huge chandelier structure as well as the store's windows.




Wallpaper have also singled out Jo for inclusion in a lunch they hosted, and documented, for London's young creative talent.



The Sway Open exhibition in, funnily enough, Sway in Hampshire features work by Laura Green. The exhibition is open until February 10th next year.

Meanwhile Sarah Dwyer is in an exhibition titled Notting Heaven at Sartorial Contemporary Art on Kensington Church Street until January 19th.

Happy Holidays and best wishes for 2008!