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!

November News

The invitations for Open Studios are hot off the press and winging their way around the globe. If you know of someone who would like an invitation mailed to them then please let us know via the website.

The event has been featured in the Westminster Arts bulletin and also in the ResCard autumn edition - more press to come.

We also get our annual mention in the Time Out Shopping Guide; sandwiched this year between Frieze Art Fair and the Hidden Art Fair.




The New York Times recently ran a piece in their travel section about spending 36 hours in the Bahamas (as you do). One of their top tips was to go and see Blue Curry's work at the National Gallery in Nassau.

I missed this reportage off the October news by mistake - it was taken at the show Happy Days part curated by Katherine Lubar and featuring studio artists Nick Dawes and David Ben White.



New Works by Clare Parry, Yukako Shibata, Laura Green, Sarah Dwyer and Jo Chate held in the gallery space at Great Western Studios was also a roaring success. The photos though make it look as if no-one was there which is far from the reality of the night.




Sarah Dwyer's show Something there Somewhere opened on Tuesday this week and continues through to December 21st; the venue is The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology HQ, 125 Charing Cross Road.

Mat Sant's exhibition of his new work took place in the gallery at Great Western Studios last week. Phenomenally well attended, the show looked great and had a real buzz about it.



Tarka Kings works in the studio outpost but this month has a show of her work opening at the Fine Art Society. Leading up to this she has garnered 2 bits of press for the exhibition; one in Vogue and the other in Grove.





I have finally received delivery of the two copies of turps banana magazine I ordered an age ago . . . and it was worth it. Issue One features an article written by Neal Tait on Luc Tuymans and Issue Three has David Ben White interviewing Luc Tuymans. So . . . if you see the two of them together in the corridors of the studios you can probably make an educated guess as to what they are talking about.



Mary Grant is having a busy old time. She is off to Art Ireland for November 15th & 16th. After that she has a solo show at Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Moore and last month the Jill George gallery were exhibiting her work at the Toronto Art Fair.

At the risk of running with a generalisation, the Japanese love a bit of Zakee Shariff. So much so that Make Art Your Zoo created a temporary installation in Tokyo in her honour - it was actually more of a renegade-guerilla-stand-alone-store-type-thing. Had you been in Tokyo and entered the hallowed portals of the store and you could have bought more things bearing the Zakee Shariff hallmarks than you would have thought possible - tableware, clothes, toys, accessories, sneakers and clouds; ok, the clouds thing is a lie but I'm sure she's working on it.




Julie Goldsmith's show, Gas Lane, curated by the dynamic duo of Simon Dawe and Danny Wootton, at the Water Point was a blast.



The Diaspora Gallery are taking Lynn Parotti's work to Art Basel Miami which takes place from December 4th - 9th.



Our ex-pat artist in Houston, Gabriela Trzebinski, has work in a group show titled Little Known Facts at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston. The group exhibition opens on November 16th and runs until January 5th.

Lastly - as if there wasn't enough talent in the studios for Open Studios there are also our lovely guest exhibitors: Anna Steinberg, Mizuyo Yamashita, Emma-Kate Francis, Virginia Dorey, Vanessa Cohen and Huggermuggers.

October News

At the risk of everyone getting bored of this - GWS Open Studios is on December 1st & 2nd this year. If you get this newsletter link by e-mail you will get an e-invite in November - if you access the blog independently and want an e-invite please drop me an e-mail.

There, reminder over.

We are nearly at the end of playing host to an exhibition of work by Kevin Parissien. The mixture of painting and sculpted works ran from October 8th and continues until October 17th.



After this a group of 4 current studio artists and one ex-of-the-studios are putting together a show that will run from October 29th until November 4th. The artists involved are, in alphabetical order, Jo Chate, Sarah Dwyer, Laura Green, Clare Parry and Yukako Shibata and the exhibition will take place in the gallery space at the studios.




Coming up are a slew of studio artist exhibitions in the capital. Sarah Dwyer's show Something There Somewhere opens on November 13th and runs untli December 21st at The Gallery on Charing Cross Road.



Sean Alexander has a piece of his work in an exhibition at Cosh on Berwick Street where all the works take the humble rabbit as a starting point. If you can get to the show you can also meet 2 very sweet rabbits, one white and one black. It's worth going for that alone.



Lynn Parotti had new work in a group show at the RAC from September 24th until October 12th.



Cristina Rodriguez's exhibition at the Chelsea Arts Club is still up and viewable until October 29th.


Julie Goldsmith has a forthcoming exhibition (curated and produced by the dynamic duo of Simon Dawe and Danny Wootton of Wootton Dawe enterprises) at the Water Point in King's Cross. The opening is on Halloween . . . . which seems rather apt for Julie's mystical creatures. If you haven't been to the Water Point before it may be advisable to take a map - see below for location.





The behemoth that is über chic retailer Toast continues to garner press for Brickett Davda's ceramics - this time in Elle Decoration.



In demand illustrator, Alice Tait, has been slaving over a whole host of illustration commissions of late. As well as her weekly illustration for the FT she has also illustrated the type for the Charlotte Church autobiography, the cover of The People of Privilege Hill and a piece for the Australian magazine Gourmet Traveller




The art jamboree has been in town for Frieze, Zoo et al. Those with keen eyes may well have spotted the following Great Western Studios' artists: Darren Almond, Neal Tait, Katy Moran, Jeremy Dickinson, Justin Hibbs.

Zakee Shariff is one of three artists who have been selected by Early Griffin to launch their ongoing series of artist screenprints. They are producing a limited edition run of 50 of each work - and you can get your print here.


Kate Gibb's relationship with the music industry continues apace; she has recently finished working with Patrick Duffy of No Days Off on a campaign for raved about artist Sonny J.



Vogue magazine features 2 studio creatives this month. Fromental are featured in an article about the trends in silk and Jo Ratcliffe has art directed a shoot on new fragrances.





Back in the annals of time - a couple of weeks ago - Fashion Week hit London. Before After continued their longstanding working relationship with Anya Hindmarch by designing her show space for the week. The space they used is to be one of 2 new London stores for the renowned handbag and shoe designer - so, on the theme of producing a Blueprint for the store, they put together the space.




Anne Musso crops up in World of Interiors this month in an article on bowls.



Finally, long standing friend of the studios Willy Borrell has, once again, been up to good/no good depending on your take on the situation. He has featured in the Holy Moly mailout not once, not twice, but three times since he last graced these pages. The finest of his missives can be seen here.