Arts/Music Around London Reviews

Ver strange exhibition but I quite enjoyed the experience It’s a bit of a stretch to think of painting as a kind of archaeology, especially if you’re doing it backwards, covering instead of uncovering. But somehow, in Shaan Syed’s small show of just four abstract paintings, it makes sense. These big canvases function as a sort of cultural dig, a scraping away of the artist’s own personal identity. Half-Pakistani, half-English, raised in Canada, Syed is made up of a lot of clashing elements, conflicting signifiers and traits that he uses his art to make sense of. Very colour starnge show Vardaxoglou, Soho 30 Aug15 Sept 2023

Excited to see this exhibition but left very disappointed Two big things you might not be aware of: the planet’s dying, and we spend too much time looking at screens. Well, good thing American artist Sarah Sze is here to really ram all that down your throat in her new Artangel installation, where she’s taken over an abandoned Victorian waiting room above Peckham Rye station. She’s welded steel rods together into the shape of a globe and filled it with dozens of screens. They show volcanoes, traffic, wildlife and furnaces. Behind it, wires are twisted into branches as projectors spin around them. The whole thing feels like you’re browsing infinite tabs, doom-scrolling the apocalypse, exploring a desktop exploding with a billion screenshots and a mess of folders. It’s visually impressive enough, if a little unwieldy and ugly, like a judgemental, miserable disco ball This is about memory and images and time and how the planet’s dying and you look at your phone too much, but this art w...

fter a day of set design, creative collaboration and artistic expression, Moki Cherry still had to cook dinner for the kids. Sure, she did it in an improvised kitchen in a museum, but she still had obligations. Obligations that her husband and collaborator, the legendary jazz musician Don Cherry, was comparatively free of. That’s one of the main narratives of this show, the first of the Swedish designer and artist’s work in the UK. Her’s is the story of so many artist mothers, of domestic and creative work being intimately linked, but always done under constraints: ‘I was my husband’s muse, companion, and collaborator. At the same time, I did all the practical maintenance. I was never trained to be a female, so I survived by taking a creative attitude to daily life and chores.’ Cherry, who died in 2009, had an amazing psychedelic approach to colour: her tapestry portrait of Don reimagines him as a shimmering Hindu deity, her paintings swirl and curl and spin with eyes and lips explo...

Having been at many Art exhibitions around London. I was interested in seeing the art works of the artist Alexander Dakers. This artist has been known for his polictical arts about the events in Chile in 1973. His stance is very strong on a very difficult topic with many views on it. Some of his work has found a permanent home in the Human Rights Museum in London Amnesty International head office "Human Rights work by Alexander Dakers" However since I was in London I decided to see the exhibition called "Father & Sons" the work of Alexander Dakers and his late father Alexander Stuart Dakers at the Espacio gallery from the 21st August till 27th August Connections was the key to this exhibition for families who had experienced loss Certain artists have made their mark on human history by carving a reputation for being especially colorful when its comes to producing paintings. Some of the most famous paintings of all time have been designated so due to the artist...