Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of four recent sculptural acquisitions from the Arts Council Collection. Which is based at the South Bank Centre but has no permanent site however is widely lent out to exhibitions.   Amalia Pica work is a garden rake on a stand. She specialises in using found objects to make absurd works. Simon Starling’s work represented a project to cross the Dead Sea consisting of a canoe made from Magnesium from the Dead Sea and photographs of the crossing.   I had seen Ryan Gander’s work before which uses versions of Degas’s Little Dancer to talk about how we look at art. This one was a blue plinth from which she had escaped to fall asleep at the bottom of it.   My favourite though was Matthew Darbysihire’s “Capitcha No 21 Doryphorus”, a blue classical statue. He had bought a 3D scan of a Roman statue which was itself a copy of a Greek original, which he then rebuilt by hand using layers of hand cut polycarbonate. I felt i...

Wonderful installation in the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain by Simon Starling. At first I thought it was a bit dull as it was just a screen but you started to realize that the projection was of the space around you and a homage to previous exhibitions in that space. It became quite ghost like and I found myself looking round to check that the objects on the screen weren’t actually there. I particularly like a representation of what the space might have looked like when it was bombed in the war. The whole thing became a new work made of the history of the space. Very clever. Reviews Independent Evening Standard