Cathy's Art Diary

Fun offerings from contemporary artists in lockdown. I’ve been enjoying the new works of art artists are offering pictures of or downloads of during the Covid-19 lockdown. I loved Banksy’s witty redecoration of his bathroom captioned “My wife hates it when I work from home” shown here. It’s so witty and beautifully done but with that added sense of desperation we all feel of what on earth can I do now! Damien Hirst has produced a new butterfly picture called “Rainbow Butterflies” a limited edition of which will be sold for NHS charities but he has also provided a free downloadable poster version. I had only recently blogged his White Cube exhibition of butterfly mandalas so I was particularly excited to see this.   Tracey Emin did a seven day lockdown diary on Instagram, written thoughts, images and short film from her bathroom and studio, commissioned by White Cube. I’m not convinced thoughts on an art work are an art work in itself but then I often won...

Beautiful but strange exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard of new work by Damien Hirst. These works were beautiful round mandalas made of butterfly wings on household gloss paint. These huge circles, in iridescent colours, were striking but had a sense of cruelty. They pull you into their centre which was usually a single whole butterfly. It drew on ideas of Victorian lepidopterist displays with elements of abstraction and also gave a sense of the fragile made concrete. The elephant in the room was where he gets the wings from. There was no mention of this in the handout or any notices in the show. In a way this added to the sense of cruelty but I would have liked this made plain. Closed on 2 November 2019 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph