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Gillian Ayres RA: works on paper
Retrospective for this brilliant and renowned colourist and Abstract Expressionist, who taught at the Bath Academy of Art in the 1960s. Ayres, known for her big abstract compositions, bold-colour schemes and love of texture, has…
20.01.2012
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Art of Arrangement
Arresting exhibition tracing the evolution of still life photography, from its early 19th-century origins via the Surrealist experiments of Philippe Halsman and Salvador Dali (pictured) onto contemporary photographers such as…20.01.2012 READ MORE -
Suspension
Bath Uni’s ICIA presents work by photographer and ex-gymnast Jo Longhurst, whose work ‘A-Z’ explores the human body via hundreds of editorial sports photographs mounted on individual blocks. Depicting the complex choreography of…20.01.2012 READ MORE -
Art: the year ahead
Big names of the past and rising stars of the future, mind-boggling conceptual art and expressive landscapes – plus a new island nation from the Arctic. Steve Wright sets sail for a busy 2012. One of this year’s arts highlights…16.12.2011 READ MORE -
Light Fantastic
After a successful first debut in November 2010, Bath’s beguiling festival of street illuminations returns to chase away the late-January blues. Steve Wright shines a light. The last days of January can be a slightly dispiriting…19.12.2011 READ MORE -
Tim Beck 1962-2011
Observers of the Bristol art scene over the last 20 years will be saddened to learn of the death of Tim Beck, a Bristol artist highly active in the Jamaica Street Artists’ studio scene of the mid to late 1990s. Tim was ever…13.12.2011 READ MORE -
Art review of 2011
Steve Wright has reasons to be cheerful about this year’s local art scene. 1 It was Happy Half-Century to Arnolfini, Bristol’s ever-adventurous artspace, which celebrated its 50th year with a raft of exhibitions and events.…16.11.2011 READ MORE -
Wild visions
It’s back! The Wildife Photographer of the Year exhibition returns to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery this month, displaying the past year’s finest images of our impossibly varied natural world. Here’s a small selection to whet…21.10.2011 READ MORE -
Leading The Giant
Drawings and sculptures from bo.lee regular Beth Carter, drawn from a rich allegorical world that fuses myths, legends and the vast, many-peopled worlds of our dreams. Beautifully composed and rich in narrative possibility,…30.09.2011 READ MORE -
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Only collect
Arnolfini’s 50th year celebrations come to a head this month with an extraordinary exhibition documenting the weird and wonderful collections and obsessions of a raft of global modern artists. Steve Wright’s our museums man.…27.08.2011 READ MORE -
Parr’s in your eyes
A major retrospective of work by Bristol-based photo-documentarist Martin Parr opens at the M Shed at the end of the month. Steve Wright puts himself in the picture. “People call me anything from voyeur to patronising. I actually…29.07.2011 READ MORE -
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Dire streets’ graff makeover
Some of the world’s best graffiti artists are descending on Bristol this month to lively up a run-down corner of the city centre. Eugene Byrne reports. In what the organisers are billing as the biggest outdoor art festival in…29.07.2011 READ MORE -
Jamaica Street Open Studios
The artists at Bristol’s Jamaica Street Studios fling open the doors of their studios this month (22-24 July) for their annual Open Studios event. The studios house 40 artists, including fine artists, illustrators, printmakers,…30.06.2011 READ MORE -
West is best
Steve Wright looks forward to a busy, big-name-thronged summer at Bristol’s Royal West of England Academy. Honestly. You wait decades for an eye-catching addition to the front of your grand classical building, and then three come…27.05.2011 READ MORE -
Sister act
Steve Wright heads back to the 1970s. Pictured here are scenes from Sistershow, a Bristol feminist agit-prop theatre group active from 1973-1975. They form part of ‘Sistershow Revisited’, an exhibition and events series at…29.04.2011 READ MORE -
Absolutely Fabulists
• Keeping up its reputation for programming arresting, intellectually satisfying exhibitions with a strong narrative strand, Bristol’s View Gallery gives over its walls for the next month to ‘Modern Fabulists’, a group show…20.04.2011 READ MORE -
Lives of others
• “You’re born alone and you die alone.” It was a favourite saying of Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002), the prolific, bohemian and hugely atmospheric painter of daily life, who died in his adopted city of Plymouth in 2002.…13.04.2011 READ MORE -
Up for the Cup
This stunning image is by Marc Aspland FRPS, chief sports photographer for The Times, and is entitled ‘World Cup Final Save’. It was on view as part of the Royal Photographic Society’s 2011 Members’ Print Exhibition, which toured…30.03.2011 READ MORE -
Salad days
• At Arnolfini throughout March and April, the Performance Re-enactment Society and artist Tom Sowden performed a series of playful and critical transformations of Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams’s 1969 photo novel ‘Crackers’, a…23.03.2011 READ MORE -
Lemmon flavours
• Pictured: ‘Finding a Pearl’ by London painter Paul Lemmon, whose busy, kinetic city scenes are inspired by the ‘snap shot’ photography style of 20th-century US realist snapper William Eggleston. Lemmon’s exhibited at Bath Fine…16.03.2011 READ MORE -
In convenience
• In what will surely rate as one of the more unusual and involving gallery spaces created in Bristol this year, a bunch of artists are to colonise the gracious old Victorian public convenience/lav/privy/restroom/water…02.03.2011 READ MORE -
Island life
Helen Legg took over as director of gargantuan artists’ complex Spike Island six months ago. Steve Wright pays a visit. “May you live in interesting times” runs the (allegedly) ancient Chinese curse. Helen Legg is certainly…02.03.2011 READ MORE -
Plinths charming
It's hardly likely to storm the bestseller charts, but a new book about statues and sculptures in Bristol deserves a place of honour on the bookshelves of anyone with half an interest in the city's heritage and culture, says…23.02.2011 READ MORE -
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Fini’s first 50
Bristol’s iconic Arnolfini notches up its half-century this year. Director Tom Trevor tells Steve Wright why he thinks the dockside arts centre’s had such an impact. Right back in 1961, Jeremy Rees described Arnolfini’s role as…09.02.2011 READ MORE -
Banksy brought to book
Sneaking around the streets, we find a man of mystery, hood up, tunnel-visioned on pursuing his own obsessive interest, to the delight of his ever-increasing legions of fans. No, not Bansky. Martin Bull. Who? You know, Martin…09.02.2011 READ MORE -
So to speak
• Interesting-looking show at Centrespace, Bristol next week, in which Devon-based artist Clem So explores – via installations, portraiture and film – his own very particular identity and ancestry. In 1957 So’s parents travelled…26.01.2011 READ MORE -
Object lesson
Did you catch any of that extraordinary Radio 4 series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ last year? From a Hindu shadow puppet to David Hockney’s illustration ‘In the Dull Village’, the series told the story behind 100…19.01.2011 READ MORE -
Dead Centre…?
Pictured here: a still from ‘Maelfa’, a poignant-sounding mixed-media installation in which artist Sean Edwards examines disappearing communities and failed utopias. The name comes from the Maelfa Shopping Centre on the outskirts…12.01.2011 READ MORE -
Jamaica In
The Royal West of England Academy begins the year in very fine fettle, with a brilliant-looking double header of shows that pits a giant of world art against some of Bristol’s finest contemporary exports. In the Hayward Touring…05.01.2011 READ MORE -
Art Preview of 2011
2011’s going to be a big old year for art round these parts, as Steve Wright reveals. 2011’s going to be a red-letter year for Bristol and Bath’s larger institutions. None more so than Bath’s Holburne Museum, which re-opens on 14…05.01.2011 READ MORE -
Back in the frame
…Or, indeed, out of it. Steve Wright revisits the galleries, exhibitions and installations that made their mark on the local art world in 2010. Bath and Bristol have, it seems, never been better places to make your living as an…22.12.2010 READ MORE -
Places to go
Make time for a fine-looking group photography show at Bedminster’s Grant Bradley Gallery this month. ‘Going Places’ features a series of images by some of the South West’s foremost snappers, all themed around the beauty and…15.12.2010 READ MORE -
Beasty boys
Mythical beasts abound as two young Bristol illustrators launch beautiful new books. Mike White dips his mighty nose in. Ben Newman and Bjorn Rune Lie are two of the nicest chaps you could hope to meet: amiable, self-deprecating,…01.12.2010 READ MORE -
Inking out West
Mike White meets one of Bristol’s longest-serving graffers turned fine artist, Inkie. Back in the hazy days of the 1980s, you could buy a pint for less than a quid, some vindictive hag called Thatcher was disembowelling the trade…24.11.2010 READ MORE -
The art of protest
Joe Spurgeon meets ‘subvertising’ photographer Don Pedro. We’ve all seen them. Those irreverently subverted billboards along the Bath Road, sticker-bombed street furniture in Stokes Croft or the omnipresent creep of graffiti,…24.11.2010 READ MORE
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Don't Miss
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Filthy Luker
Bristol-based street artist Filthy Luker, who specialises in colourful, witty and often beautiful hand-crafted inflatable sculptures, undertakes a residency at the RWA. RWA, BRISTOL, 20 JAN-4 MAR.
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Tricksily-titled solo exhibition by artist Haroon Mirza, whose work fuses sound and image into a complex sensory experience. SPIKE ISLAND, BRISTOL, 21 JAN-18 MAR.
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An Eye for Fashion
Exhibition of vintage fashion photography by Norman Parkinson, one of Britain's most significant portrait and fashion photographers of the 20th century. M SHED, BRISTOL, 21 JAN-15 APR.
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The Cookham Erratics
Second solo show at W|P for artist Andy Holden, who this time presents six knitted sculptures – enlarged replicas of small stones collected from Cookham, Berkshire. WORKS|PROJECTS, BRISTOL, TO 10 MAR.
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Barry Cawston
Studies of buildings and cityscapes by Bristol photographer, an invited artist at the RWA’s second Open Photography Competition last year. BRISTOL FOLK HOUSE, 3 FEB-1 MAR.
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I ♥ Art
Handmade goodies including paper cuts by Rebecca Coles and Helen Musselwhite, original prints Trevor Price RE and Mychael Barratt and ceramics by Paul Smith. ROSTRA & ROOKSMOOR GALLERIES, BATH, 2-29 FEB.
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Sport and Fashion
Bath’s Fashion Museum gets its Olympic gear on with this exhibition tracing how historic sportswear has influenced contemporary designers. THE FASHION MUSEUM, BATH, FROM 4 FEB.
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Margaret Gregory RWA
Retrospective for renowned poet, painter and RWA member (d. 2011), curated by her son, musician Will Gregory (Goldfrapp et al): paintings and drawings, diaries, sketchbooks and poetry from the last three decades. RWA, BRISTOL, 18 FEB-4 MAR.
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Rose Hilton
Beautiful, sparse drawings by Cornish painter/illustrator RH, demonstrating a fine eye for evoking shape and texture – especially of the human form – in a few spare strokes. HILTON FINE ART, BATH, 24 FEB-17 MAR.
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