Brain Activity, a solo exhibition of David Shrigley, opens on Feb 1st @ Hayward Gallery. It will be the artist’s first major survey show in London, covering full range of his diverse practice (besides drawing also photography, books, sculpture, animation, painting and music) and including new pieces and site specific installations. Besides the show itself, you’ll have a great opportunity hear Shrigley discuss his inspirations and influences during Artist Talk on April 23rd (book in advance).

The exhibition will run till May 13 2012.

Btw: The Complete Spot Challenge continues till March 17, so still some time to win your personalized Hirst spot painting print and make an art-trip around the world.

(via ArtInfo)

One city’s loss is another city’s gain: Olek – the artist known above all for crocheting a christmas coat for the Wall Street’s iconic bull statue – is residing in London since couple of months & the city streets are getting brighter! Moreover, her first solo show opens @ Tony’s gallery next week. Drop by at the opening reception on Thursday 26th January from 6 to 9 pm, dressed to the occasion. Don’t have any sharp objects on you. And if you bring some Polish vodka, Olek might even reveal couple of crochet secrets in exchange for a bottle… or two ;-).

The exhibition will run till 23rd of March 2012.

An exhibition of Iranian-born & Berlin-based artist Maryam Najd, opens on 19th January 2012 in Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Maryam will present new works from the ‘Non Existence Flag Project’, dealing with the symbolic and semiotics employed in the formation of national identities. Mostly abstract paintings are also accompanied by some figurative works, such as Happy New Year My Love, depicted here, a painting of various country’s national flowers, arranged into a bouquet that nods to Jan Breughel.

Opening tonight: The Indifferent Owl, a solo show of Gary Hume, presenting new paintings & sculptures of the artist. The exhibition, his first in London for over four years, brings together a large and varied body of new work that will occupy both the Hoxton Square and Mason’s Yard galleries. The exhibitions will run till 25th of February 2012.

Gary Hume (born 1962) attended Goldsmith’s College in London. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Bienal de São Paulo in 1996, the same year he was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Thomas Czarnecki’s photo series From Enchantment to Down depicts abandoned crime scenes where, under  dramatic lighting, abandoned bodies of victims make us suspect some pretty gross acts of violence… Not something you’d particularly called hilarious, except for the fact that each victim comes right down from a Disney tale. Alice, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White or Pocahontas managed to retain their dignity and innocence even in these very undignified poses. Call it a triumph of good over evil.

Plus we’re really pleased to see that we were not the only ones associating Disney characters with acts of mad violence in multiple artworks (more about this in some shameless self promotion post in the coming days!)

(via Who Killed Bambi)

With Jake & Dinos Chapman’s installation gracing their shop windows, Dover Street Market – a “must” on London’s to-do list - has presented their new spring/summer 2012 selection this weekend. We’ve browsed through the 6 floors & took some quick snapshots of the stuff that shall rule every fashion victim’s life in the coming months. Warning: ‘bankrupt danger’ price tags unfortunately accopany the ‘desire hazard’ tag.

Note: Dover Street Market is since recently open also on Sundays and the Rose Bakery on the top floor is a great destination for Sunday brunch, mixing culinary treat with great crowd watching!

A life-size art installation by Israeli artist Noam Braslavsky depicts statesman Ariel Sharon lying comatose in a hospital bed. The former Israeli Prime Minister has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke in 2006. The work can be read as an allegory for Israel situation, not an allegory for the economical and standing Power of it, but as reflection to an emotional State of mind, that moves sometimes, like a wave in part of the Israeli society (quote of the artist).
(HT Kenny Schachter)

The statue of Ariel Sharon is going be exposed in Dox museum in Prague as of the 25th of January 2012. It will be shown – like in Tel Aviv – imitating a private hospital room where the visitors are allowed to visit one by one or as a couple only and intimated with the sculpture.

Italian magazine Domus has been publishing great series, documenting recent design movements, written by Paola Antonelli, curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Covering themes as data visualization, brand design, thinkering, critical design, organic design, typography, bio design and design of chairs, you can read all these so far published articles on the online version of Domus under the States of Design section.

A novel with Michel Houllebecq as author & contemporary art world as main theme certainly couldn’t escape our attention and curiosity. A truly brilliant read, all the more enjoyable for everyone familiar with the environment. Ending it is a sad experience, both for knowing that the pleasure of the read is over as well as for realizing how much of its underlying nihilism applies to your own existence.

To get you into the mood of the story, you can read some interesting reviews of the book from the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

All for Love, solo show of Rachel Agnew, opens @ the Base Alpha gallery in Antwerp on the 19th of January and runs till the 25th of February. Pop by to enjoy the ride!

La Grande Fête des Voyeurs, first big retrospective of Han Hoogerbrugge, alias The Flash God, opens in TENT Rotterdam on the 26th of January. And we’re pretty damn sure that if there’s one show which should not be missed, it’s this one! Transforming the exhibition space into a Hoogerbrugge-universe, it will present Han’s works of the last 15 years in form of drawings, projections, video- and interactive installations plus life performances.

If you can make it to Rotterdam on the day of the opening, don’t hesitate. It promises to be quite a party, with live bunnys, Karl (Lagerfeld), The Young Punx and Han’s new spectacular video installation in an international premiere.
The exhibition will run till March 18.

It’s hard not to notice the spotted commotion at the Gagosian Empire. Quite some fuzz from art critics and bloggers, clearly some people have had enough of the Hirst-iarrhea that is celebrating the height of its boredom – hence success with the coincidence of the 11 Spot Painting Shows throughout the world. “Why? Just because they can” to quote ArtFagCity.

The spot paintings are passé in so many ways. They are a small, visual, nihilistic joke; the crystallization of artistic self-reduction of a great marketeer; a best-practice of how the 90s art world was more fueled by Wall Street bonuses than by artistic integrity, both from the artist and the buyer side, pushing the gallery owner in a purely commercial/transactional role.

And this is exactly why this show is irrelevant – it is boring because it is coming too late, it looks back at what nobody with a genuine interest in art is excited about today. It doesn’t tell us something new: not about the work, not about the artist and surely not about the world we live in today. It’s all been there, done that. So let’s move on and focus on the more exciting stuff happening in the art world today!

On a more positive side, we really like “The Complete Spot Challenge“. This idea is brilliant: let people travel across over the world to see shows and give them the chance to acquire their very own Hirst print. It pushes the loyalty card to another level; it stays a prestige trip but must be a great experience too. Was it Hirst’s idea? Larry’s idea? Some agency’s idea? Hey, look at it as an act of appropriation of the loyalty card in the context of the ultimate luxury art goods. It certainly made us smile. And that is already more than the dots galore will do.

0 New Year’s Resolutions
1 Objective
2 Refuse to Lose:
Great artists ship! Shit artists grate.
We will ship!

HFA = Gods of Olympus London 2012

We have placed Thomas Heatherwick in the Design category (he studied three-dimensional design) but his activities reach far beyond one practice. His studio has given birth to the remarkable British Seed pavilion @ last years’ Shanghai expo, a Velopark for the 2012 year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games and several award winning furniture prototypes. He has collaborated with Longchamps to launch an expandable, zip-wrapped line handbags and his redesigned version of the iconic red double-deckers have just started to cruise the streets of London. The Heatherwick studio website proudly states in its ‘about’ section: we exist to make extraordinary projects happen – a claim which they have proven to validate more than once.

Might be of interest:

> In 2012 Victoria & Albert Museum will host a solo exhibition of Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary will run from May 31st to September 30th.

> The current issue of Intelligent Life magazine (free downloadable iPad version) features an in-depth interview with Thomas Heatherwick, in which he describes his background and philosophy as well as many of his projects.

> Thomas Heatherwick’s speech @ this years’ TED conference, where he shows five of his recent bio-inspired designs, is also definitely worth watching.

> 600-pages monograph  Thomas Heatherwick: Making Ideas will be published in May 2012 by Thames & Hudson.

Photos:

1/ Heatherwick’s sleek double-decker bus in London (via Inhabitat)

2/ Building the British Pavilion, a.k.a.Seed Cathedral in Shanghai (via Heatherwick studio)

3/ The Extrusion Bench formed from one single piece of aluminium exhibited on Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010 @ the Design Museum  (see more photos from this show on our Flickr)

4/ Trying out the Spun Chair @ this year’s Brit Insurance Design Awards @ the Design Museum (see more photos from this show on our Flickr)

There is a theory about how the toys you play with during your youth, determine your problem solving skills as an adult. LEGO comes often on the top of preferred toys for creative people. Some of them go one step further and start using their childhood toy as a medium.
David Cole, a Brooklyn-based designer decided to create miniature taxidermy LEGO pieces. He put them last week in his webshop and generated instant worldwide demand. Even NYT did a piece on him! And rightly so… the Taxidermy Deer LEGO kit is absolutely adorable. Good idea, perfect timing.

Via This is Collosal

Because we value you bad people and want to give you a pleasurable online experience, we have sweated over this new blog and produced what we hope is something worthy of your time, minds and pixels.
Don’t be a lurker and show us some love/hate in the comments!

Probably arriving just a bit too late to impress your auntie at Xmas dinner, but still very exciting news from the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. The scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator - have made their first clear observation of a new particle since the opening of the LHC in 2009. The new particle “Chi_b (3P)“ is made up of a ‘beauty quark’ and a ‘beauty anti-quark’, which are then bound together.

For advanced scientific minds we include the official press release:

“The chi_b(nP) quarkonium states are produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV and recorded by the ATLAS detector. Using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.4 fb^-1, these states are reconstructed through their radiative decays to Upsilon(1S,2S) with Upsilon->mu+mu-. In addition to the mass peaks corresponding to the decay modes chi_b(1P,2P)->Upsilon(1S)gamma, a new structure centered at a mass of 10.539+/-0.004 (stat.)+/-0.008 (syst.) GeV is also observed, in both the Upsilon(1S)gamma and Upsilon(2S)gamma decay modes. This is interpreted as the chi_b(3P) system.”

After Berlin, Niels Posts is bringing his Business Proposals to Brussels. Watch out for his adhesive messages on various locations through the city!
For this project Niels collects sentences from business proposals that are being emailed to him and plots them out as vinyl adhesive letters. He then searches suitable vacant commercial windows & pastes the sentence on them. The business opportunities offered by vacant shopping spaces allude beautifully to the empty promises of the email spammers.

Nice extra touch (not only) for typophiles: the letter font used is Arial, one of the ten Core fonts for the Web.

Lacoste, the rag maker of choice for the fashion unconscious, has found that Larissa Sansour is just a bit ‘too pro-Palestinian‘ for their taste in upscale banality. Her work ‘Nation Estate’ was nominated for the €25,000 Lacoste Elysee Prize awarded by the Swiss Musee de l’Elysee, but mysteriously the polo shirted chumps at Lacoste misplaced their taste & spine and had her removed from the nominations, then-

In an attempt to mask the reasons for her dismissal, Sansour was asked to approve a statement saying that she withdrew from her nomination ‘in order to pursue other opportunities’. Sansour has refused.

Quite a neat little censorship scam- censor the work then try and force the artist to pretend they withdrew it, which makes me wonder did Stalin wear polo shirts? One person who does like Lacoste is mass murdering fascist scumbag Anders Behring Breivik, to the point where Lacoste asked the police to make him stop wearing the brand in court. Which leaves Lacoste desiring a prosaic, conservative, elite image that is so intellectually vacuous it does not discern between a far Right Christianist terrorist and an artist’s work that represents a dispossessed and oppressed people. I guess they sought to avoid controversy, Mission Accomplished…in the Bush sense.