Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was a Scottish proto-pop artist of Italian parents. He designed a lively mosaic for Tottenham Ct Road Central Line platform on the London Underground, was a keen collector of advertising ephemera and a prolific pop-collagist. He spent his mature years as a sculptor producing lumpen, mechanical-looking sculpture. These were often overly illustrative works which yoked the human form to the mechanical. I wish he hadn't. They are ugly and outdated (this kind of approach was far more successful, even exiting and dynamic in the early 1900s, when it was new – in the work of artists like Jacob Epstein and his 'Rock Drill'). It has always been an easy call for local councils and developers to call on the established well,tried names and commission one of Paolozzi's unsmypathetic, brutal pop-cyborgs or mechanical collages in an attempt to offset and even culturally validate an already over-commercialised and brutally designed cut-price-modernist concrete square or office block. Although such projects are usually devoted to anything but art and culture, this one, strangely enough houses the offices of Arts Council England's NE regional office. Arts Council and other workers in the building are greeted each day by this figure. Paolozzis – bin-'em! They just make the ugly uglier!
Posted on 11th July 2008
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For one of the British Modernist ‘New Generation’ sculptors of the 1960s, Philip King has worked in a wide range of materials including steel, bronze, wood, fibreglass, slate, clay, wax and plastics. Painted sculpture? Why not? The Ancient Greeks did it! Commissioned in 1981 by Romulus Construction (builders of the Fulham Centre, beside which the work is positioned). The sculpture has always met with mixed reaction. The artist saw it "...in terms of a musical composition; The lower part builds up to a crescendo with a burst at the top". It certainly changes shape and reinvents itself at every angle – in a similar way to the work of his art college tutor and mentor, Anthony Caro.
Posted on 20th June 2008
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Ok, so it's not as horrible as some of the things on this site (see 'bin-it' bad art group). But since I first saw it (almost every day) when I worked for a while in Ealing, I always thought it just seemed too lumpy, dumb and awkward to be beautiful – and too naturalistic, and neither awkward nor ugly enough to be interesting. Also, its proximity to a Lloyds Bank (at the sign of the black horse!)in a shopping centre just doesn't do it for me!
Posted on 4th June 2008
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Some kind of reaction to what's happening to the Bush, as we get a brand new commercial development on the old 1908 exhibition site?
Posted on 28th May 2008
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A nicely positioned comment at the Goldhawk Road end of Shepherds Bush Market, on the rough sleeping and homelessness as well as the slow gentrification that are such contradictory features of the Shepherds Bush Green area of London W12
Posted on 28th May 2008
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WWII allies Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, (though the American president thought Winnie a 'drunken sop'!) portrayed sitting on a park bench in conversation. They are probably having a laugh about the high price of fashion and bling on display down Bond Street!
Posted on 28th May 2008
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I don't know what these over-sized pencils were doing outside West London's Lancaster Hotel, or if they were supposed to be art or not. They seemed to have lines of text on each one that was perhaps meant to read as a poem?
Whatever they were, it was a colourful and intriguing intervention on a hot and busy street and loads more interesting than the corny sixth-form surrealism, slapstick abstraction and derivitive tourist crud mostly hung on the railings of Hyde Park across the road!
Posted on 23rd May 2008
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Built in 1872, located within the old city's Venetian walls and a short walk from the (now open) border with the Turkish occupied part of the island. The church used to be the largest in Lefkosia (Nicosia). The marble mausoleum to the east of the church contains the relics of the bishops and priests executed by the Ottomans in 1821.
Posted on 23rd May 2008
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Any Moore experts know the title of this one?
Posted on 5th May 2008
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