#londonburning

[iannidadog]

#metropolitanpolice #donotcross #londonburning #crimestoppers #photoreportage (at London, Unιted Kingdom) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFF4fJyHOG4/?igshid=1cc9a5qeacmni

[concretedisquiet]

A cityscape on the Thames: wooden structure featuring 190 17th century London buildings by artist David Best. It will be set alight tonight to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London in 1666 #thames #london #wood #sculpture #londonburning #davidbest

[pelhamcommunications]

Extract | How London's cultural trailblazers and their city have influenced each other

Extracts from London Burning: Portraits from a Creative City, by Hossein Amirsadeghi, have been printed today in the Independent and are interesting insights into the minds of London’s cultural trailblazers and how they feel about the city they live in. Below is an extract from the Tate Director Nicholas Serota.

“My ambition was to connect London to the rest of the world. I grew up [with] important exhibitions being made in small museums in Continental Europe. I also watched major exhibitions being made in Paris and New York. Very few of those exhibitions were avant-garde; all were important, large historical surveys. I set up originally in Whitechapel to make a place in the UK that was the equivalent to any of the small museums (particularly in Germany, Belgium and Holland) that have a commitment to showing artists as they are emerging and to do so in a consistent way. Then you grow a public, and they grow an audience, and then you grow an influence. Then you provide a repository of knowledge and information and energy that is appealing to young artists.

When I came to the Tate, people had been saying, 'The great exhibitions pass London by.' I had the ambition that the Tate should be the place that had the expertise to make such shows, but that could also become part of a world that can command such shows… I've always loved the Tate…What I wanted to do was create a space that artists had respect for and an engagement with. You could say that in terms of contemporary art, the Tate had kind of lost its way. I just wanted to recover that.“

London Burning: Portraits from a Creative City by Hossein Amirsadeghi, Executive Editor: Maryam Eisler, is published by Thames & Hudson on 19 October, £58, thamesandhudson.com

Via Independent

News | Robin Wade obituary

Innovative museum designer Robin Wade, who helped modernise institutions from Ironbridge to the British Museum, died on the 11th September. 

By the time he had retired, the prominent museum designer had completed several hundred projects, from entire museum design schemes to smaller projects in the new breed of independent museums. His work ranged from major galleries at the British Museum to displays for the national collection of telephone boxes at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings in Worcestershire.

According to the Guardian’s Neil Cossons the key to the late Robin Wade’s success was his focus on the visitor, on simple design and clearly written words, without a compromise of intellectual integrity. He saw himself as an interpreter to the public, disliking prescriptive written briefs, but preferring to sit down with his client and work up ideas from basic principles. Peter Saunders, former director of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, where Robin worked over several years, summed up his approach as “rapport, patience … imagination and brilliant application of lateral thinking to problem solving”.   

Via The Guardian

News | David Hockney to return to Royal Academy in 2016

Seventy-seven equal-sized portraits of friends and family by David Hockney are to be exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts next year. Sitters include Dame Edna Everage’s alter ego Barry Humphries, the Californian artist John Baldessari and Hockney’s older sister Margaret. The RA’s curator, Edith Devaney, said Hockney began the portraits in the summer of 2013 when he returned to Los Angeles after his seven years living in Bridlington. “He didn’t set out to complete a fixed number of works, he was simply pursuing his own curiosity in their execution but when we offered him an exhibition it was undoubtedly a spur to continue and complete a given number to fill the gallery spaces,” she said. 

None of the portraits were commissioned, so each sitter had little idea that Hockney would ask to paint them. Each person was asked to sit for three days, in the same chair, in front of the same blue curtain. Devaney said Hockney considered all 77 portraits as one work, and that they were a celebration of the individual. “Above all, the exhibition will be a celebration of Hockney’s consummate skill as a portrait painter,” she said. The show will be in the RA’s Sackler Wing of galleries, opening in July 2016. 

Via Guardian