#readingprison

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Reading and Writing

[openspacecontemporary-blog]

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Robert Gober's sculptures are rife with meaning and reference, exploring sexuality, relationships, nature, politics, and religion. He meticulously handcrafts common household items, human body parts, and objects of devotion – from bags of cat litter to crucifixes and church pews – to emphasise the fragility of humankind. Through selective exaggerations and meaningful alterations, Gober mixes the real with the surreal in ways that disorient the viewer. #HMPrisonReading #ReadingPrison #artangel_ldn #RobertGober The exhibition ends on the 4th of December 2016. (at HM Prison Reading)

[aestheticstimulation]

NastyWoman #prison #gallery #readingprison #art #artshow #feelings #nasty #oscarwilde (at HM Prison Reading)

[aestheticstimulation]

How can you prepare yourself #pattismith #mtrain #meeting #rock #goodread #love #bookoftheweek #eastlondon #nyc #readingprison #reading #london (at Copenhagen Place)

[fangirl802]

The books Oscar Wilde read in prison. Saw an amazing exhibit at #ReadingPrison this past weekend and was blown away. The heaviest thing was seeing graffiti from prisoners who'd been staying there up until 2013 when the prison shut. Some had a sense of humor--they wrote "room service" beneath the bell that probably called guards to their cell. The show as a whole was eerie, but eye-opening. The best piece was a letter written by Ai Weiwei, an artist who wrote about his time as prisoner in modern China. He talked about how he got to leave, but the guards had to stay. (at HM Prison Reading)

[monikea]

De Profundis // HM Prison Reading, 11/09/2016

[pelhamcommunications]

Art sales: the business of art

The Art Business Conference took place last week and consisted of a day of panel discussions, not about art, but the business of art, organised by Louise Hamlin, formerly of The Art Newspaper.

The opening address came from Conservative MP Victoria Borwick. As a Brexiteer and president of the British Antique Dealers’ Association, Borwick is in a minority in the art trade, but took the opportunity to tub-thump about Britain being at the heart of the international art market and very much “open for business”.

Later, a panel on the risks involved in consigning property to an agent for sale alerted the audience to the potential for theft, the limits of legal action and the necessity of insurance. 

Via The Telegraph 

Review | Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison

Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison is the latest project by Artangel currently on show at HM Reading prison and running until 30 October.

Adrian Searle gives the exhibition four stars describing its main installations as well as Wilde’s own cell: “The core of Inside, and the silent, dead and squalid heart of Reading Gaol, is the cell where Oscar Wilde lived out the worst two years of his life, between 1895 and 1897. He was condemned to an appalling regime of hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed. At some point modernised with a dinged-up metal desk, sink and toilet, the cell is perhaps less grim than it was in Wilde’s time, when evidence of his dysentery overflowed the small tin vessel he had to use for a toilet and made his warders gag.”

Via The Guardian

High-end hotels’ passion for daring artworks 

Traditionally, hotels bought their art by the yard, as Robert Diament, director of Carl Freedman Gallery in Shoreditch, points out: “The reason they used to go down that route – and also why many hotels continue to do so – is very much due to budget constraints and practical reasons such as insurance. To create a successful installation in a public space needs time, planning and very careful consideration.”

A new trend shows however how high-end hotels are now increasingly exhibiting daring art pieces. Hotel Le Bristol on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, for instance, currently hosts a large pergola in modish coloured glass by Daniel Buren, the French artist who recently exhibited at Fondation Louis Vuitton. Inside, in the bar, Moroccan-born artist Hicham Berrada has projected his ethereal creations on to mirrored screens.

Many more are the hotels following this trend, such as The Meurice (both in Paris and in London), Das Stue in Berlin and the Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà, Verona.

Via The Evening Standard   

An art exhibit based on a migrant tragedy in Austria stirs unease 

Han Falb, the owner of the café Jazzgalerie in Nickelsdorf, Austria, has hosted Konfrontationen Festival each year which showcases experimental music and art. This year the exhibition, created by Klaus Filip and Arnold Haberl of the klingt.org collective, focused on the white truck in which 71 migrants were found suffocated on the side of the Budapest-Vienna highway in August last year. The grim discovery shocked Europeans, and began a kind of soul-searching over the dangers the migrants faced even in the heart of Europe.

The exhibition drew numerous complaints, evidence of how the migrant crisis has touched lives in this area.

But Mr. Falb, in his own way, tries to bring the outside world to Nickelsdorf, which for decades was isolated because of its proximity to one of the former Soviet bloc’s most tightly policed barriers.

Via The New York Times

A new exhibition showcases hundreds of pieces by Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter 

The master of visionary taxidermy, Walter Potter, is showing hundreds of his pieces for the first time in the US at the Morbid Anatomy Museum running through until 6 November. The eerily commanding centrepiece of the new exhibition “Taxidermy: Art, Science & Immortality” is “The Kittens’ Wedding”, an elaborate tableau by Mr. Potter.

The art piece, completed in the 1890s, shows a wedding party gathered solemnly at an altar. This is not Potter’s largest tableau, but the only one in which the animals are fully clothed, right down to frilly undergarments properly out of sight. 

Via The New York Times