#sigwaller

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Better late than never! Here are some photos of Running with the Wolves, the show I curated earlier this year. The exhibition took place at 35Blumen, a small project space in Krefeld, Germany. Participating artists were: Annie Aube (US), Chris Shaw Hughes (UK), Eva Lis (UK), Julia Maddison (UK), Max Reeves (UK), Martin Sexton (UK), Stephen Spera (US), Rhys Trussler (UK), Stoll & Wachall (DE), Mark Scott Wood (UK), and of course my good old self.

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‘Say Goodbye to Love’: Sig Waller’s seriously dark & twisted art

When it comes to describing the work of artist Sig Waller, I think the writer Seb Doubinsky sums it up best: If you don’t know Sig Waller’s art, you don’t know shit. It’s amazing. Writers are good like that. Good with words. Over the past twenty years, Sig Waller has produced a staggering array of exceedingly beautiful, powerful, subversive, often disturbing yet darkly comic paintings, drawings and prints. Her work explores the darker borders of our culture of excess—with particular attention to our potential for destruction. Her most recent work Goodbye to Love was a hit exhibition at 35blumen, Krefeld, Germany in 2016. Taking its title from that well-known bittersweet song by the Carpenters, Goodbye to Love focused on the reality between being a woman and a mother when compared to the idealized fantasy as promoted in the pages of women’s magazines, TV and billboard advertising and old 1950s housewives’ guides. Sig’s “housewives” are drooling Pavlovian figures, expected to perform absurd tasks and domestic rituals. The work is a stylistic follow-on from her 2013 show Happy Homes. But the black humor very apparent in Happy Homes has now been replaced in Goodbye to Love...

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Goodbye to Love - new work!

here are some of the new GTLs I made over the summer months - more to come soon! :))) you can view the entire series, plus pricing and purchase details on my website here 

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Goodbye to Love

Here’s the flyer for my solo show opening in Krefeld this evening. Do come along if you are in the area. I will be scanning the new work and adding it to my website & blog when the show is over, so keep a look out for that in October! :)))))

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New SMILEYS!

Made for the SCHWARZ show @ 35blumen in Krefeld, Germany - catch it if you can! :))))))

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So here is the first of my black-on-black demons which I made for the SCHWARZ show at 35blumen in Krefeld. I’ve included several shots as it’s hard to photograph.

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  When the artist Sig Waller was a child, she experienced intense fever hallucinations. It possibly explains something about her paintings, which are beautiful, brightly colored, fluid, dreamlike, visions of reality. I find her work addictive, and am drawn back, time and again to certain paintings - paintings which seem as if she has made real some fragment of my dreams. Waller’s first major exhibition was in 1996, and since then she has exhibited her paintings across the world. Her work is fabulous, intense, politicized yet often darkly amusing. There is a great intelligence at work here, which can be seen in such varied series as: Dreamlands (1999-2001)…

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Valueless In Tallinn

This is a brief account of my week in Tallinn last month. I’ll post about the valueless art project separately

Monday:

Two of the students were kind enough to meet me at the airport, from where we got a bus into town. The locals can ride for free, which means the buses are often nose-on-nose full. Looking out the windows I got my first glimpse of the old wooden houses typical of the area. There was still a fair bit of snow on the streets and big frozen heaps of the stuff appeared at regular intervals. After some searching we found the music hall of residence behind one of these icy mounds. I unpacked my bag and we made our way to the old town to meet Marko, who was setting up his Painting and Waiting show at two separate galleries on Pikk and Hobusepea.

We ate at NoKu, a bohemian club accessed by a dark stairway, the entrance to which is hidden behind a plain wooden door. We sat at a round table and I was introduced to the somewhat baffling Estonian cuisine.

I gave my valueless talk at the Estonian Academy of Arts, which is currently housed in a labyrinthine old building up on a hill overlooking the old town. Afterwards a student showed me the way back to my rooms, for which I was grateful as by now I had lost all sense of direction. I discovered a strange, gaudy off-licence on Gonsiori, which was to prove useful during the coming week.

Tuesday:

I enjoyed the unfamiliar neutrality of the rooms at the music hall. Everything so white and sparse. The lighting in the bathroom was garish and I acquired an unhealthy obsession with the wrinkles under my eyes, which seemed to be more prominent than ever. I liked the bed most of all, it was very comfortable and I wasted a lot of time recumbent on it. Beds are a novelty to me - I don’t have one.

I spent the afternoon doing tutorials and missed the beginning of Marko’s openings at Hobusepea Galerii & Draakoni Galerii. By the time I got there the locals had drunk all the wine. Free wine doesn’t last long anywhere, and certainly not here…

We went back to NoKu Klubi and I ate more questionable food and tried the Saku beer, which I liked.

Wednesday:

More tutorials and studio visits in the afternoon and then a big opening of the Estonian Artists' Associations's Annual Exhibition at the Tallinna Kunstihoone, and this time there was plenty of wine. It was a strange mixed show of all sorts of clashing artworks, of varying quality, all battling for attention. There were loads of people there and when we arrived I saw a drunken bum being carried out by security guards. For all I know it was one of the artists.

We decided to return to our round table at NoKu but some other people had got there first. We found a smaller round table and proceeded to get riotously drunk on more of that Saku. I rose to the Estonian food challenge once again but the more dishes I tried the less convinced I was.

Thursday:

A student cancelled a tutorial so I had an extra hour to recover. Went to the supermarket and stocked up on herrings. Dragged myself up the hill to the art college; when I got there, one of the MA students was tattooing a mysterious scrap of cut-off skin. Later I returned to my neutral space to chill out and invented the pickled herring / vodka diet.

Friday:

The students put up their valueless art show at Raja Galerii, which seemed to be near a forest on the outskirts of town.

After the opening of ‘valueless art, bloody strange event’ and lots of jolly tram rides in grey suburbia, we went to two very different parties. The first was in an old hippy studio, somewhere near the train station. It was full of the living dead, risen from their graves and covered in a layer of dust. They were all moving in ultra slow motion and their party food was jam. Cheap toast bread, 10 different types of jam and a box of cornflakes. They were listening to really depressing Estonian crooning music. It was making me want to kill myself.

The second party was in a medieval Rapunzel tower back in the old town. To get to the room one had to climb up a steep stony staircase in the dark, there was a rope to hold on to but I didn’t see it. This party was full of fairy lights and candles and beautiful elves, most of them artists. Some of them even had elf-ears. I was very impressed. One guy told me he often gets mistaken for an elf. I couldn’t stop staring at his ears, which seemed to grow pointier with every glass of vodka tonic. The food was piled up in layers on a table - no such bourgeois things as bowls being used. Apparently it’s called a ‘coat’. I want to have a party and make this. There was a niche at the party that would have been perfect for snogging but sadly all the men were either gay or otherwise engaged. I should have snogged an elfette. In retrospect one is always wiser.

I don’t quite remember leaving the elf party, but the descent must have been quite hellish. The steps really were very steep. There was an exhausting pipe, which wound its way down the stairs like a snake. One could clasp this pipe 'full of old shit and party vomit' to help prevent the otherwise surely imminent plunge into the abyss.

Saturday:

My legs were aching like crazy and I had a huge blister on one toe. After going shopping for more pickled herrings and vodka I decided to chill out and hang out in my music hall of residence, posting rubbish online and napping. In the evening I could hear the sounds of a wild party emanating from somewhere within the building. A group of students were playing live music which sounded like Suicide but weirder. I liked it and was tempted to gatecrash but luckily I was wearing my nightshirt and decided to stay in that comfortable bed.

Sunday:

I met Marko in town. Fortunately he was wearing his bright yellow hat, so I could spot him from a distance. We checked out a gallery space and went to NoKu (again) and sat at the round table and pretended to talk business, concluding that we liked dirt. Then we riffed some surreal nonsense and I drank more Saku beer and I hopped back home to my music hall on my one good foot.

Next time I’ll do the tourist stuff.