Since the beginnings of abstraction, painting black paintings- that is, paintings that are mostly or entirely black- has been understood as staking a claim to a high seriousness of the most forbidding kind. Think of Kasimir Malevich’s...
I first encountered Robin when he appeared at St. Martins as a postgraduate student on Alan Gouk’s Advanced Sculpture Course. He was intense and something of an oddball. Later, I selected him as part of a group of...
It’s been a fair few years since Kapil Jariwala traded in the white-cube stylings and west-one postcode of his central London exhibition space for the walls and stairwells of his narrow terrace house in Camberwell. A bold move,...
‘What is all this juice and all this joy?’ ‘Celebration’ isn’t a word Instantloveland tends to hear being used all that often these days; at least, not in connection with abstract painting. Good Lord, no. In case any of...
What does the end of a dream look like? J G Ballard offered one possible answer in his short story, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, in which the abandoned, rusting launch sites at Cape Canaveral have become a memorial to a future that...
Simon Pike uses intricately-cut stencils to layer complex imagery and text on to his paintings, conjuring gridded formats that mimic the ‘weave’ of digital imagery. Previous paintings spliced the design vocabulary of the...
What’s a painter like Basil Beattie to do, when it becomes apparent to all except the wilfully blind, somewhere around the beginning of the 1980s, that the sort of Modernist abstraction that his generation of British artists had...
There was a time, back in the early 1980s, when you couldn’t walk for more than a couple of yards through the Fine Art department of a British art school without tripping over a John Walker painting. Not that Walker himself would have...
Speaking of the Red Army’s vast resources of manpower at the height of the Second World War, that well-known patron of the arts, Joseph Stalin, declared that ‘Quantity has a quality all its own’; and on the evidence of his current...
