TON: Dave Baby’s Temple of Desire

The new interiors magazine TON – the first issue is out now –  has two pieces by me on very different but equally extraordinary homes.

TON’s founder and editor-in-chief Jermaine Gallacher – who works with art director Rory Gleeson and editorial director Ted Stansfield – commissioned me to write about Dave Baby’s apartment close to where we both live, in south London’s Stockwell.

As I write, ‘this otherworldly space represents a bewitching realm of desires, sexuality and esoterica with Dave at the maelstrom’s centre, a still figure dispensing wily wit and charm’.

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An unblinking look inside the squirrel cage: Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy

When he was growing up in Minneapolis in the 1950s, the painter Duncan Hannah’s father advised him: “You never know what kind of squirrel cage a man goes home to at the end of the day.”

Hannah’s book 20th Century Boy allows the reader full access to the squirrel cage inhabited by this charming man in 1970s New York.

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Run To Me: A quizzical visual exchange between Sam Jackson and Derek Ridgers

//Front, Run To Me catalogue, 25 x 20cm, 44pp//
//Unconditional Love, Sam Jackson, 2017//

In the exhibition Run To Me – opening tomorrow at Old Street’s Charlie Smith London – curator Faye Dowling presents a quizzical visual exchange between painter Sam Jackson and photographer Derek Ridgers.

//First part of my essay faced with Tanya, The Batcave, Derek Ridgers 1983//

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Unflinching beauty: The work of Emma Hopkins in new exhibition FACE | TIME

emma-hopkins

Tonight sees the opening of a group show featuring the work of one of my favourite contemporary figurative artists, Emma Hopkins.

available-uta-125x57cm-mixedmedia-on-polyester-2000
//Uta. Mixed media on polyester, 125 x 57cm. Emma Hopkins 2016//

Hopkins’ work unflinchingly considers the raw beauty of the human anatomy and physiognomy. As she says: “I paint people from the inside out.”

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