PRINT! Tearing It Up – the exhibition at central London’s Somerset House I have organised with the SH Trust’s senior curator Claire Catterall – is now open.
Continue reading PRINT! Tearing It Up opens at Somerset House
The new issue of international interiors magazine apartamento includes my feature about British artist Duggie Fields and his extraordinary mansion flat in inner west London neighbourhood Earl’s Court.
To mark the opening earlier this month of the new Sonos store in Berlin – the home leisure company’s first retail presence in continental Europe – I was invited to organise a display of photography relevant to David Bowie’s creative connections to the city.
Continue reading Sonos Song Stories: Bowie In Berlin photographic display of rarely seen images
Of the many talented photographers who provided The Face with its visual verve, Kate Simon was uniquely positioned to chronicle the cutting edge cultural developments in New York in the 1980s.
Simon had spent much of the previous decade in London, photographing musicians and performers from Bob Marley and David Bowie to the Sex Pistols and The Clash (whose debut album features her striking portrait of Strummer, Jones and Simonon). Crucially, Simon’s work also appeared in the New Musical Express during The Face founder Nick Logan’s editorship of the music paper.
“For this solo exhibition to happen in the same year that we celebrate 100 years since some women were legally considered human and therefore entitled to vote is deeply significant for me. The formation of my feminist project always meant that I needed to be a figurative painter – this made me, right from the start as an art student in the late 1960s, a ‘girl’ outlaw in the then Greenbergian-ruled art establishment. I am what Linda Nochlin called, in her 1973 essay, a Realist Criminal.” Caroline Coon, 2018
Liverpool’s The Gallery is staging yet another must-see exhibition: the first solo show by painter, writer, thinker and countercultural figurehead Caroline Coon.
Entitled Caroline Coon: The Great Offender, it is curated by Martin Green and James Lawler, who have selected 29 of Coon’s works and are mounting the show as part of their ‘Perpetual Provocateurs’ 2018 season.
Continue reading Caroline Coon: The Great Offender’s first solo exhibition
“Harrison embraces age-old symbols and fanciful myth, irrational beliefs and exuberant sexuality to name just a few in order to speak vividly about our own time and provide a different perspective on the disciplines of painting and sculpture”
Fuck Me is the title of the new show by great British artist David Harrison at Lungley at east London’s The Haggerston.
I’m very much looking forward to Women Look At Women, the new exhibition which explores feminine identity through the work of 13 internationally renowned women artists opening at London’s Richard Saltoun tonight.
This summer I am staging PRINT! Tearing It Up, an exhibition at central London’s Somerset House which investigates and celebrates the power of independently produced British magazines and journals.
The Face magazine was firmly rooted in central London and like its host city it was inclusive, outward-looking, multi-cultural and diverse. While it expressed all the best aspects of creative London it was never parochial but simultaneously intent on making the connections to cities and sub cultures around the country and around the world.
Based throughout the 1980s and 90s in the enclaves around Carnaby Street, Mortimer Street, Marylebone and Clerkenwell, the magazine and its writers, designers, photographers and stylists became fundamental to the scenes they documented.
From Soho’s “The Cult With No Name” through rare groove, rave and British soul to Britpop, Brit Art and beyond, The Face was at the epicentre of the capital’s youth, music, fashion, art, design and club cultures.
At a time when the area’s venues and nightlife are being challenged by regulation, regeneration and urban development, this exhibition and companion events aim not only to shine a light on central London’s cultural significance but also highlight a time when a magazine could change the world.
Perhaps the greatest exemplars of The Face’s disruptive London attitude were cover stars such as John Lydon, Malcolm McLaren, George Michael and Suede as well as Kate from Croydon and Naomi from Streatham, who toppled the glamazons ruling fashion and endure as emblems of London street style and suss.
The Face: It was a London thing.
My exhibition about The Face magazine’s roots in, and relationship to, London is currently being staged at home leisure specialist Sonos’ newest store, in Earlham Street, Seven Dials.
Continue reading Exhibition: The Story Of The Face x London at Sonos Seven Dials until April
I am again partnering with Sonos for a fresh brace of exhibitions at the home audio specialist’s London and New York stores.
Following the successful Song Stories: David Bowie displays in each outlet, I have organised two shows to mark the recent publication of my book The Story Of The Face. Each has site-tailored exhibits, including original articles and covers from my magazine library, scaled-up enlargements and precious archival material provided by The Face founder, editor and publisher Nick Logan.
Continue reading The Story Of The Face x NYC at Sonos in SoHo