Eva Rothschild to represent Ireland at Venice Biennale in 2019 Working alongside commissioner/curator Mary Cremin, director of Void Gallery in Derry-Londonderry, the London-based Irish artist will develop an immersive installation for the Irish pavilion at the 58th Venice Art Biennale. The work will engage in conversation around ideas of precarity, political and environmental instability and what it means to be a global citizen.
Rothschild said she was “delighted and honoured” to represent Ireland at Venice: “My intention is to make a sculptural environment which engages with current social changes through embodiment, presence and materiality. I want to create a situation that suggests multiple sculptural possibilities for rearrangement and reordering in which it becomes difficult to distinguish renewal from collapse.”
Rothschild has exhibited her sculptures internationally at The Nasher Sculpture Centre in Dallas, Witte de With in Rotterdam and The New Museum in New York. Commissions have included a Public Art Fund Commission for New York’s Central Park, Tate Britain’s Duveen Gallery and The Whitechapel Gallery Children’s Commission.
David Risley Gallery to close The gallerist David Risley, who opened his gallery in the East End of London 18 years ago before relocating to Copenhagen, has decided to close his space. In an email mail out addressed “Dear friends”, he states that his reason for closing the gallery is to “be able to dedicate my time and energy to Funkisfabriken, the huge old factory building I have in Sweden. Funkisbabriken is an audacious project to realign art, food, business and innovation with sustainability”.
Risley, who represents a number of artists including Ryan Gander and Jake and Dinos Chapman, also stated that “As a gallerist I have always sold art to make exhibitions, I never made exhibitions to sell art”, while criticising those in the art world who undervalue artists.
He said: “It has felt recently, with the ever increasing push toward the professionalisation of the art world, that the least welcome person in the room is the artist. This is to forget that it is the professional duty of the artist to question, ridicule, provoke and cajole. It is unprofessional of an artist to be a corporate patsy. Especially when everybody in the room is getting paid except the artist.”
Judy Chicago and Chris Kraus TV shows axed Amazon Studios has cancelled the pilots for two new television series. The pilot about the feminist art project Womanhouse, that Chicago and Miriam Schapiro ran in 1972, has been dropped, as has an adaptation of Kraus’ book I Love Dick. The move is due to a change of direction at Amazon, which is looking to expand its mainstream appeal over more art house projects. Even though Amazon has allowed their option on Womanhouse to expire, its producers Topple Productions are in an exclusive TV deal with the studios and therefore have no plans to continue to develop the show.
Artist who coined term ‘Gulf Futurism’ wins first major award for contemporary Middle Eastern art in US Artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria has been awarded the $100,000 Dunya Contemporary Art Prize and an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The Quatari-American artist is known for work that explores the changes taking place in the Arabian Gulf, as well as for themes of female exploitation and empowerment.
Selectors announced and applications open for Jerwood Makers Open 2019 Artist Rana Begum, fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, V&A senior curator Alun Graves, writer and independent design historian Tanya Harrod, and Jerwood Visual Arts head of programme Sarah Williams are the selectors for the 2019 edition. The £8,000 award which will be given to five UK-based makers who are within 10 years of beginning their practice. Applications are open until 24 September 2018.
Roger Hiorns creates an international network of buried decommissioned aircraft In a series of secret projects, artist Roger Hiorns has recently buried a plane in an undisclosed location in Ipswich, a Soviet-made MIG21 jet plane in Prague and a British aerospace 1984 model in Haarlem in The Netherlands. This latter burial was commissioned by a Dutch art collector and a set of spiral stairs will enable people to go underground and enter the plane.
The artist, who is currently in conversation with an evangelical priest about creating a burial in Abuja, Nigeria, has enigmatically said of the project: “I am here really to give my blessing and advice to those who want to bury planes for whatever reason or agenda. A globalised network of burial interests me.”
Gillian Wearing’s statue of Millicent Fawcett unveiled in Parliament Square The first ever statue of a woman to be sited in Parliament Square has been unveiled. Created by Wearing following a campaign initiated by equalities campaigner Caroline Criado Perez, the figure of the suffragist will join the 11 existing statues of male figures such as Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela to mark the centenary of women’s suffrage in Britain.
Images:
1. Eva Rothschild, Alternative to Power, (installation shot), The New Art Gallery Walsall, 24 September 2016 – 15 January 2017.
Photo: Robert Glowacki
2. Laura Youngson Coll, Regimen, 2017. Courtesy: Jerwood Visual Arts
More on a-n.co.uk:
Glasgow International 2018: recommended shows and works from across the festival
Mark Tanner Sculpture Award shortlist announced; National Gallery cuts staff as visitor figures drop by a third
a-n Assembly 2018: new series of “artist-led peer learning and sharing” events announced
