The London Traveler

Have you ever thought what London would look like after global warming raises the sea level? Which parts of London  would be left – and how people would live in it?
That’s the starting point for Squint/Opera’s Flooded London exhibition, which opens Friday at Medcalf bar and restaurant in Exmouth Market, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.
This should be quite a surreal vision… a wonderful pastoral future in a tropical, leafy London, with skyscrapers gently decaying under the surface of the lagoon. Definitely worth a visit.
Where: Medcalf, Exmouth Market
When: 20 June – 20 July
How much: Free

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The Momart fire was one of the great disasters of Britart. In a single warehouse fire, works by Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst,  Gavin Turk, and other artists were destroyed – and one of the works lost to the flames was Hell, by Jake and Dinos Chapman.
But now, the Chapman brothers have revived Hell – calling it F***ing Hell this time round – and even improved it, making it bigger.
It’s a really strange work, replaying atrocities and war crimes using little plastic soldiers. The sheer banality of evil is what strikes you – the idea that these little plastic toys with …read more

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Imagine a house that explodes around you. Or one where you have to crouch and wriggle to get into it. Imagine making your home in a coccoon. Or living in a house made of paper. Or seeing your life explode in front of your eyes.
That gives you an idea what you’ll see at the Psycho Buildings exhibition. It’s not an exhibition of architecture, but an exhibition of artists thinking about architecture, and what it means to us – what it does to us.
If you’ve seen the press reviews, the boating lake on top of the building is the work that …read more

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Since I’ve been blogging a few tea-related themes I had to post this one – a superb image from an exhibition by Mai-Thu Perret which will open in London later this year.

It’s a teapot, but not as we know it…. it doubles as a walk-in art gallery.
Now you might look at this as just a piece of fun. But Mai-Thu Perret is actually a very interesting artist. She’s been working for years on a project about a feminist community called ‘The Crystal Frontier’, imaging what kind of products and artworks they create. Her multimedia evocation of this community includes text …read more

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Regular readers of this blog will know I’m fascinated by industrial buildings and landscapes, like the old railway stations of London or the two great ‘cathedrals of power’, Bankside and Battersea power stations.
Ed Burtynsky is another person whose heart beats faster when he sees a huge industrial building or landscape. He’s a photographer who spends a lot of time looking at massive factories, huge waste dumps, quarries, mines.

Look at this picture. At first you might think it’s an abstract. Then you see the little figures standing at the bottom of the quarry and you realise the scale of the picture. …read more

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This splendid crucifixion painting is on show now in the British Museum (which will be holding an Ethiopian Day on May 3rd).
It’s just been restored, and it’s on show together with a reconstruction of the colours as they would have been when it was freshly painted – vibrant as it is, the original has faded.
Just looking at it you feel the energy of the composition. But what’s really interesting about it is that there are two stories here. There’s the crucifixion of course.  You can see the centurion with the spear on the left of the cross, and the two …read more

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A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery shines a light on black talent in the acting profession with photographic portraits of thirty black British actors. They’ll be shown on a plasma screen in the Ondaatje wing of the NPG from April 4th to June 8th; admission is free.
Photographer Franklyn Rodgers has a distinctive, rather abstract approach to portraiture, using monochrome photography and dramatic lighting to create dramatic and even bizarre compositions. But the importance of the show for many will be its celebration of black culture and black success.
Coincidentally, one of the NPG’s most recent commissions shows another …read more

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I rather like this statue of Sir John Betjeman in St Pancras station. (It’s on the upper level, on the way to the champagne bar.) How much nicer it is than the much bigger ‘kiss’ statue which takes pride of place in the restored Victorian station.
Martin Jennings created the image of the poet looking up at the wonderful Victorian roof of the station, as if he was seeing it for the first time. Betjeman is slightly rumpled, his coat blowing around him, his hat probably about to fly off, but the sense of wonder on his face gives the …read more

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Tate Modern has sprung a new sight on London to join the interesting riverbank scene.
In a joint venture with the Design Museum, Tate Modern is hosting an icon of modern architecture – the Maison Tropicale by French architect Jean Prouvé. It’s a stunning creation which to me looks like a cross between Le Corbusier’s cool rationalism and the tinniness of an American diner. Perhaps nowadays it doesn’t look too shocking, but in its day it must have been quite a stunning innovation. Even today it has lessons to teach – how to reconcile prefabrication with artistic integrity.
In fact Prouvé could …read more

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March 13th will see the opening of the 2008 Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park. If you fancy yourself as a Charles Saatchi but you haven’t got the millions you need to be a patron of the arts, the Affordable Art Fair is your chance to find an original work of art for your flat.
You will have to ante up £10 for an entry ticket. But that’s hardly Saatchi money. (It wouldn’t go far towards getting you a Damien Hirst jewel-encrusted skull, would it?)
120 different galleries are exhibiting at the fair, most with a determinedly contemporary feel – this isn’t …read more

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