Magazine / Arts / London

Bloomberg Newcontemporaries 2008

Art not to miss

Written by Caisa Ederyd / 08 Dec 2008
Bloomberg Newcontemporaries 2008

We are served twisted ideas in a smörgåsbord of art in this year's Bloomberg newcontemporaries. The 2008 exhibition offers a wide range of disciplines from oil paintings, films and prints to very hairy sculptures and animals penetrated by lights. Caisa Ederyd went down to Afoundation London to review.

Artists Ken Lum, Ceal Floyer and Richard Billingham have selected 57 fine art students from around the country and given them an opportunity to show their works to a broader audience. Both Naomi St-Clair Clarke and Pio Abad have made eye-catching sculptures out of interesting materials. Clarke's sculpture, The Unconscious Significance of Hair: Queen is a massive, black creation with soft shapes and romantic details, mainly made out of synthetic hair.

Naomi St Clair Clarke The Unconscious Significance of Hair, 2007

Abad's work Push me, Pull you is in the same line. He has decorated his blonde beauty with pearls and bows in the spirit of Marie Antoinette's pastel coloured and garnished world. His second sculpture, The Monument is a pair of surrealistic hands, hairy and masculine with a feminine touch. His works may not be the largest, but are certainly some of the most noticed.

littlewhitehead, So Many Fellows Find Themselves, 2007

In the entrance, littlewhitehead's masked man So Many Fellows Find Themselves welcomes the viewers. The installation is a man in a chair, looking relaxed and thoughtful. It takes a while to decide if it is a performance or not. A few yards from him, Esther Teichmann's untitled C-print is hanging on the wall. It is a splendid portrait with contrasts of old and new; a mature woman with dirty feet and a glamorous robe.

Esther Teichmann, Untitled from Stillend Gespiegelt, 2005

Paul Westcombe's sadomasochistic characters appear as if they were in stories from x-rated comics. His filthy creation Coffee Cups gives the sense of dirt poured into your imagination, with a decaying world of sex and self abuse and watercolour paintings.

Paul Westcombe, Coffee Cups, 2007

Suspension of Disbelief, a stuffed fox, skewered by fluorescent tubes by Steve Bishop may be one of the most noticeable pieces in the exhibition. A mixture of Dan Flavin and taxidermy, it is definitely a must-see.

Alexia De Ville De Goyet is playing with sound effects and focusing on a well written manuscript in her Astral Chorus, a video which already has won the prize for Best Narrative Film in the Digital Media Film Festival in New York.

Bloomberg Newcontemporaries runs at Afoundation London until 11 Jan (excluding 22nd Dec – 2 Jan). More info at www.newcontemporaries.org.uk
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Nina Kraviz

Fabric
4 Feb
11-8