Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Hazel Sheffield, May 9th 2012

Where in New York would you put a very big tent? As Frieze’s co-founder Amanda Sharp said, “The true story is that I opened Google Maps and looked for big green spaces.” The one she found was on an island that nestles under the hulking Robert Kennedy Bridge between Manhattan and Queens. Once home to a mental asylum and public burial ground, Randall’s Island is now best known for its parkland, tennis academy and athletics track.  

For a tent, the New York-based architects SO-IL created a snaking marquee whose curves follow the contours of the island. Tumbleweed rolled around in the grass outside the tent (installed by Latifa Echakhch) to heighten our sense of the wild. The festive tone was struck by artist Joel Kyack, who had worked in booths at state country fairs as a child. He manned a game truck, inviting people to roll a ball into the lips of a yawning mouth.

This will be the 10th year of Frieze in London, and demand from New York's gallery owners for something similar persuaded Frieze's founders to try their first one here: of the 180 galleries participating from 30 nations, 60 are American. But the location also provides a powerful new context for the art. In the "Frame" section, reserved for galleries less than six years old, Night Gallery from Los Angeles showcased a nightmarish bedroom installation concocted of black tape, video and mirrors by Samara Golden called "Bad Brains", a reminder that Randall’s Island still houses a psychiatric ward. 

Going round, there were plenty of fun moments too: a huge plaster nose protruded into the aisle; a blue plastic Disney dwarf grinned at us from one of the nooks; up close, a wall of chicken wire by the Romanian cartoonist Dan Perjovschi turned into a mesh of tiny drawings of people.   read more »

This season: Olivia Weinberg welcomes the return of John Singer Sargent and the American impressionists to the Tuscan capital ...  read more »

"The Hare with Amber Eyes" has become an international phenomenon. Fiammetta Rocco follows the author to Vienna and finds the saga continuing ...   read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 2nd 2012

Visitors to Makkinga, a northern village in the Netherlands, are greeted on the outskirts by a nice joke. After a road sign that announces the 30kph speed limit, and another that says "Welkom", there's a third that says "Verkeersbordvrij". That translates as "free of traffic signs". It’s a sign that tells you something you can work out for yourself.
 
As Tom Vanderbilt explains in his book "Traffic" (2008), the sign captures the philosophy of Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, who overturned years of bossy thinking by arguing that the fewer road signs there were in social settings, the safer those places would be. (Motorways were another matter.) When car drivers use their own intelligence, and interact with others who are sharing the same space, they slow down, and there are fewer accidents. 
 
The latest example of this counter-intuitive thinking was unveiled in London yesterday. Exhibition Road runs half a mile from South Kensington tube station to Hyde Park, and passes entrances to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. It has cost nearly £30m to redesign this stretch of road and the best bit about it is the stuff that's not there.  read more »

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, January 12th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Lucy Farmer, January 11th 2012

There are only four weeks left to see the Leonardos at London's National Gallery, one of the exhibitions of the decade. You can still get in if you queue; probably for three hours before it opens at 10am (bring a folding chair and a torch). If you do get in, here are some tips.
 
Lower your expectations
Not of the quality, but the quantity. Leonardo was slow: only 18 paintings survive, and you are about to see seven that are finished and two that aren't. And these don't include the "Mona Lisa". Watch the 20-minute film beforehand. It tells how Leonardo left Florence for Milan when he was 30 to become court painter to the duke, Ludovico Sforza in 1482. The work he did over the next two decades is on show here. As well as the paintings you’ll also see more than 50 drawings (quite a few of which belong to the Queen).  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 14th 2011

Olivia Weinberg writes that David Hockney's forthcoming exhibition of British landscapes "could establish Hockney as one of the most important landscape artists of our time". Well, naturally impatient, we thought we'd check out some of these landscapes on the BBC's new site Your Paintings. This project, launched in June, is putting online more than 200,000 oil paintings from the national collection. These are pictures housed in 3000 galleries, museums, hospitals, universities, even fire stations, around Britain. A press release went out this morning saying another 40,000 had just gone online, taking the total so far to 104,000.  

Go to Your Paintings, type in Hockney's name, and a slideshow of nine paintings appears, including two wintry Yorkshire townscapes from the Fifties: "Bolton Junction, Eccleshill" and "Moorside Road, Fagley". But nine Hockneys isn't many. There are 134 Sickerts, 113 Rubens and 63 Canalettos. The slight number for Hockney reflects several facts: the Tate's collection hasn't yet been uploaded, many of his paintings are in private hands and big-name contemporary artists tend to have priced themselves beyond the reach of hospitals and fire stations.   read more »

William Turnbull will turn 90 in January. His career as an artist has spanned more than 60 years. During the second world war he served as a pilot in the RAF, and saw a world of aerial landscapes. This view informed many of the abstract paintings he produced in the early 1960s—bright block colours with thin lines to represent a river, and textured marks that may be trees or the sea. Painting was his first interest, but during his time at Slade art school in London after the war he found that he preferred sculpture, the medium he is best known for. He was captivated, he has said, by the idea that with a bag of plaster dust he “could make something out of nothing”.    

He began sculpting in plaster before turning to bronze, wood and stone. In the mid-1960s he began to make work in steel. But whatever the material, his sculptures tend to combine the figurative and abstract—representing a body, a head or an animal but moulding the form to the limits of our ability to identify it. “Head”, from 1950, at first appears to be an obscure tangle of metal, but in the carefully created lines we can make out a cheek, an eye, an ear. His work is at once ancient and modern, and Turnbull has spoken of wanting to take his work “out of time”—a theme taken up in a new documentary about his life and work, “William Turnbull: Beyond Time”, now showing at the ICA in London.      read more »

The affluent emirate of Abu Dhabi appears to be revising its cultural policy. The Arab spring has ushered in a shift in consciousness across the region; citizens are re-considering their rights while rulers watch their step. Last month Abu Dhabi's Tourism Development and Investment Co (TDIC) announced that its Guggenheim and Louvre museums, which are part of a $27 billion development, would not be completed by 2014 as projected. No new dates for the openings have been announced, and the museums may proceed with a new agenda. What started as a tourism-driven project may be transformed into a local education initiative.

This political shift can be seen in the difference between the 2010 and 2011 keynote exhibitions of Abu Dhabi Art, a boutique art fair that takes place every November. Last year the main art exhibition was titled "RSTW", and it featured expensive works by Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool from the "private collection"—perhaps more accurately described as the "stellar inventory"—of Larry Gagosian, a New York-based dealer.

By contrast, this month, the same space hosts an exhibition titled "Emirati Expressions", which is the culmination of an education workshop conducted by Stephen Shore, an influential documentary photographer. The show includes work made in Abu Dhabi by Shore as well as the photography of artists who live in the United Arab Emirates. It's an unusual but smart model for a flagship exhibition, particularly for a nation with a fledgling art scene.  read more »

It seems an unlikely success story: identical twins of Indian origin, born in Britain, become famous artists for depicting their home city of Liverpool and other more controversial scenes in the style of Mughal miniature paintings. Yet this is the case of the Singh Twins, Amrit and Rabindra, now in their 40s. They recently completed a month’s tour of India, where they were feted in Delhi and Mumbai.  

Mughal miniatures are usually only a few inches big and rarely more than an A4 sheet of paper. The twins were inspired by the intricate and colourful miniatures they saw as teenagers, when their father drove them round India in a converted bus. But the work they now produce is on a grand scale of several feet. This gives their approach to this traditional and intricate style a colourful pop-art feel. The effect has earned acclaim, particularly in India, where Alka Pande, a Delhi-based curator and author, marvels at the way they have “taken Indian miniatures to a completely new level with reflections on contemporary life”.

They have been featured in exhibitions in Britain, America and Canada since the late 1980s, including a show last year at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In India there have been numerous shows, most recently “The Making of Liverpool—portraits of a city” (and an accompanying film) at Delhi’s Art Alive Gallery, and a series of Tarot-card images at Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery and at the British Council in Delhi with Gallery Nvya.  read more »