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1 month ago | 
artreview.com | Digby Warde-Aldam
Festim da alma at Mendes Wood DM, Paris interrogates the marginalisation of Black culture in BrazilAntonio Obá has an axe to grind, and quite understandably so. His chief concern is the marginalisation of Black culture in his native Brazil – and the fact that the country has all but buried its considerable debt to Africa in the creation of a national identity. His work is heavy on symbolism, mysticism and allusions to cultural syntheses between Catholicism and Candomblé spiritual traditions.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Digby Warde-Aldam
Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Standing at well over 6ft and weighing 17st, he would have been a conspicuous presence on the capital’s streets even had he not adopted the berserk sci-fi drag attire that became his signature aesthetic.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.com.au | Digby Warde-Aldam
Leigh Bowery!Tate Modern, until 31 August Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
canvasonline.com | Digby Warde-Aldam
The latest iteration of the Lyon Biennale takes water as its creative premise and specifically the confluence of rivers and what that might signify for wider awareness of who and what we are.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Digby Warde-Aldam
Around the time of the Frank Auerbach retrospective at Tate Britain in 2015, I conceived a plan for a walk themed around the artist’s London haunts.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Digby Warde-Aldam
Francis Bacon: Human PresenceNational Portrait Gallery, until 19 January 2025 You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with what might be the single worst picture it contains.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Digby Warde-Aldam
Ireland has a problem with America. Irish politicians and the country’s establishment would, of course, deny this. They would point to the fact that 35 million Americans claim Irish descent, and that the Irish and American governments enjoy their own version of a ‘special relationship’, involving an annual presentation of a shamrock at the White House
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Digby Warde-Aldam
The latest iteration of the nomadic biennial, stretching across the entire Barcelona metropolitan area, is spread far too thin The industrial landmark repurposed as palace of culture makes for a potent symbol. Such spaces, often spectacular in scale, function as signifiers of holistic intent: here, a relic of an earlier era is transformed into a demonstration of the regenerative power of the arts, and usually underscored with socially and environmentally-conscious agendas.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Digby Warde-Aldam
The artist’s paintings at Perrotin, Paris are less a literal articulation of place than a meditation on a state of insularity informed by historical memoryThe seed for Nick Goss’s latest exhibition was planted when he learned that the Isle of Thanet – the coastal headland of Kent, Britain’s southeasternmost county, accommodating the towns of Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate – really was an island once.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
stirworld.com | Digby Warde-Aldam
Frieze London is upon us. Since the turn of the century, major art fairs have changed the way the art world operates – and not everyone is happy about it. by Digby Warde-AldamAt the turn of the millennium, London was a city with an audible cultural buzz. In terms of music, fashion and design, it was experiencing a boom of a kind not seen since the high days of the 1960s.
