Eddy Frankel

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Eddy Frankel

There’s a video online of 100 kids playing football against three adult pros. The kids get absolutely annihilated. But they’d do a whole lot better if they were more like the menacing, knife-wielding little terrors who populate Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s world. Try dribbling past a toddler when he’s just jabbed a shiv in your calf, Lionel Messi. For 40 years now Nara has been dealing in cutesy kitsch with a vicious edge.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Eddy Frankel

Rachel Jones is frothing at the mouth, baring her teeth and licking her lips. The young English painter has an oral fixation, and the result is a show that looks like a psychedelic bomb has been detonated in a dentist’s surgery. For six years now, Jones has been painting teeth and mouths in thick swirls of Technicolor semi-abstraction. Gums and lips appear over and over. Incisors are twisted, snapped, broken.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Eddy Frankel

A filthy mattress lies in the corner of an otherwise barren room. The only adornments here, screwed to the wall, are a metal table and a payphone. But this is no ordinary prison. Rather, it’s a north London gallery which has been temporarily converted into a humid, fetid cell. For 72 hours, it will cage an artist in solitary confinement.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Eddy Frankel

Donald Locke looked at all the formal aesthetic experimentation of the 1950s and 60s, all the minimalism and modernism and abstract expressionism, and thought: “Hold on. There’s something missing here. Something big.” The three grim, heavy, black monochromatic paintings that greet you as you walk into this show, called Resistant Forms, at Spike Island, the first major retrospective of the Guyanese-British artist’s work in the UK, have all the hallmarks of minimalism.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Eddy Frankel

Years before he was a modern art megastar, long before the cool pop perfection that would make him one of the most popular painters of the past century, David Hockney was a student. Some of his early works from this period have been brought together at a small but perfectly formed exhibition, curated by Louis Kasmin, grandson of John Kasmin, the dealer who first spotted Hockney. Thrums with angry static … Composition (Thrust), 1960, by David Hockney. Photograph: © Royal College of Art.