Emily Steer

London

Journalist at Freelance

📝Arts journalist and editor 🧠Currently studying Psychodynamic Psychotherapy MA 🐘Previously @elephantmag, AW22 out now

Articles

Justine Kurland on Curating Her Defiant New Collage Exhibition

1 day ago | anothermag.com | Emily Steer

“There is a necessity to take scissors to the archive and rethink it,” the cult photographer says as The Rose opens – a new show exploring collage as a powerful tool for protest and repair Collage can be a powerful means of creative protest. Involving the violent acts of ripping, cutting, and slicing, this rebellious art form sees images transformed to confront the strict cultural codes of their original making.
Immerse yourself in Helen Chadwick’s short and subversive career

4 days ago | wallpaper.com | Emily Steer

Helen Chadwick’s work reverberates through contemporary art, though her practice lasted less than two decades. Creating expansive feminist work from the 1970s, the British artist utilised unconventional materials such as chocolate, flower petals, and bodily fluids in explorations of desire and decay. She died in 1996 at the age of 42, leaving a rich archive that forms The Hepworth Wakefield’s ‘Life Pleasures’, the first retrospective of the artist's work in over 20 years.
See the fruits of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely's creative and romantic union

1 week ago | wallpaper.com | Emily Steer

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were both immensely influential artists in their own right. Saint Phalle’s sprawling sculptural practice saw her build a famous tarot garden in Tuscany, with her work often focusing on robust, divine figures. Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures offered a satirical view on automation and technical production, long before our contemporary fears of social media and iPhone addiction took hold.
Edvard Munch’s psychological hunches

2 weeks ago | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Steer

Edvard Munch is recognised for his feverish, sensitive depictions of the human condition. The figures within his most well-known paintings could be seen as stand-ins for universal feelings; expressive everymen rather than individual personalities. Now for the first time in a British exhibition, Edvard Munch Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery focuses on the Norwegian painter’s intimate impressions of friends, lovers, patrons, doctors and family members.
Why Toilets Keep Turning Up in Contemporary Art

2 weeks ago | artsy.net | Emily Steer

Ever since Marcel Duchamp entered his readymade urinal Fountain into the 1917 Salon of the Society of Independent Artists, toilets have been a particularly powerful symbol in the art world. More recently, Maurizio Cattelan picked up on this trope with his satirical, solid gold loo, America (2016), which drew over 100,000 people to the Guggenheim in New York.
Margate's new must-see is a stained-glass window at Turner Contemporary

3 weeks ago | wallpaper.com | Emily Steer

Cassi Namoda paints figurative works drenched in bold blocks of colour. They pulse with heat, bringing everyday relationships together with fantastical symbolism. Many reflect upon the post-colonial landscape of Mozambique, combining Western mythologies with African indigenous religions. They also nod to pop and literary culture. For her first institutional work in the UK, Namoda has reimagined one of her paintings as a vinyl stained-glass window at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK.
Is It Furniture or Fine Art? How Artists Are Rethinking Everyday Design

3 weeks ago | news.artnet.com | Emily Steer

Physical contact with art is rarely encouraged by galleries. The use of furniture within modern and contemporary art has often played with this rule, offering—but not always providing—the tantalizing promise of touch or rest. Readable as both art object and design commodity, artist-designer furniture blurs the boundary between these two often distinct categories.
How Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley and Félix González-Torres Explore Ideas of Home

4 weeks ago | anothermag.com | Emily Steer

A new group exhibition at Anonymous Gallery in New York explores the underlying conflicts of the home as a place of both tranquility and turmoil The home is often viewed as a place of comfort, but it can also be a source of tension and confinement. A new group show at Anonymous Gallery in New York explores the underlying conflicts of the home as a place of both tranquility and turmoil, through the work of iconic artists such as Félix González-Torres,Nan Goldin, and Mike Kelley.
'Even My Most Polite Work Turns Out Deeply Fucked Up'

1 month ago | ocula.com | Emily Steer

Marianna Simnett's work is complicated. Across video, performance, painting, sculpture, and more, she draws out the messy, conflicted emotions that we tend to suppress. Inspired by ancient myths and fairy tales, as well as by cutting-edge technology, Simnett's pieces careen between sadism and humour. When I ask the artist about the underlying malice in her work, she laughs: 'I have tried to be less cruel towards my viewer, but even my most polite work turns out deeply fucked up and violent.
Why Do Ho Suh Keeps Remaking His Childhood Home

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Emily Steer

Do Ho Suh, whose major survey exhibition in London opens this week, discusses the power of architecture and finding motivation from mistakes. The artist Do Ho Suh's London studio is a mazelike series of spaces within a Victorian warehouse complex in the northern Islington neighborhood. In one room, a wall is covered in monochromatic mesh maquettes of sculptures that resemble his former homes in Seoul, New York and Berlin.