Rod Mengham

Nov 20, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Aaron Peck |Lauren Elkin |Rod Mengham

It is hard not to think of André Breton’s writing desk when viewing the ambitious centenary exhibition on surrealism at the Centre Pompidou. In the permanent collection, on the floor directly below, the contents of its founder’s office are installed behind glass. A little like Freud’s consulting room, the French poet’s office is cluttered with fetishes and sculptures, and hung with paintings, both by his artistic peers and from Indigenous societies.

Nov 13, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Rod Mengham

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.

Nov 8, 2024 | apollo-magazine.com | Rod Mengham

The Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin is currently hosting a small survey of the work of Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), a founding member of the capitalist realism movement of the 1960s and ’70s along with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (later known as the art dealer Konrad Fischer). The movement’s name was chosen as a deliberate counterpoint to socialist realism, whose style and subject matter were sanctioned by the East German state. Polke and co.

Nov 6, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Charles Darwent |Kathryn Hughes |Rod Mengham

That Xanti Schawinsky may be an unfamiliar name calls for an explanation. Born Alexander Schawinsky in Basle, Switzerland, in 1904, he enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar in the year when he turned twenty, 1924. This alone should guarantee familiarity. His teachers at the school – Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, etc – need no introduction.

Oct 23, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Rod Mengham |Ben Street |Boyd Tonkin

Four years ago Tracey Emin was diagnosed with a cancer so aggressive that survival beyond six months seemed the least likely outcome. Her response was to paint – as much as possible – and the results convey not just her horror of the disease, but also her anger at her own body, as well as resentment of the past lovers who abused it. There are forty-three works in this show: forty paintings, two sculptures and one film. Its subject is vulnerability, but its mood is defiance.