Gaps - solo exhibition by Aliah Makik

Gaps is artist Aliah Malik’s first solo exhibition. This mixed-media show is disturbing and confrontational. It is a revealing and intimate exploration of the flipside of what we culturally accept as the meaning of feminity. The veneer of grooming and fashion, and the conventions of beauty, are stripped away. This is womanhood that lives, breathes, secretes and excretes.

Artworks 'destroyed' at Bristol gallery

All modern art is rubbish say some. Those that hold this view might have enjoyed the spectacle of the apparently wanton destruction of art on display at the ‘CUTS’ exhibition in the Motorcade/FlashParade gallery in the BV Studios in Philip Street, Bedminster this evening.

Of course, the  saw-wielding technicians were in reality also artists and in their hands the works on show were being used as raw materials, prompting discussion about the relationship between destruction and creation in art.

The exhibition continues, or at least what’s left of it, until Saturday 2 April (12 – 6pm).

Read the review

Gabriel Orozco at the Tate

Black Kites, 1997, Graphite on skull

Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco has returned for his first major show on the UK since 2004. His art is observant of the mundane and rooted in everyday life. Orozco does not work in a studio and works with materials and situations as he finds them. ‘For me what is important is not so much what people see in the show,’ says Orozco, ‘it’s what you see after…how your perception of reality is changed…’

His reflections on mortality, the fleeting and the absurd stay with you on leaving the exhibition; things that had become invisible through familiarity are brought into sharper focus. This is not autonomous self-enclosed idealized art; Orozco’s practice is part the real lived world. 

Read the full review.