Whether you’ve always wanted to experience the London Art Fair or discover more about the modern art scene, here are five virtual art exhibitions we recommend escaping to within your home in 2021.
Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination – MoMA
In 1969, Japanese artist Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver created an immersive moving-image event made up of beaming images from 18 slide projectors across the Tokyo discotheque Killer Joe’s, a unique underground space. The resulting Cinematic Illumination had the effect of transforming frame-by-frame film projection into a 360-degree environment intended to meld with the sound, lights, and moving bodies in the underground venue.
The installation formed an almost psychedelic display of movement and colour, which makes even more sense within the context of a ‘booming postwar youth culture that […] ignited critical debates about technology, politics, and Japanese-US relations.’
Today you can see Gulliver’s nearly 1,500 slides, created from film footage of everyday actions and magazine imagery, online through MoMA’s website. Bringing 1969 into modern-day technology viewers are encouraged to experience the sensory overload of Cinematic Illumination through 360-degree video. The virtual exhibition is the prime opportunity for a millennial to experience the filmstrip-style imagery and 1960s sounds in an all-to-contemporary way.
Street Fans by Sylvain Le Guen and various artists – The Fan Museum
In 2017 The Fan Museum, a unique museum and art gallery located in Greenwich, London, launched a pioneering project to put fan making on the map. Whilst the museum has works dating back to the 12th century and typically looks back in history at the political, cultural and fashion influences on fan design and making, this exhibition was different.
Based on an original concept by street artist Codex Urbanus, a collection of 29 different street artists created individual fan designs in collaboration with Europe’s foremost contemporary fan maker, Sylvain Le Guen. Guen worked with empathy and ingenuity to bring each design to life whilst the street artists’ unconventional ideas also prompted the fan maker to work in similarly imaginative ways.
Artists involved in the project and their works include Nathan Bowen who curated the ‘London Skyline’ fan, Dale Grimshaw’s ‘Kayopo Person’, ‘Type Fan’ by Captain Kris, and Jordane Saget’s ‘Arabesque’. Each design is unique to the artist and reflects their style, with the thought process from each individual detailed in the exhibition. Today you can see the collection in all its glory through Google’s Arts and Culture online exhibit and discover the combination of past and present, domestic and urban.
Folk Art by various artists – Jaggedart (London Art Fair)
London Art Fair 2021, an annual event that has moved online by using digital viewing rooms to display the collective works from artists across London, follows the theme of Folk Art – ‘a view to our cultural heritage, our communities and our identity’.
As their contribution to London Art Fair 2021, Jaggedart gallery presents works by four female artists whose practice is embedded in heritage; inspired by storytelling and rituals, creating pieces using traditional ways of making and infused with new narratives. The artists and their mediums include Abigail Booth’s ‘Forest + Found’ textiles, Denise de Cordova’s wooden sculptures, Monica Fierro’s collages and Thurle Wright’s works using paper.
Specifically, Abigail Booth’s works explore psychological narratives surrounding identity and place drawing from Epping Forest for both materials and inspiration. The pieces suggest a geometric pattern and monochromatic colour palette, yet they are designed with natural colours and traditional practices of patchwork and quilt-making.
Thurle Wright’s intricate paper works are influenced by language, nature and their systematic and structural properties. Thurle patiently folds, morphs, cuts and contorts fragments of maps and classic literature, in order to distort and deconstruct their original meaning.
You can immerse yourself in Booth’s and Wright’s Folk Art pieces, and all other contributing galleries’ virtual exhibitions through the London Art Fair viewing rooms. Each creation will be accompanied by audio and written commentaries narrated by Jaggedart galley, allowing you to interact with the artworks on show in an alternative format.
Hélio Oiticica’s Estate of Hélio Oiticica – Lisson Gallery
Lisson Gallery, a contemporary art gallery with locations in London and New York, presents a selection of works by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. Oiticica is a visual artist, sculptor, painter, performance artist, and theorist, best known for his participation in the Neo-Concrete Movement. This year you can see his two installation works, Tropicália and Hunting Dogs Project (Projeto cães de caça), that are on display at the two Lisson Gallery locations in New York.
The dual-part exhibition demonstrates the profound impact Oiticica’s ideas had on the wider art world, both past and present. Tropicália (1966-67) draws from Oiticica’s home country Brazil and the stereotyped associations with paradise, bright colours, sand, and exotic birds and flowers to explore the conflicting nature of the country’s contemporary identity. Whereas Hunting Dogs Project (1961) loosely depicts a labyrinth or archaeological site as the work’s title comes from a spiral nebula discovered in the 17th century by a Polish astronomer who believed it looked like two canines.
You can view the two virtual exhibitions on the Lisson Gallery website through a video which is accompanied by Oiticica’s original narration from 1979 describing his process, maquettes and unrealized projects.
Barnaby Barford’s TRUTHLIESFEARLOVE – David Gill Gallery
TRUTHLIESFEARLOVE is an online exhibition of artist Barnaby Barford’s latest body of work comprising of 10 unique pieces on paper presented by the David Gill Gallery in London. TRUTHLIESFEARLOVE is the outcome of the artist’s further exploration of his word drawing; Barford’s signature technique consists of repeating the same words over and over, allowing his practice to develop both on a formal and conceptual level.
Upon viewing these intricate pieces, it is difficult to believe they are formed on paper as opposed to being a manipulation of a neon wire material. The level of depth in each image works well to assist Barford’s exploration of modern technology and human connection and his ‘testimony to a changing world in which everything is susceptible to being questioned, an oscillation between the power of love and the limits of fear.’
To view this intriguing and stunning imagery, in addition to a time-lapse video of Barford drawing ‘Love over Fear’ displaying the intricacies of layering needed to create such an illusion of depth, visit David Gill Gallery’s website.
