For Faith in Shopping by Grayson Perry,

City Gent by David Harrison

and Study for Eternal Movement by Idris Khan

Sale proceeds will go to support Little Sparta, the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Not a shopper? Culture and entertainment more your gig? Then read this in-depth article in Indagare about what’s hot in London now. Some highlights:

A million lights will twinkle along a new mile-long path at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew,

Winnie the Pooh will go

Bump, bump, bump

down the stairs and over to the Victoria & Albert Museum

and an Instagram-friendly, crazy, light installation by artist Alan Kane will take over the front entrance of Tate Britain Lights, Christmas, Action gets switched on at Tate next Saturday (Dec. 2). Happy Ho, Ho, Ho-ing!

November, 2017

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No one is here, she said. I can zip around the city, do all my errands in no time.

I couldn’t agree more- no line at my local coffee shop, pilates class is now just me and the teacher. It’s a bit like being on holiday without the jet lag. A staycation is so under-rated. If you  happen to be in London this summer, even for just a few days, here are my tips on what to see while luxuriating in the rare quiet.

Pack a picnic and head to Regent’s Park where Frieze is hosting its first-ever summer Sculpture Park in the very pretty English Gardens. The display includes 25 new and important works by top 20^th century and contemporary artists, including, Urs Fischer, Miquel Barceló, Michael Craig-Martin, Ugo Rondinone, Tony Cragg, and John Chamberlain.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Clare Lilley talks about each work for a few minutes on the downloadable audio tour.  Lilley is full of interesting  and fun facts about the sculptors.

Ugo Rondinone’s Summer Moon below is a white enamelled bronze cast of a 1,000 year-old olive tree from where Rondinone’s family came from in Italy. He currently lives in a converted chapel in Harlem.

I loved the plaster Gran Elefeandret by Miguel Barceló. And I thought headstands were hard! Born in Mallorca he now spends a lot of his time in Mali without electricity or running water.

Below is American artist John Chamberlain’s Fiddlers Fortune. Best known for his crushed automobile scrap metal sculptures, this is a finger-sized sculpture made big. Imagine a tiny tinfoil chewing gum wrapper rolled into skinny tubes and twisted into a knot. Then enlarge it.

Next stop is White Cube Gallery in Mason’s Yard in St James. Harland Miller is a British writer and artist who just can’t get his thoughts out of the gutter…

For something a bit more serious, go see Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901-1991) at Tate Modern, a forgotten female artist from outside the conventional American European norm. The Turkish-born painter and princess had been left behind until Tate’s Frances Morris and Jessica Morgan (now at NYC’s DIA) “rediscovered her” at the Istanbul Biennale a few years ago.

I interviewed the show’s curator Kerryn Greenberg about Zeid. She led a fascinating and troubled life including a family murder, death of her first child, a narrow escape from political assassination and two world wars, not to mention tea with Hitler and writing to Donald Trump. Through it all, she kept painting. Here’s my blog in The Women’s Room Blog about the unappreciated artist.

The Victoria & Albert’s long-awaited new entrance and porcelain-paved courtyard has finally opened its doors. The £48 million project by Amanda Levete Architects beautifully connects the museum to Exhibition Road. And come September, the 1,100 square meter, column-free Sainsbury Gallery will open, one of the largest temporary exhibition spaces in the U.K. A new Member’s Room opens in the autumn with glorious vistas of the entrance and London beyond. Worth joining for the view.

Just up the street from the V&A is the Serpentine’s Summer Pavilion designed by Francis Kére, an award-winning Berlin- based architect originally from Gando, Burkina Faso.

The main canopy mimics a tree, the central meeting point in Kéré’s hometown. While you’re there check out cross-dressing artist Grayson Perry’s show, The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever.

And lastly, Matisse in the Studio opens August 5th at the Royal Academy, an exhibition about  the props from which the French painter drew inspiration and the specific paintings they inspired. African masks, Chinese calligraphy, Islamic odalisques and more. Wish I was here for that.

But alas I will be hopping around and reporting back. Stay tuned for more urban centric stories – a blog on a terrific Milanese designer and his gem of a shop, a lovely, contemplative show  in New York and a story on when your friend becomes your stylist. It did not end in tears.

July, 2017

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This blockbuster of a show Their Mortal Remains at the Victoria & Albert is a psychedelic, audio-visual journey through time, showing the beginning, middle and end of this highly creative, technically brilliant and extremely private British band.

The successful cult group was catapulted into fame when its 8^th album Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973. That album remains one of the world’s best sellers, selling over 7,000 copies a week to this day.

They could have joined the audience at one of their own gigs without being recognised, said the late John Peel, referring to the media-shy band members Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and the late Richard Wright.

The group excelled at distracting attention from themselves by creating iconic imagery, surreal album covers,

ground-breaking theatrical stage sets, and new technically-produced sounds. Flying pigs, refracting prisms, a businessman on fire, seven hundred empty beds on a Devon beach and several other seminal images are all here. The headphones are a must – the music changes as one moves through the show.

Fans and newbies alike will love the enlightening back story; A stuntman had to be set alight 15 terrifying times on a Warner Bros. back lot to create the cover of Wish You Were Here. The infamous character ‘Teacher’ in The Wall refers to a teacher who used to cane Roger Waters, ex-band member Syd Barrett and long-time creative collaborator Storm Thorgerson when they were in school together. The exhibit includes both a 25-foot tall inflatable teacher and the original cane.

‘Mortal Remains’ ends at the end, with giant video screens on all four walls showing live footage of the group’s last performance “Comfortably Numb” in Hyde Park in 2005.

Next must-see is an 80^th birthday retrospective of Britain’s most celebrated living artist, David Hockney, at Tate Britain which closes this Sunday, May 29th.

Featuring more than 100 works, the show looks back at the Yorkshire man’s early student days in London in the sixties. These slightly gloomy, dark works provide a stark illustrative contrast to what comes next. Hockney bursts through the canvas in California. Sex, sunshine, blue skies and the bohemian lifestyle liberate Hockney and his work.

These formalised, flat pictures – the swimming pool series and portraits of art collectors, writers, artists, people you’d like to meet, are delightful – simple, colourful, witty and provocative.

Then he experiments with a camera, later video and Ipad. Regardless of how successful his later works are, Hockney is always challenging himself, always evolving and regardless of what medium he uses – paint, charcoal photography or video, Hockney is always distinctly himself.

And final stop on this London tour is Howard Hodgkin, a painter who used splashes, dashes, dots and stripes of color to evoke memory and feeling.

Absent Friends at the National Portrait Gallery shows 52 paintings and drawings, tracing the inventive, vibrant visual language Hodgkin developed over a career spanning more than six decades. He was apparently thrilled to be asked to show his portraits at the NGP.  Sadly, he died two weeks before the show opened, aged 84.

I find painting agony, he once said because of the effort required between the feeling and the mark on the canvas that would express that feeling.

Hodgkin painted what he felt and remembered about his friends, not so much the banalities of what they looked like. Memory, emotion and relationships depict Hodgkin’s approach to portraiture.  The last major painting in the show (below) is an abstract self-portrait of the artist listening to music.

This post is also appearing in an edited version in the membership-only travel site Indagare.

May, 2017

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Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1941 and working with glass for nearly half a century, Chihuly has created a vast number of astonishing glass works that are a colorful, vibrant mix merging fine art with craft, ranging in size from a simple vessel to room-size installations.

Perhaps the most eye-catching and glorious of the lot is the one in Berkeley Square for sale for £1.25mm. The show ends April 21^st. For a stimulating read on Chihuly’s rise from modest means (he worked as a commercial fisherman to pay for graduate school)  to becoming an artist of world class stature, read “The Glass Menagerie” article in the Telegraph. This prolific artist is no stranger to London with major installations at Kew Gardens, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Claridges Hotel. This summer  (’14) he has two exhibitions opening in Dublin.

April, 2014

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Yamamoto was the first Japanese designer to stage a fashion show in London. It was in 1971 on the Kings Road. He became inspired to return to his fashion roots  after the V&A’s recent blockbuster “David Bowie Is” exhibition which included many of Yamamoto’s iconic costumes for the superstar singer.

November, 2013 

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