![]() The Jim Otto Suite constitutes an extended narrative based on the character and physiology of Jim Otto. Although Ottoshaft was already planned when the other two parts were shown in 1991, it was made later, in the summer of 1992. While fully self-contained, Ottoshaft is the middle section occurring at ‘half time’ in the trilogy. Ottoshaft is one of a trilogy of works called the Jim Otto Suite, named after Jim Otto, an American football player of the 1970s. ![]() Taking an extreme view on what constitutes artistic practice, Barney has evolved a visual vocabulary that explores the striving of the body against its inbuilt limitations, reflexes, ageing processes and memories. In Barney’s work diverse activities are combined in highly charged fictional narratives. In Barney’s work dynamic performances are intended to be seen as the external equivalent of vital processes – such as digestion, oxygenation or muscle growth – that take place within the body. These range from physical pursuits such as football, climbing and wrestling, to the skills of role-playing and dressing-up associated with acting or modelling. In installations he has been making over the past five years, he introduces references from diverse cultural activities. “You don’t quite know why you’re drawn to something, and it’s the painting that will tell you, eventually – years later, maybe.Matthew Barney’s work combines sculpture, performance and video. “If you want things to emerge, you have to be intuitive and keep the door ajar,” McFadyen says about his process. In one, an apartment block is reproduced to near-blueprint precision, accounting for the exact number of floors and windows in another, the platform of a London underground station becomes an almost symbolic array of squares, interrupted only by hanging cables and a no smoking sign. The paintings in his new exhibition offer a compelling mix of realism and abstraction. “He described me as a ‘sightseer without a guidebook,’ and I realized that he actually nailed my attitude to painting: to have no agenda, but just to be drawn like a magpie to things, without really having an intellectual premise. The London show is called “Tourist without a guidebook,” a riff on a remark by Tom Lubbock, the art critic who wrote the catalog for his 1991 exhibition, “Fragments of Berlin,” about the Berlin Wall post-1989. McFayden's work maps the changing landscape of East London amid rapid gentrification. The majority of his works, however, aren’t here, rather split across two exhibitions: a retrospective at The Lowry near Manchester, which is about to end, and a new show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which just opened. ![]() Upstairs, where McFadyen works, one wall is dominated by a huge unfinished painting of a skateboard park, as well as about a dozen smaller paintings he’s currently working on. He bought it on eBay just a few years ago when he spotted the license plate, realizing it was the very same bike that he owned as a teenager and once drove down to Hyde Park to see The Rolling Stones play in 1969. His most prized possession is a 1966 Honda Super Hawk 250cc. The ground floor is full of motorbikes, which McFadyen, born in Scotland in 1950, still rides every day. ![]() The landscape has changed radically,” he says. And there were lots of artists, because of the warehouses and studio space. “The East End, in those days, was very poor. In a way, the row encapsulates this extremely gentrified part of town, which has changed dramatically since McFadyen arrived in 1978. Black artists highlight how the trauma of empire still echoes in Britain ![]()
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