Simon Bookish - EVERYTHING/EVERYTHING

I've been working over the last few months with a very close friend of mine, Leo Chadburn who performs under the moniker Simon Bookish. I have been a fan of his music since I met him, so I was honoured to be asked to art direct his new album artwork (the cover is featured here). The album is called EVERYTHING/EVERYTHING and features astonishingly complex pop songs composed for a fifteen piece band. It is being released by the german independent label Tomlab in October this year, and when he tours it you must go and take in his live show, it's spell binding.

SIMON BOOKISH website

TOMLAB website

TO SEE... SEE NEW YORK Louise Bourgeois

Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)

NY 10128 0173

June 27th - September 28th

Louise Bourgeois is a full-career retrospective of one of the most important artists of our time. This exhibition, which will fill the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and one adjacent gallery, will be the most comprehensive examination to date of Bourgeois’s long and distinguished career.

Born almost a century ago, Louise Bourgeois has remained steadfastly at the vanguard of the development of contemporary art for more than 70 years, and continues to create new bodies of work with characteristic energy and restless innovation. Throughout a career that has intersected with many of the leading avant-garde movements of the 20th century, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Post-Minimalism, she has remained resolutely committed to a singular creative vision. Although her oeuvre includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois is best known for her sculptures, which range in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and across a diverse array of mediums including wood, bronze, latex, marble, and fabric. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, she has developed a richly symbolic visual idiom that encompasses totemic forms, ambiguously gendered anatomical fragments, and towering spiders, as well as the assemblages of found objects that are encased in her environmental-scale installations. These images powerfully articulate the psychological imperatives that drive her artistic process, based in large part on memories of a troubled childhood in France and her subsequent struggle to find personal equilibrium throughout her adult life. Louise Bourgeois presents a nuanced exploration of the artist’s distinctive iconography and major themes, in an installation that evokes both an intensely individualized process of introspection, and the universal complexities of the human experience.

This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Support for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presentation was provided by the Leadership Committee for Louise Bourgeois: John Cheim and Howard Read; Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr.; Karsten Greve; Xavier Hufkens
Gallery; Tina Kim and Hyun-Sook Lee; Jennifer and David Stockman; Ginny Williams; and Iwan Wirth. (TO BUY TICKETS CLICK HERE)

TO SEE... SEE PARIS Miroslav Tichy

Centre Georges Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris

June 25 2008 - September 22 2008
11h00 - 21h00

This is the first exhibition in France of the photographic work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, now more than 80 years old. Only recently discovered, his work reveals the distinctive talent of a marginal and somewhat monomaniacal figure who steadfastly refused the social, political and personal values of the Communist period, form its beginning in 1948 to its end in the late 1980s. Tichý took up photography in the mid-1950s, reinventing it as it were from scratch and building his own cameras and enlargers from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials.

His timeless and uncategorizable images, shot instinctively or carelessly on handmade cameras with makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women on the TV screen : these are his single, 

obsessional subject.

Rescued from neglect by his neighbour, the film director Roman Buxbaum, in 1989, Tichý's work was first shown at the Sevilla Biennale in 2004. This exhibition at the Centre Pompidou brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichý Ocean.