All posts tagged: Remo Notarianni

Philip Colbert

Published by Artomity Magazine

Lobster Land  / Whitestone Gallery / Hong Kong / May 23 – Jun 28, 2019 / Remo Notarianni / Multidisciplinary Scottish artist Philip Colbert has made the lobster his alter ego. “I became an artist when I became a lobster,” says the artist, who describes his work as “hyperpop realism”. Colbert’s quirky crustacean was a central figure of Lobster Land, a collection of his large-scale paintings and sculptures at Hong Kong’s Whitestone Gallery, and his first solo exhibition in the city. His images immerse the audience in a landscape of social media aesthetics, including thumb and heart emojis, that are interspersed with art-historical figures. Through his persona, Colbert analyses the visual vocabulary we have acquired by using social-media products that most people depend on daily. In the 2018 triptych Dream Hunt, which was presented at the exhibition, the lobster is seen trying to ride through a congested digital landscape, vaguely reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). In Hunt Portrait I (Study) (2019), he sits holding a spear in his claw, on a horse that …

Power and Perspective: Charles Esche

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Remo Notarianni / If every picture tells a story, then like the picture, that story has a perspective. According to art writer, curator and museum director Charles Esche, the story of art in Asia has been told, over time, from countless perspectives by writers from around the world, in what he sees as a journey towards greater understanding. “It was still not that long ago, in 1982, that the director of Documenta wrote in the foreword to the catalogue that he covered the whole of the art world in this publication, and he described a world which exists between New York and Vienna,” says Esche. “That’s a white, largely male world. He might have been a rather conservative director at that time. Nevertheless, it was a position that was held quite generally in the era.” Europe’s art world flourished with the development of movements reflecting its changing ideas – Renaissance, Impressionism, Fauvism – that grew from and at times shook its classical foundations. But as it made contact with art in distant places, according to Esche, rather than tell …

Gordon Cheung

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Remo Notarianni It is hard to think of Gordon Cheung’s worlds as homes. But his landscapes, often mountainous, vast and empty, yet shimmering and abundant with flowers, might begin to look eerily familiar as technology blurs our reality and modernity transforms or even erases our living spaces. Home at Galerie Huit is a body of mixed-media paintings and sculptures that raises questions about the meaning of a domicile: a place of birth, a residence, a source of heritage or identity, or a land that is conquered by an empire. Cheung reflects on his personal story as a Brit born to Chinese immigrants who left Hong Kong, a place that many fondly consider home despite its political turmoil. He sees this as part of a volatile global situation that has created complex individuals who live in an in-between space, caught between rapidly changing layers of history that define, at least temporarily, as they confuse identities. His work asks what we are becoming as our societies change, and what we could become if they disappeared. “This …