What's Goin' On

So after a very long absence In am back. I haven't been away anywhere just seem to have been very busy and have lost the blogging habit. Loads going on at the moment at the gallery, we have a fantastic show on until 2 November called Temporary Fiction and opening on 7 November is a two part project called Ruins/Souvenir. Ruins is a collection of prints by Pirenasi gathered together by the artist/curator Hugo Worthy to form a "simulacrum of a conservative exhibition space" while Souvenir is an installation of snapshot photos by over 100 artists and photographers put together by the artist Paul Murphy. The Souvenir snaps are being sold at a very reasonable price to raise money to fund future projects at the gallery £5 unframed and £40 framed. The exciting bit is that the photos are only going to be identified by their locations and the artists will only be revealed at the end of the show.

Capri

Last weekend was the Frieze art fair and to accompany this there has been a frenzied amount of art activity in London. The east end saw F-est and Capri which are two gallery umbrella organisations. Capri is a grouping together of the younger east end galleries and includes Transition. The party held on Saturday night in Vyner street was fab with many galleries contributing cars suitably arted up for the Capri rally. The two galleries in the street Modern Art and Mobile Home seem to have got together to provide work which was almost identical - little paintings that looked like photos. Very clever but ultimately really quite boring and sterile. Anyway there was free beer and dispite the cold everyone was very upbeat.

Frieze

The Frieze art fair was huge. Held in a specially designed tent in Regents Park which creaked and shuddered with every gust of wind in contained stalls from every trendy gallery in the world. Because of this many artists were grossly over represented - stand up Sophie Von Hellerman - as their Berlin, New York and London galleries all fought to show their best pieces. I had read the Adrian Searle piece in the Guardian before I went so I was already clued up on the star attractions (precocious performance children, big grassy slope etc.) However the most exciting moment for me was my first sighting of Charles Saatchi in the flesh (he has been into Transition before but I wasn't there) He was at a Berlin gallery and looked like he was going to buy a load of messy sculpture by someone who I thought was called Urs Fischer but I have just looked him up in Google and it wasn't him at all. This brings me to a gripe - what is it with the really confusing labelling at the moment in art, it just is not allowed anymore to have the artists name under their work there has to be a map or sometimes no indication at all of who has done what. Anyway the whole Frieze thing was very elitist and although I started off enthusiastically by the end I was really depressed - art can not be sold like a packet of washing powder. My favourite things were the Tokoyo galleries which seemeed to have a much younger fresher outlook and the Franz Koenig bookshop was excellent (pity no Arty on sale though).