Vanity Case

At:
Lost in Beauty
117 Regents Park Road, Primrose Hill, London NW1

23 April–1 June 2008


Cathy Lomax’s Vanity Case features a cornucopia of new paintings inspired by the pages of fashion magazines. Each image is a subjective selection that replays and subverts notions of an art historical gaze.

The girls, isolated and cut from their original commercial intentions, are free to take on another existence - the mise en scene, made-up world of paintings. This reconfiguration is further enhanced by Lomax’s romantically girly titles such as Hellcat, Bolero or Broderie Anglaise. The titles provide a sub-text that reveals the contemporary imperative of painting’s ability to make up its own stories.

These girls move in and out of time, from the pages of Vogue to the pages of romantic fiction but their function is always underpinned by the artist’s commitment to painting. The drips and swirls are there to remind us that the picture we are looking at is not a substitute for a photograph but a hand-made object where the artist is not just art director but total creator.

Vanity Case is the first exhibition at London's newest beauty emporium - Lost in Beauty

Garageland 5
Subversive Beauty

There is a new issue of that 'cultural trash mag', the magnificent Garageland magazine.

This one is all about beauty, a theme suggested by the new show at Transition, The Golden Fluffer

Its on sale now at all the usual places or you can get it through the Transition site... oh and we do a really good subscription deal

Frieze Week

Every Year the week of the Frieze art fair just gets busier and busier - everybody opens or has just opened a new show.
I am really looking forward to seeing The Painting of Modern Life at The Hayward and Mama Anderson at Camden Arts Centre, I am not lookingforward to seeing Frieze (I always find it a bit depressing and uninspiring)

So in common with everyone else I have lots of work in a whole lot of different places...

Girlsworld - The Grey Area, Brighton
6 - 21 October
pv Friday 5 October 7-9pm
Solo show at the small but perfectly formed Grey Area in Brighton (very handily located close to the station) The main part of the show is taken up by my Mary Bell paintings

The Free Art Fair - Seymour Place, London
8 - 14 October
opening party 8 October 6-9pm
An art fair where everything is free. As well as my work there is a chance to pick up work by Chantal Joffe, Harry Pye, Matthew Collings etc.

The Future Can Wait - Atlantis Gallery, London
10 - 14 October
pv Tuesday 9 October 6-9pm
Huge group show curated by Zavier Ellis and Simon Rumley, loads of good artists - go here instead of Frieze!

Blanc Noir - Transition Gallery, London
13 Oct - 18 Nov
pv Friday 12 Oct 6-9pm
Transition does Black History Month! A mix of black and white artists look at how black culture has entered into the mainstream. This will be a fab mix of work and includes my new hot off the press Afro paintings

Garageland, Painting and Translating


There is a new issue of Garageland arriving today. It has been guest edited by Emma Talbot and looks at the way that painters translate the world around them to produce their work. Contributors include Dexter Dalwood, Stella Vine, Rosa Loy and Peter Doig.

Its a really good issue both to look at and to read and will be on sale at Transition from this afternoon and probably from the end of next week at our other stockists which now include Borders. Oh and you can also buy it online here. There will be a launch and a last chance to see the aclaimed The Craft on Sunday 22 April between 2 and 4pm at Transition.

Whitechapel Salon - Painting

If you fancy a bit of a debate about painting I will be chairing a Whitechapel Salon session at the Whitechapel Gallery on April 26th with Emma Talbot. I went to the last one, which was about Aesthetics, and it was a really nice event - the Whitechapel bar has an intimate atmosphere that works really well for this kind of thing.

David Bailey Took My Picture


Just in case my friend Alex hasn't shown you yet, there is a photo of me in the new 'London' issue of GQ Style taken by David Bailey. It is a great issue with contributions from writers such as Iain Sinclair, Simon Reynolds and Michael Bracewell and is definitely worth checking out.

The section of the magazine that I appear in is called 'Young Meteors' and also includes Patrick Wolf and Theo Walcott. My photo (it is a spread and I only show half of it here) is of people from the art world and includes Tom Morton (pictured), Stella Vine and Charles Avery.

The Craft

Emma Talbot and Cathie Pilkington's The Craft opened on Friday night at Transition.

The gallery has been magically transformed form a white cube into a cosy, slightly creepy clubhouse full of strange collections of objects and massive paintings filled with vacuous models and flourescent shapes.

The whole thing is fantastic and I recommend you see it asap.

The Whiteness of the Whale

The Whiteness of the Whale opened last night at Transition. The show is curated by Nadia Hebson and inspired by Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The opening kicked off with a '24 hour' tag reading of the book. Nadia took the first slot and read to an empty gallery, as things went along the gallery filled and the reading became less audible. The 15 minute section I read included a description of a painting called Black Sea which is also the name of one of Nadia's paintings in the show. Other readers included Sarah Doyle, Russell Herron, Mimei Thompson, Roy Exley, Alex Michon, Olly Beck and Rachel Potts.

Guardian Art Blog

Arty Romance seems to be getting lots of attention (well it is almost valentine's day). The lovely Stella Vine (one of the issue's contributors) kindly did a mail out to her list about it and I got lots of press enquiries from places which were quite new to me + the Guardian asked me to an art blog about 'why romance is dead but we still love it, and how art, from Barbara Cartland novels to Oscar Wilde, proves it'. Well of course I jumped at the chance although in retrospect I don't think I quite wrote what they asked for - read it here - oh and be warned there is a very scary photo of Barbara Cartland (not my choice). So here is one of her when she was a young socialite which is a little easier on the eye.

True Love

















Rachel Cattle has a show opening this evening at The Centre for Contemporary Drawing which is in 61-63 Cudworth Street, Bethnal Green, E1 (just around the corner from Herald Street). I love her work and her invite card for the show is one of my favourite ever.

Arty Romance

There is a new Arty!
Arty Romance is the twenty second issue of the original art fanzine and is available now from all the best art bookshops or you can buy it online.
Contributor Patrick Galway described it thus; 'It is like a pink sweet that has fallen on the floor
landing in some grit... beautiful'
Other contributors are Stella Vine, Susan Aldworth, Alex Michon, Rachel Potts, Simon Holmes, Annabel Dover and of course me.

New Year New Show

The latest show at Transition is Andrew Bracey's Freianlage, the last part of our Supernature season, for which the gallery has become a zoo and is full of hidden animals (the image is of the private view and features his origami butterflies). It is a real delight and I urge you to check it out at your earliest convenience. Flavourpill have opened the year with it as the cover of their newsletter and I can only hope that some other art reviewing on or off line publication also pick up upon it. We are hopeful at Transition that with a new editor at the helm Time Out may find time to review a few more of our shows (two reviews in 4 years has been really dissapointing). Even if you don't manage this one Time Out we have lots of good stuff coming up - check out our upcoming shows page.

I have been quite lax with the posting in recent months so didn't mention the previous Supernature show - Woodland Chicken World by Chris Humphreys which was also very good and included a really great talk on Chinoiserie by Margaret Timmers of the V&A. And I have one of my own paintings in a really great show at Studio 1.1 in Redchurch Street called Grotto - the show is on until 14th January.

Also look out for the new Arty (no.22 Romance) which will be on the shelves of all the best art bookshops soon - I will let you know the precise date as soon as I have it.

Re-enactment Day at Transition

The sixteenth century re-enactment day at Transition went very well and as promised I am attaching a couple of images of Sigrid Holmwood, Ruth and Mark Goodman in their Tudor clothes

Mixing Paint and Pansies at Transition

It is going to be a busy weekend at Transition. On Saturday 11th November Paul Harfleet is bringing his Pansy Project to the gallery. He will be here between 2&4pm with pansies to give to people who want to mark sites of homophobic abuse. The project really seems to have captured imaginations, there is something funny yet moving about it. Feel free to come along

On Sunday 12th November between 1&5pm Sigrid Holmwood, whose show has been up for a couple of weeks, will be doing a paint making performance in sixteenth century clothes. It is all part of her fascination with re-enactment and later in the afternoon at 3pm she will be talking to Ruth Goodman from The Tudor Group. You will also be able to see Sigrid's hovel (based on a pigsty) that she has built in the corner of the gallery and from which she will be doing her paint mixing. Do not miss - it will be fascinating.

I will post images from both performances when I get them

Nicole Wermers Earring



This is the earring as mentioned below - pre installation

Laura Owens, Nicole Wermers + lots of Others

As I mentioned in my previous post I have been out and about over the last week or so and have seen loads of art. My favourite things are Laura Owens at Camden Arts Centre, Pat O'Connor at Ashwin Street and Pierre Klossowski at the Whitechapel Gallery. I have also seen Hans Holbein and The Turner Prize at Tate Britain (and that silly Steam Roller thing that everybody is going on about on their blogs), Valesquez at The National Gallery (I thought there was going to be more in it) and Carsten Holler's slides at Tate Modern.

The Camden Arts Centre is a particularly strong candidate for public institution of the month. Laura Owens' show (who I have never been absolutely sure about) is stangely alluring. There is an annoying air of cleverness and fashion about her mish mash of styles and subject matter but there is something about the work which just makes you like it despite yourself. I can't easily talk about any of ther individual works because they are all untitled but there is one huge one with trees and butterflies (I have managed to find an image of it - above) which is really beautiful. Also at Camden is Edwina Ashton who has done a drawn on wallpaper and potted plants installation which is nice and almost my favourite piece - an installation by Nicole Wermers which is a giant earring (flamingo pink and pearly white) pierced onto the side of the gallery.

Oh and remember if you do go to Camden or any of the other galleries you can buy a copy of the new fab Garageland Nature as recommended by Steve Smith on his Golgonooza blog

Garageland, The Nature Issue

The new Garageland is now out and I have spent the last week touring all of the London galleries and art bookshops delivering magazines. The theme this time around is Nature and in particular man's relationship with the natural world.

So if you have any interest in nature and the most exciting new art and art practitioners I advise you to get down to one of our many stockists (not all in London) or buy a copy online. We also do a really great subscription deal - 3 issues for £10 and if you subscribe before the end of November 2006 you might just win a copy of insanely kitsch Alfred Hitchcock, The Master of Suspense by Kees Moerbeek.

Oriole

A new show has just opened at Transition - it is the second in the Supernature series and is Annabel Dover's Oriole: The Birds of the British Isles. The show features a papier mache tree full of cute plaster birds. The birds have a distinctive folk art look to them, they could almost be part of some elaborate rural ritual. Annabel is particularly interested in the folklore which grows up around the birds and has made a series of vivd ink drawings which highlight various bird myths. The whole thing is accompanied by the plaintive song of the nightingale (the nightingale sings to attract a mate, the better the song the better the mate). The Oriole in the shows title is an amazing looking golden coloured bird that stops off in East Anglia enroute from America. Apprently one of the ultimate audio experiences is to hear the Oriole singing at the same time as the Nightingale, this is something which happens very rarely because the Oriole generally arrives when the nightingale has finished its courting.

Vacuous Vyner

In this week's Time Out Sarah Kent reviews Vyner Street. Almost inevitably the review annoyed me, it is so easy for her to bluster over the whole of the London contemporary art scene call it vacuous and compare it to the eighties before the stock market crash. This is not the art scene I recognise where we struggle to afford to put on shows by really interesting artists. All those spaces should be applauded I thought. And then this afternoon I had to go to Vyner Street for the first time for ages and I think she is just about right. Although there are good individual pieces of work, overall the street has a really nasty air, a kind of how dare you come into this gallery, who do you think you are attitude about it.

So my advice this weekend is to have a quick look at Vyner Street but then come over to the spaces where the real excitement is. At Transition it is the last week of Laura White's fabulous 'Into the Cold Light', a magical installation of discarded electrical goods and phosphorescent sea creatures, whilst upstairs from us is MOT which has a really interesting sounding Casper David Friedrich show on, oh and then there is Cell + Flaca and it looks like there is something going on in Ada Street and so many others.

Publish and be Damned

Transition Editions took part in Publish and be Damned in Shoreditch yesterday. It was the third time for me and there seemed to be more participants than ever. All the ususal suspects were there Tangent, Sarah Doyle, Rachel Cattle, The High Horse, Interlude and Pin Up. The archive will now be at Canal on Vyner for the next few weeks.