Victoria Miro Gallery | | atractivoquenobello

We first came across the work of Idris Khan during a short tour of the Dubai’s Al Quoz art district earlier this year, where he was showing at Isabelle van den Eynde Gallery. Funny, that we should encounter the British artist’s mammoth pitch black paintings for the first time a continent away.

Thankfully though, Victoria Miro Gallery will be presenting Khan’s third solo exhibition at the art space, opening September 19 and running to November 9, Beyond the Black. It takes his explorations beyond photography and into the dark existentialism of the likes of Nietzsche and Sartre with an abyss of radial constellations of text -words slipping into abstraction. After all, words are just that, words, and it can be easy to get lost in them.

See the Miro Gallery website for details. **

Idris Khan, 'Peaceful Stillness' (2013). — Idris Khan, ‘Peaceful Stillness’ (2013).

The world can sometimes be a harsh place. Just try and make your way across London in public transport at rush hour or, better yet, try to get your Christmas shopping done at the weekend and you will know exactly what I mean. In such circumstances, all you can do is seek shelter. For most of us, that haven is a flat, a house, a favourite coffee shop or gallery. For Alex Hartley, it’s a shipping container in the desert or a tent in the Arctic.

Alex Hartley A city in my mind, 2011. VM Gallery

Using aspects of photography and sculpture to formulate a critical stance on contemporary architecture, Hartley has long taken a special interest in shelters manifested in his references to Drop City, the utopic experiment in communal living of the 1960s, and his ongoing Nowhereisland project, a small island in the Arctic region of Svalbard that he claimed to have discovered in 2004. He has since had the island registered on all subsequent maps and has launched a campaign to recruit citizens. Continue reading Shelter