Preview: Laura Taylor – Speedboat Matchsticks

Exhibition: Laura Taylor – Speedboat Matchsticks, Surface Gallery, Nottingham, March 27 – April 8 2010 In a gallery, it may be impossible for an object to become completely useless. Laura Taylor will strip away the functionality from her ready-made sculptures, only to find new purposes for each assemblage. Her raw…

Review: Billy Childish – Unknowable But Certain

Exhibition: Billy Childish – Unknowable But Certain, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, until May 2 2010 In a poem on the wall, we find that Billy Childish once wrote: “I am a desperate man who loves the simplicity of/painting/and hates gallarys [sic] and white walls.” Now that his recent…

Review: Christen Købke – Danish Master of Light

Exhibition: Christen Købke – Danish Master of Light, The National Gallery, London, until June 13 2010 This is an exhibition in which each painting’s title is as precise as the brushwork. View of a Street in Østerbro Outside Copenhagen, on the Right ‘Rosendal’, in the Background ‘Petersberg’ is a case…

Review: Artes Mundi 4 at National Museum Cardiff

Exhibition: Artes Mundi 4: Wales International Visual Art Exhibition and Prize, National Museum Cardiff, until June 6 2010 Olga Chernysheva’s photos of a natural history museum in Moscow can now, by a strange quirk of fate, be seen in a natural history museum in Wales. But the scenes captured by…

Feature: A Guide to Artist-Led Studio/Galleries in the UK

The pristine white walls of the gallery and the paint splattered chaos of the studio are no longer art world opposites. Studio/galleries have now joined the establishment but are artists still running the show? Many begin as anarchic, entrepreneurial experiments like the do-it-yourself-art-centre at The Old Police Station in New…

Interview: David Litchfield, Development Manager at Phoenix Brighton

The largest artist-led arts organisation in the South-East of England aims to get bigger, or at least better. Phoenix Brighton, which currently provides studio space and a gallery for 100 artists, last week announced plans to revamp their city centre building at a projected cost of more than £2 million.…

Feature: Artes Mundi Prize at National Museum Cardiff

The UK’s biggest art prize, Artes Mundi, is vying to become the most talked about. At £40,000 it is worth twice as much as the Turner, which should provide twice as much scope for controversy. While installing work by shortlisted artists at National Museum Cardiff, the organisers make clear their…