“Kaari Upson developed ‘The Larry Project’ after she snuck into the abandoned mansion of her parents’ neighbour, a wannabe Hugh Hefner, and discovered a trove of dream journals and photographs detailing his aspirations to a playboy mogul lifestyle.”

“In their paean to hedonism, Milly Thompson’s works nonetheless offer a feminist edge: that of the viewpoint so often either neglected or mocked of a middle-aged woman.”

“Sir John Soane’s out-of-town house is a particularly distinctive location, and Sahib is well-placed to make an unusually localised response to it. Born in 1982, he grew up nearby, and has fed the area into his autobiographically infused work over the past decade.”

“What is this tableau of wreckage? Recent media images of Gaza's destruction come to mind. So, too, does the devastation wrought some two decades ago by Hurricane Katrina, especially to black working-class communities in New Orleans. But Drew speaks in formal terms.”

“In Eva Hesse’s work there are certainly body-like forms apparent: aspherical forms ensnared within netted bags in one work and the odd couple of a quasi-phallus conjoined with a quasi-testis in another work certainly allude in that direction. Yet this is a case where caution should be exercised.”

“As happens with retrospectives when the artist is deceased, there is now a rush to reframe Rebecca Horn’s work in terms of contemporary themes, such as nonhuman kinships. While Horn did stage interactions between herself and a cockatoo, this studio performance is arguably centred on mimicry.”

“The brilliance of Maryam Tafakory’s approach lies in reversing the usual way prohibitions are signposted: she turns the gaze towards the film industry’s efforts to keep desire within the frame, and the shifts in image-reading this prompted across Iranian spectatorship.”

“Consider the dance marathons of the US’s 1930s depression era, dramatised in Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ If there’s a finer allegory of industrial capitalism’s ruthless demands upon the human, I’m struggling to find it.”

“Downplaying the political narrative has the mysterious effect of pushing the working class as an empirical category into the history of capitalism while denying it a place in contemporary capitalism.”

“One of the things about filming people is that if somebody is doing something that they are consumed by then they will become glorious, otherwise they’re feeling under threat from the camera or what’s being demanded.”

September art jobs, grants, exhibitions and other artists’ opportunities, plus art listings, podcasts and more in the latest newsletter: www.artmonthly.co.uk/newsletters → [image: Felicity Hammond, V3: Model Collapse, 2025, artist talk, 6.30pm 12 Sep, The Photographers’ Gallery, London] #artjobs

Art Monthly, #489, Sep 2025 • Hilary Lloyd interviewed by Chris McCormack • Talking in Class – Dave Beech • Dance Class – Chris Townsend • Maryam Tafakory – Profile by Luisa Lorenza Corna • On Residencies – Maria Fusco + news, views, reviews, more… [cover: Maryam Tafakory, ‘Razeh-del’, 2024]

SUMMER OFFER – ends midnight 31 August Take out an individual Direct Debit PRINT subscription and we'll add a FREE DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION + FREE BACK ISSUE of your choice – while stocks last Print subscriptions start at only £13 per quarter Email [email protected] with 'SUNSHINE' as the subject

Liam Gillick x Art Monthly TAKING ART APART SINCE 1976 To celebrate Art Monthly’s 50th anniversary in 2026, Liam Gillick has produced a cap design to support the magazine’s fundraising campaign. 100% cotton cap, adjustable sizing, £39 www.artmonthly.co.uk/buy

“One of the modernist churches in Elizabeth Price’s video resembles an upturned ship's hull. The first narrator says it reminds them of a shipwreck, but the other, more optimistically, proffers its resemblance to a temporary shelter created from maritime catastrophe.”

“The descent from the reception desk towards the installation feels closer to a choreographed execution march as we are seemingly ushered towards the guillotine. We become more attuned to the physicality of our own bodies, as if this is a rehearsal for our own fate.”

August art jobs and other artists’ opportunities, plus art listings, podcasts and more in the latest newsletter: www.artmonthly.co.uk/newsletters → [image: Emeka Ogboh, ‘Ode to the Channel’, 2025, photo Igor Emmerich, Folkestone Triennial Tour with Hettie Judah, 11am Sat 16 Aug] #artjobs

“It was writing that led me to photography as a form of representation that was not intimidating to an audience in the way that a painting can be. Also, my working-class origins played a part here. I was feeling increasingly alienated from this bourgeois art world in which I had landed.”

“If we were to look for a single market mechanism in the art world that has had an outsize impact over the past 20 years – something we might provisionally put alongside the advent of Spotify or Netflix or Amazon in different spheres – it is surely the proliferation of art fairs.”

“Ultimately, it might be suggested that what matters is not destruction in the public sphere or by the public, but the destruction of the public sphere itself and the social bonds that it can foster.”

“Although there are a number of artists engaging with the legacies of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the UK’s curatorial and institutional interest in the topic is slight, which is alarming to say the least.”

“I was interested in the idea of a finish line or a starting line not being linear and someone having many starts and many finishes, an alternative sense of growth and moving at one’s own pace. Competition stifles relationships and how we engage with each other.”

July art jobs, residencies, grants, exhibitions and other artists’ opportunities, plus art listings, podcasts and more in the latest newsletter: www.artmonthly.co.uk/newsletters → [image: Fergus Carmichael, ‘Rhadinace’, 2024, ‘Selected 15’ screenings, 10am–8pm 5 Jul, CAST, Cornwall] #artjobs

Art Monthly 488, Jul–Aug 2025 • Ima-Abasi Okon interviewed by Polly Staple • Atomic Legacies – Tom Denman • Art in Decline – Morgan Falconer • Victor Burgin talks to Chris Townsend • Diamond Stingily – Profile by Amrita Dhallu + news, views, reviews, more… [cover: Myriam Mihindou, ‘Rhizôme’]

“Constructed using traditional Korean sewing techniques, details of door handles, light switches, electrical sockets, shower units and other mundane fixtures are drawn in elegant embroidery; memories of specific spaces are complemented by memories of touch.”

“An unexpected moment arrives in the audio recording when Laura Khan Mitchinson’s monologue along the Thames is interrupted by two police officers. We learn that she is recording close to the MI6 headquarters, a ‘protected site’ unfriendly to such uneasily defined artist interventions.”

“This is where we are: a world in which intellectual enquiry and creative endeavour, usually poorly rewarded, is expropriated as raw material through claims of ‘fair use’ for techno-corporatism’s latest profit-enhancing scam …

8pm Mon 9 Jun: Art Monthly Talk Show Morgan Quaintance analyses the absence of discussion of working-class lives in the arts. Presented by Chris McCormack resonancefm.com [image: Jasleen Kaur, ‘He walked like he owned himself’, 2018] #art

“In November 2020, Jasper Marsalis left a crater in the rubble of a vacant site in Minneapolis. The simple earthwork was surrounded by seven powerful floodlights and titled ‘Stadium’, but there were no performers and no crowds.”

Deadline 9 June! Michael O’Pray Prize – An award for new writing on moving image and artists’ film The Prize is aimed at writers starting out in their careers with no more than four articles previously published.

“In this country, where many formerly strong, working-class communities have gone into decline, despite the very workplaces that neighbourhoods were built around having been long closed down or in need of drastic repair, working-class speech and imagination still survives and evolves.”

“In much the same way as the colonial subject existed as the irrational other against which the rational, civilised and civilising western subject was measured, the working-class subject must inhabit a position of socio-cultural lack to fulfil the role of uncultured other.”

“I began to understand that the object of what I had been making were these shadows. It was ephemeral but it was also material, so it was both.” Liliane Lijn interviewed by Chris Clarke Only in the June Art Monthly www.artmonthly.co.uk [image: Liliane Lijn, ‘Four Figures of Light’, 1978] #art

June art jobs, residencies, grants, exhibitions and other artists’ opportunities, plus art listings, podcasts and more in the latest newsletter: www.artmonthly.co.uk/newsletters → [image: Caspar Heinemann, ‘Dead Ducks’, 2025, artist talk, 7pm 11 Jun, Studio Voltaire] #artjobs #artopportunities

Art Monthly, Issue 487, June 2025 • Liliane Lijn interviewed by Chris Clarke • Class Distinction – Morgan Quaintance • Jasper Marsalis – Profile by Michael Kurtz • Letters from Warsaw and Milan – Nick Thurston • Leonardo Caffo + news, views, reviews and more…

“The darker side of marine discovery is represented by Julian Charrière’s ‘Midnight Zone’, which relies on the beam of a sunken lighthouse lens to illuminate the liveliness of aqueous ecosystems flourishing out of reach of sunlight, but now endangered by the deep-sea mining of rare minerals.”

“Caspar Heinemann’s work makes me unembarrassed in believing in the necessity of subculture, the handmade and the DIY because of his commitment to ‘convey the infinite with the least possible means’.”

“Artist Suzanne Lacy pointed out that one should never assume that public space is democratic or, for that matter, public. The ‘public’ of public art involves many private interests – all art in public space is institutional in some way and all public space is controlled.”

“The multicoloured art that developers commission represents socially excluded groups on a purely symbolic level, while on a very real material level the same developers bulldoze their homes.”

“In our increasingly networked reality of digital dependency and atomised freelancers, with museums crumbling alongside so much of the public sphere, the battleground for critical art has changed beyond recognition.”

“When you breathe you introduce into the air that is in the room a form that has a different temperature than the air around it. It is like the intrusion of a form in a material, so in that sense it is a sculpture, a sculpture that starts at the beginning of our life and ends when we finish.”

LAST CHANCE: May Day special offer Ends midnight Thursday 8 May Purchase any print subscription and receive a FREE upgrade to print+digital. For full online access to every issue of Art Monthly ever published, grab a print sub from only £13 and we’ll do the rest! www.artmonthly.co.uk/buy

May art jobs, residencies, grants, exhibitions and other artists’ opportunities, plus art listings, podcasts and more in the latest newsletter: www.artmonthly.co.uk/newsletters → [image: Jaki Irvine, ‘SHWO EM THE WAY OT GO HMOE’, 2025, performance 2.30pm 24 May, De La Warr Pavilion] #artjobs

Art Monthly, Issue 486, May 2025 • Giuseppe Penone interviewed by Martin Holman • Negative Freedom – Michael Kurtz • Artificial Local Colour – Henry Broome • Caspar Heinemann – Profile by Larne Abse Gogarty + news, views, reviews and more… [cover: Ahmed Rasel, ‘Untitled’, 2020]

“Cows, coins and Jeff Koons’s shiny indigo balloon dog sculptures fall at his feet, like the spinning tokens of the Super Mario Mushroom Kingdom; this is a tale of time-travelling – here the global banking credit system enables journeys into the future to borrow the means of living in the present.”

“This is American Artist’s response to a moment, soon after the 1992 LA Riots, in Octavia E Butler’s career when she addressed social breakdown: ‘Shaper of God’ is both a transposition of Butler’s warnings into today’s sociopolitical climate and a speculative extension of her fictitious scenarios.”

“An intricate grid work consists of a series of delicately painted matchboxes featuring a recurring series of motifs: closed crates, lock cutters, swallows and parakeets. Symbols of restriction and flight are bound up with one another.”

“One set of monitors offers numerous abstract animations made on a Commodore Amiga near the end of the decade, which look very much of their time but include intriguing fourth wall breaks when they cut to a blue Amiga DOS screen that demonstrates some of the programming that made them.”

“The historical area of this exhibition includes samples of the mid-15th-century Visconti Tarot, the world’s earliest surviving examples of such cards. A version of this pack was used by Italo Calvino as a generative device for his 1969 novel ‘The Castle of Crossed Destinies’.”

“Leigh Bowery was a categorical contrarian: a fashion designer who loathed the idea of other people wearing his clothes; a notorious liar and gossip who nonetheless maintained a loyal band of collaborators; a relentless exhibitionist who once said that embarrassment was ‘the unexplored emotion’.”