Mailing List


Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

Articles Available Online


Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

In the light-filled rooms of The Piper Gallery is a painting show that features no paint Brought together by artist Tess Jaray under the title The Edge of Painting, the twelve works are by names that are rarely associated with painting such as Rana Begum, Cornelia Parker, Tom Lomax and Cathy de Monchaux With work chosen for its painterly qualities but rendered in materials including 3-D print, rattlesnake venom and 16mm film, the exhibition offers, as Jaray states in her curator’s foreword, ‘no answers, but it does pose many questions’   Posing my own questions to Tess Jaray in her north London home, I realise how much the exhibition reveals about her own work The piece of her own that she includes in the show, ‘Migration, Wide, Orange’ (2013), is listed with deliberate ambiguity as ‘work on panel’ Like the exhibition itself, it is a strong, colourful statement that combines the visual punch and cool intellectualism that characterises Jaray’s work   As visual artist, writer and tutor (she was the first woman to teach at the Slade), Jaray has kept faith with a formal language of light and geometry that is both constant and infinitely renewable In her work, precise groups of shapes are arranged on absolutely flat grounds to investigate the elemental effects that pattern, repetition and colour have on our perceptions From the mid-1990s Jaray started increasingly to write about other artists’ work, and in 2001 she collaborated with the German writer W G Sebald, pairing visual responses to fragments from The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo In 2010 she published her collected writings under the title Painting: Mysteries and Confessions   On my way to meet Jaray I turn the wrong way out of Caledonian Road station and arrive late; something that she later tells me is because I failed to frame my journey properly She is gracious in spite of my trouble with framing, and I am warmly invited into her home, which, rather like her show, exhibits a pleasing selection of disparate materials and colours White walls and pale contemporary floors play host to worn dark

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

READ NEXT

Prize Entry

April 2017

A JOURNEY THROUGH ☆ FAMOUS ☆ BY ♫ 'KANYE WEST' ♫

Liam Cagney

Prize Entry

April 2017

A twilit bedroom. Silence. Ceiling view of the base of a hyper-extended bed—the length of a catwalk. Slow pan...

fiction

Issue No. 1

From the Town

Desmond Hogan

fiction

Issue No. 1

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School,...

Art

October 2014

For the Motherboard

Vanessa Hodgkinson

James Bridle

Art

October 2014

Please click on the links below to download, print and assemble (instructions in slideshow above) Vanessa Hodgkinson’s For the Motherboard:...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required