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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did Neel was the Matisse of the brownstones: an exceptional colourist, immaculate stylist, and a collector of New York souls Her particular mode of vision has attracted many, and later in life, she gained famous admirers Frank O’Hara sat for her in 1960, and after Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, it was Neel who painted him, his frail, naked torso stitched up like a rag doll mended one too many times   Today, it would be easy to see her as a portraitist of New York’s canonised ‘culturati’, but she painted hundreds of the city’s residents, treating taxi drivers, kids, actors, and activists with the same candour and attention For the exhibition ‘Alice Neel, Uptown’, the writer Hilton Als has brought together her portraits of people of colour residing in Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem, two largely immigrant neighbourhoods in which she lived over the course of five decades   The pairing of Neel and Als shows two artists who are both in sync and out of time Neel was born into a white, middle-class family in Philadelphia, and moved to New York with her husband, the Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez Gómez, in 1927 Als, a staff writer at the New Yorker, grew up in a black family in Brooklyn, and hit adolescence in the decade that Neel died Als shares with Neel a stylistic affinity – chicness served with a twist of Freudian introspection, and steeped in New York modernism – and a particular flair for studying character For Als, that character is often himself, and in prose passages dotted through the publication that accompanies the exhibition (also titled Alice Neel, Uptown), he uses Neel’s portraits as triggers to reflect upon his own life story   The exhibition travelled to London’s Victoria Miro after opening at David Zwirner in New York, and some of the most extraordinary paintings on show were those of men of physical and political action, in moments of calm In Ballet Dancer (1950), an un-named man lounges across a sofa, emanating the

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Interview

November 2016

Interview with Dodie Bellamy

Lucy Ives

Interview

November 2016

The summer of 2016 was for me the Summer of Dodie Bellamy. I am a New York resident, but...

Art

July 2012

Interview with Ben Rivers

Alice Hattrick

Art

July 2012

Ben Rivers is an artist who makes films. Two Years at Sea, his first feature-length film, was released to...

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April 2013

Félix Fénéon, Bomb-Thrower

Tom McCarthy

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April 2013

Editors’ Note: On 25 April 2013, novelist Tom McCarthy announced the winner of the first annual White Review Short...

 

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