1. Articles

Fiction | Asphyxia by Violette Leduc

Fiction, Fiction, Staff Picks, Writing

My mother never gave me her hand… She always helped me on and off pavements by pinching my frock or coat very lightly at the spot where the armhole provides a grip. It humiliated me. I felt I was inside the body of an old horse with my carter dragging me along by one ear… One afternoon, as a gleaming carriage sped past, splattering the leaden summer with its reflections, I pushed the hand away right in the middle of the road. She pinched the cloth […]

Essay | Reflections on Orwell’s Coming Up for Air by Patrick Maxwell

Articles, Essays, Essays, Writing

“Call it peace, if you like. But when I say peace I don’t mean absence of war, I mean peace, a feeling in your guts. And it’s gone for ever if the rubber-truncheon boys get hold of us.” What moves us about this passage? It is not particularly difficult to know which literary world we are in, which part of history we are being exposed to, and even which author is speaking […]

Review | Young Rembrandt & Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age

Articles, Events, Reviews, Reviews, Writing

The similarities between the life paths of the 17th century Dutch painters Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693) and Rembrandt (1606-1669) are intriguing. Both grew up in small town Holland, both were apprenticed to local painters at an early age, both moved to Amsterdam to work with a master, both returned to their home towns to perfect their own style, both ended their lives in Amsterdam to which each had returned as their careers began to burgeon […]

Interview | Elizabeth Eade at HIX ART

Featured Writing, Interviews, News, Preview, Writing

HIX ART is currently presenting I know you are but what am I, the first major solo exhibition by acclaimed British artist Elizabeth Eade. In this new series of installations, Eade playfully and powerfully continues her exploration of a range of social and political issues. In 2018, Eade won the celebrated HIX Award, judged by the likes of Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk, with her piece Die Liste — a ten-metre-long handwritten list documenting the deaths […]

Interview | Atiq Rahimi on dreams, minimalism and the female nude

Featured Writing, Interviews, News, Preview, Writing

‘Depicting the body is a very political act in my culture, no matter what you do with it; even if it’s abstract. Nudity is a political act. Unveiling the body is engaging with the essential in life, the universal. The body is fundamentally the same regardless of gender. Some political regimes divide the genders along the lines of insignificant bodily differences. Politics often create a contradiction between the sexes when, in actual fact, it’s just a difference, nothing else.’ […]

Interview | Joo Yeon Park on Beckett, Failure and ‘the Unword’

Featured Writing, Interviews, News, Preview, Writing

‘If you are to fail, you might as well, as Beckett put it, ‘fail better’; you might as well volunteer to fail. And failure is, possibly, a necessity in art-making, and it’s not necessarily a negative thing in art. It can prove to be a turning-point, to open up a space for discussion, for something that you haven’t expected to see or experience. So it can be a positive thing, so I think there’s a double-edged sword in what Beckett means by failure.’ […]

Review | Bridget Riley: The Eye’s Mind

Reviews

Bridget Riley didn’t invent Op Art. The phrase first appeared in Time Magazine in 1964 in response to Julian Stanczak’s exhibition Optical Paintings. Defined as a form that uses visual trickery to challenge perception, it was a natural successor to Futurism, Constructivism, Vorticism and even Dadaism, liberated by Impressionism. But Riley made it what it is now […]

Essay | Reflections on The Brothers Karamazov by Patrick Maxwell

Articles, Essays, Essays, Writing

In his masterpiece, Enemies of Promise (1938), Cyril Connolly distinguishes between two different styles of writing, which he terms as the ‘Mandarin’ and the ‘Vernacular’. In the former group: Edward Gibbon, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce; among the latter: William Hazlitt, George Orwell, and Christopher Isherwood. Fyodor Dostoevsky is a writer of neither groups […]

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