Balloon Museum Art Installation

At the old Billingsgate building there is a Balloon Museum although it’s actually a series of Balloon art installations. Or inflatable art installations if you want to be precise. But don’t let that distract you from the impressive nature of these pieces that range from small to huge as you walk through flashing moving globe and then witness huge inflatable rabbits. From their website - 

“Balloon Museum is a format created by a curatorial team that designs and realizes contemporary art exhibitions with specific works in which ‘air’ is a distinctive element. A journey through out-of-scale installations with unexpected shapes in which the interaction with viewers is placed at the center of the experience. Art one can touch, to live with and share, never static that creates an innovative relationship with the user, giving life to an experiential path of socialization. This unconventional approach to culture is fascinating and intriguing to adults and children, as they are passionate and curious, and are helping to establish Inflatable Art as one of the most acclaimed ‘Pop’ movements in the world.”

Phillip Guston at The Tate Modern

On Monday I was lucky to visit the Guston exhibition at the Tate Modern. Previously I’d not heard of Guston but really enjoyed this selection of his work. Tate Link. 

I also saw two quotes I enjoyed - 

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas… But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave” (John Cage)

“The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge… You cannot settle out of court” (Phillip Guston)

From the Tate Modern website - For over 50 years, artist Philip Guston restlessly made paintings and drawings that captured the anxious and turbulent world he was witnessing.

Born in Canada to a Jewish immigrant family, he grew up in the US and eventually became one of the most celebrated abstract painters of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside Mark Rothko and his childhood friend Jackson Pollock.

His early work included murals and paintings addressing racism in America and wars abroad. During the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s, Guston grew critical of abstraction, and began producing large-scale paintings that feature comic-like figures, some in white hoods representing evil and the everyday perpetrators of racism. These paintings and those that followed established Guston as one of the most influential painters of the late 20th century.

Guston was a complex artist who took inspiration from the nightmarish world around him to create new and surprising imagery. This exhibition explores how his paintings bridged the personal and the political, the abstract and the figurative, the humorous and the tragic.

Philip Guston is the first major retrospective on the artist in the UK in nearly 20 years.

The exhibition is co-organised by Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Visit - 29th January 2024. Thanks to BW for arranging x