Art in Lockdown: Online Viewing at Cork Street

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, art, as everything else, has been challenged to adapt. Arguably it is dispositioned to do so, being a field for exchange and ideas.

The rise of the online viewing room has kept culture alive while gallery doors are tempo-rarily closed. Fostering a new medium of outreach to a broader audience, the online viewing room has become an emblem of resilience and possibility. However distant we may be, there is still capacity for experience.

During this time of rapidly changing restrictions, physical exhibitions remain shuttered for the next weeks. But there are four Cork Street shows you can visit online, anytime day or night.

Flowers Gallery

Isolation: Solitary Suspended (until 27th June) brings together work based on the idea of isolation before it became our reality. “When socialising is limited to only those with whom we cohabit for a prolonged period of time, how do we now view isolation?” asks curator Isabel Bingley. Works featured include Tai Shan Schierenberg’s Walden, inspired by the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s book of the same name.

Tai Shan Schierenberg, Walden, 2019, Oil on canvas © Tai Shan Schierenberg, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Goodman Gallery

ruby onyinyechi amanze presents a new series of drawings for The Ones That Stayed (until 10th June). A novel beginning for the artist, who has pared down and created three new strands of focus.

ruby onyinyechi amanze, Swimming Pools [pool dance], 2020

Meanwhile Grada Kilomba continues questioning the power structures implicit in the writ-ing of history. “What if history has not been told properly? And what if our history is haunted by cyclical violence precisely because it has not been buried properly?” she asks. Heroines, Birds and Monsters runs until 18th June.

Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Creon Act I, 2020 Ink on cotton paper

Waddington Custot

Ian Davenport is the first artist featured in the NEW WORK programme (until 14th August). An online platform debuting painting and sculpture by leading contemporary artists working today, four ‘Puddle Paintings’ continue Davenport’s exploration of colour, refer-encing combinations by French artist Pierre Bonnard, as seen at his 2019 Tate Modern exhibition.

Ian Davenport, Acra Magenta, 2019, acrylic on aluminium mounted onto aluminium panel