Kanopy (Firm)
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Martin Creed is one of Britain's most engaging contemporary artists. His self-effacing work reflects an anxiety to communicate in a world already full of too many things. So he frequently tries to produce both something and nothing, and does so in idiosyncratic ways with the modest means from everyday life. In 2000 his Martin Creed works solo exhibition was organised by Southampton City Art Gallery. The show provided the first opportunity to reflect...
42) Red road
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Jackie works as a CCTV operator. Each day she watches over a small part of the world, protecting the people living their lives under her gaze. One day a man appears on her monitor, a man she thought she would never see again, a man she never wanted to see again. Now she has no choice, she is compelled to confront him.
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Tony Hill's films present entirely new ways of looking at the world in which we live. His extraordinary sculptural films turn and transform, squeeze and stretch the landscape and constantly challenge how we see what's around us. They are films about perception, time and space but they are also films about the body and memory and being alive. Above all, they are constantly surprising and delightful and, often, funny. Many of the films have been created...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
An internationally acclaimed artist, Antony Gormley is best known for his monumental sculpture Angel of the North. This earth-bound figure with its massive wings shares with all of Gormley's work a preoccupation both with the human form and with our shared spiritual potential. Antony Gormley's early lead and iron figures were cast from his own body. They demand a physical and emotional response, but they also raise profound philosophical questions...
45) David and Turner
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
In the fascinating Great artist series, we investigate some of the best artists in history - examining their influence, style and what exactly made them so unique. In this double package we examine two radicals and revolutionaries; David, the French revolutionary artist and propagandist and originator of hard-edged neo-classicism (best exemplified in the haunting 'Death of Marat'), and Turner, the maverick landscape artist whose work astounded and...
46) George Romney
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
George Romney (1734-1802) was a key figure in British art in the late eighteenth century. A contemporary of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, he was a fashionable, prolific and at times dazzling portrait painter. Originally from the Lake District, Romney moved to London in 1762, abandoning his wife in the process. After a visit to Italy, he found numerous patrons attracted by his immaculate draughtsmanship and spontaneous style. Along with...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Marc Quinn remains best known for his sculptures cast from parts of his body. The first of these, Self (initially cast in 1991), was created with nine pints of his frozen blood. Yet, as this profile demonstrates, his art over the past decade has embraced an exciting and diverse range of materials, including lead, ice, wax, glass, frozen flowers and even DNA. His sculptures include both figurative and semi-abstract forms, but each engages with his...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Many of Sam Taylor-Wood's distinctive photographs and films depict an affluent and fashionable social scene. But her concerns are often isolation and anxiety, conflict and alienation. Her art is alluring and disarming, and also frequently formally inventive. She uses multiple screens, still images combined with sound, and complex interior views conjured up with a panoramic camera. Among her earliest photographs are confrontational and sexually charged...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
In a distinguished career since the mid-1970s, Tony Cragg has produced a strikingly diverse range of sculptures in the widest variety of materials. His prolific output embraces organic and industrial creations, abstract and near-figurative images, delicate, powerful, immediate and yet elusive forms. The sculptor, he says, "looks for all the forms that don't exist." Filmed in the UK and Germany, where Tony Cragg has lived since the early 1980s, this...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Michael Landy acknowledges that he will probably always be known as "that bloke who destroyed all his belongings". In his 2001 artwork Break Down he publicly and systematically shredded, dismantled and demolished everything that he owned. “I’m always trying to get rid of myself," he says, "so that I can move on. And then I end up always coming back to the same themes… I guess I’m a creature of habit." In this film profile Michael Landy reflects...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
At the heart of Dryden Goodwin's art is a fascination with drawing. But the ways in which he explores this age-old practice are anything but traditional. He combines drawing with photography, film and large-scale screen-based installations. He is engaged with time as well as line, and with the sculptural potential of two-dimensional images. Other concerns in his art are also strongly contemporary: the city, ideas of public and private, voyeurism,...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
In the early nineteenth century John Constable revolutionised landscape painting and the way in which we see the natural world. Many of his major works are in the collection of Tate, and this film uses those paintings and drawings, together with works from London's National Gallery and elsewhere, to consider the artist's life and work. The canvases and sketches are newly and exceptionally filmed in HDTV from the original artworks. Constable at Tate...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Although at times obscured by the artist's celebrity, the art of Tracey Emin is serious and focussed, challenging and at times startlingly beautiful. In this film, she speaks frankly about her career, the craft of her immensely varied work, and the immediate, personal themes with which she engages: autobiography, memory, desire, and identity. Many of her best-known works, including Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995 (1995) and My bed (1998),...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The perennially popular paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) have long been recognised as embodying the sophistication and elegance of Georgian England. The inventiveness and complexity of his techniques remain as dazzling today as they were to his contemporaries. He was among the first British artists to show his work in public exhibitions, and throughout his life he was committed to creating a modern art with modern subjects. Produced alongside...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
What is fair trade? How does it work in practice? What difference is it making to people in the developing world? This is the story of fair trade fashion company People Tree. Sweatshop labour: The UK fashion business is worth over {dollar}40 billion annually. But beneath the industry's glamorous facade, there's an inconvenient truth: most of the clothes are made in the developing world using sweatshop labour. People Tree set out to make a difference,...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
William Turnbull is one of Britain’s most distinguished sculptors and painters. In the late 1940s he studied art in London and then spent time in Paris, and ever since he has rigorously explored a limited number of archetypal forms as well as the fundamentals of art’s languages. Over more than fifty years William Turnbull has returned again and again to the head and the mask, to the standing figure and the horse, as well as to possibilities of...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The painter William Hodges is increasingly seen as a key figure in eighteenth-century British art and in its relationships with the wider world. In an age of colonial expansion Hodges accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific from 1772 to 1775. His vivid paintings of Tahiti, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands were the first such images widely seen in Europe. In the early 1780s Hodges travelled extensively in northern India, and...
58) Inside a hotel
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The MacDonald chain of luxury hotels serves business and leisure customers across the UK. Their people are integral to their success. This film goes inside one of its hotels to discover what they do. Service is everything: Guests have to be greeted with a smile. Neil, the concierge, is virtually a "personal organiser" for everyone who visits the hotel. The receptionist is in the front line, too, checking people in and dealing with angry customers....
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
From previously barren moorland in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, Ian Hamilton Finlay has created a unique garden as an encompassing work of art. Little Sparta is a magical combination of culture and horticulture, poetry and planting, philosophy and myth. Ian Hamilton Finlay began his work at Little Sparta in the mid-1960s. With friends and collaborators, around a group of old farm buildings he has fashioned landscapes, streams, bridges, glades,...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Howard Hodgkin is one of the world's leading painters, whose art is admired both by critics and by a wide public. Beginning with a remembered experience, Hodgkin works on his seductive and complex paintings for long periods, characteristically producing richly coloured, sweeping compositions, which continue into the picture-frame itself. These paintings uniquely straddle representation and abstraction, at the same time as they demonstrate both an...