The now and again Five Pieces of Art thing feature again. Well why not (again)? Again and again (and again and again), all this art flowing past on various feeds or wrapped up in press releases or jumping off actual gallery walls or wrapping chips or passing on the side of those Whitechapel white vans. So we ask (again) why not five pieces of art every couple of weeks or so alongside everything else that appears on these fractured pages on a daily basis? Can you think of one good reason why not to? Well besides the time involved and the this and the that and the dancing around and the skins on the tins of paint and the man at the door…

Five pieces of art then, a semi regular feature, just five pieces of art that have passed our way in the last few days, nothing more (or less) than that. Nothing really to do with an upcoming show or anything else (although maybe they are), just a simple, semi regular five pieces of art feature. Let’s do it again…

1: Carol Bove – A special installation of Carol Bove’s sculpture Mary (2025) is on view on the roof of Gagosian, Beverly Hills, for two weeks only. The work belongs to the artist’s celebrated Glyph series, a succession of glossy, white-painted, looping cylindrical tubes of stainless steel. There’s something very exciting, no not exciting, soemthing very refreshing, no, that’s not the word either, there’s just something stimulating or exciting or refeshing or questioning or something about a Carol Bove piece (if you happen to be in Beverley Hills then the piece is on the gallery roof at 456 North Camden Drive until 13th may 2025). The last encounter we had with Carol Bove’s art was when ii stood out at Frieze London last year. There’s lots more about Mary here

ORGAN: Frieze Week – The Fair itself, Part Four and we’ve made it to the big dog that is Gagosian and those Carol Bove installations via Nancy Spero’s underwear, some Martha Rosler and the bloke with the blue carpet sweeper…

ORGAN: Frieze Week, was the man with the blue carpet sweeper sweeping around Carol Bove’s pieces part of it? Part of the performance? The blue was surely no accident?

ORGAN: The twenty art things that stood out in 2024 – Tracey Emin, Lee Bae, Ken Currie, Jeffrey Gibson, those Safehouse shows, Working Girls at Gallery 46, Bianca Raffaella, Ernest Cole, Sadie Hennessey, Peter Kennard, Carol Bove and…

2: This is a Peter Prendergast painting of Jan, it is a piece that’s so full of the energy of life, full of the challenge of the life drawing room where Peter was a tutor. Jan was a life model known to many of us from North Wales and well, regulars around here know I need little excuse to post an image of a Peter Prendergast piece, this one is rather powerful, I can hear the slices of pencil flying past my left ear as he sharpens it with a Stanley Knife and yelling about art mostly being about looking. Jan meanwhile was always a keen life model full of observations, conversation and more. There’s a statement from Peter’s son and current art tutor at Coleg Menai (or the Bangor Art Foundation course as it was in my day) underneath the image…

“Last night I heard the terribly sad news that our model for many years, Jan, died this week. I was fortunate enough to work for over 20 years with Jan when she worked with the foundation course, normally on Fridays. Life drawing was always a highlight, and a great ending to the week, made all the better for working with such a professional like Jan. As well as a great model, she was very knowledgeable about many things, and in particular the art world. I used to really enjoy 2 o’clock on a Friday when we would send the students out for a break and spend a few minutes chatting about all sorts of things and discussing the students drawings, she always had an interesting well informed take on things often pointing out things out to me that I hadn’t noticed. I learned a lot from her.  I’m sure many of you have equally fond memories of her, she was a huge part of the foundation course and will be missed greatly. I looked through my photo archive for a suitable student drawing of her, but there are so many good ones, that in the end I chose one of my father’s, that hangs on my wall and I look at every day” (Owain Prendergast)

Rest in Peace Jan. Our thoughts are with Jan’s friends and family.

Previous Peter Prendergast coverage on these pages

3: John Zorn – We know Mr Zorn for his music of course, however, those are two pieces of his visual art up there, right now he has an exhibtion on in a gallery in New York “Known predominantly as a groundbreaking figure in New York’s avant-garde and experimental music scenes, John Zorn has long been celebrated for his radical innovations in music. However, his abstract drawings—a private language of symbols and notations—have remained a closely guarded secret. Offering profound insight into Zorn’s creative mind, Hermetic Cartography reveals a new dimension of his artistic practice by showcasing works on paper that span seven decades of his visionary engagement with mark-making, improvisation, and the esoteric.

The exhibition includes a diverse array of Zorn’s visual artworks, graphic scores, dense philosophical notations, abstract poetry and artist books, and not only highlights Zorn’s radical approach to marks on paper but also his unique Theatre of Musical Optics and other experimental projects. By exploring these visual elements, the exhibition provides a new perspective on how Zorn’s abstract works intersect with and inform his musical compositions.

Explore more of John Zorn’s visual art here on the Gallery website

4: Another Orlanda Broom painting, this one is called Double Scoop, an acrylic painting on Hahnemühle paper, I just really (really) like Orlanda’s paintings, sometimes it really is that simple, we have said this before about Orlanda’s work. You can currently find this piece and a number of other recent Orlanda Broom paintings via the Art Car Boot Fair on-line shop.

By the way, the date for this year’s main London real life event from Art Car Boot Fair has now been set as September 20th 2025, once again at Kings Cross. Early bird tickets are now on sale…

5: Nana Wolke – This rather green Nana Wolke painting passed our way via a gallery press release from NıCOLETTı this morning. The last time we encountered Nana’s work it was all rather blue – ORGAN THING: Nana Wolke at NıCOLETTı, Wanda’s under the Westway, ultramarine tales of taxis and…

Now this page isn’t really about shows or events or the mostly thankless task of giving ungrateful galleries free publicity, although seeing as we’re here, here’s what the gallery press release said; “NıCOLETTı is pleased to announce its second participation in Independent New York, with a solo exhibition by New York-based, Slovenian artist Nana Wolke, in a shared presentation with Management, New York. This is our first collaboration with Management, with whom we now co-represent the artist. Exploring issues related to perception and modes of apprehension of space and time, Wolke’s series of works usually begins on film-like sets, where the artist records the unfolding of staged situations and improvised actions occurring in spaces spanning social hierarchy – from hotel rooms and private apartments to architectural complexes and public spaces, among others.

At Independent, Wolke presents a new series of paintings honing in on and observing the distortion of symbols associated with American suburbia through the prism of waning girlhood and newfound power in femininity, replete with Campbell’s soup cans, cowboy iconography, bananas, seduction, boredom and escapism. Painting in her signature style from self-captured low-fidelity footage, she directs her (and our) attention towards Upstate New York, depicting scenes soaked inreferences to iconic late 90s films such as The Virgin Suicides, or American Beauty. Playing with the viewer’s position and perspective while moving from exterior to interior spaces, Wolke focuses her attention on unstable, transitory moments, capturing the impermanence of youth and the existential drama of life lived at the margins. Nana Wolke was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1994 and lives and now works in New York, USA”.

There’s a preview of the New York thing here

Previously…

24th February 2025 – ORGAN: Five pieces of art – A David Shillinglaw/Lily Mixe piece, a new Melike painting, Tricia Gillman’s Paintings From the Eighties, Jennifer Binnie’s Woman in the Trees hand-coloured linocuts, a last glimpse of Taylor Silk’s big red star in that basement…

19th December 2024 – ORGAN: Five Art Things – Rick Lowe transforming shared structures, Madeleine Strindberg, David Bowie’s art collection, a new Deborah Roberts print, a quick bit of Stik and…