Other Criteria’s Beautiful Primal Urges Rug by Damien Hirst is now being stocked by Belgian concept store Smets. We caught up with Pascaline Smets, Buyer and Creative Director for Smets, for a quick Q&A.

Damien Hirst’s Spin rugs are available in two different sizes and four different designs. View the full selection here.

Want to learn more about Smets? Click here to visit their website.

9th May – 29th June

JEFF KOONS, Antiquity 3, 2009–11, Oil on canvas, 102 x 138 inches  (259.1 x 350.5 cm)

With sources as diverse as children’s art, comic-book characters, and figures from antiquity, Jeff Koons continues to draw a common thread through cultural history, creating works that attempt to touch the core of the human psyche. Working through conceptual constructs including the new, the banal, and the sublime, he has taken his work from its literal, deadpan beginnings in readymades to baroque creations that extol innocence, beauty, sexuality, and happiness in confounding combinations of abstraction, figuration, sumptuous effect, and pure spectacle.

Read more about the exhibition on the Gagosian website.

The Virginia MoCA Virginia Beach
30 May – 18 August 2013

For this unique and highly acclaimed exhibition curated by Stacy Engman, an interdisciplinary mix of today’s top creative icons have interpreted a Tarot card using their own iconography. Each artist was matched with a Tarot card based on archetypal themes that their work references. This project distinguishes the art and iconography of our time through interpretation of the cards by the artists — demonstrating that archetypes and myth are still very much alive and present in contemporary art and culture.

The first project of its kind in history, the collection of 78 artists, designers, and photographers in this project represent a comprehensive survey of some of the world’s most influential and original creative minds, and offers and intimate probe into contemporary archetypes, the iconic, myth, meaning, and modes of interpretation. A truly rare occurrence to engage with contemporary art and culture in such an interactive, poetic, and profound way via the extraordinary original interpretations, and the infinite possibilities which exist for combination and exchange.

Rachel Howard / 7 of cups / ink on paper

Thanks to Jeremy Shotts who emailed to show us a photo of him enjoying playing one of our Spin Bass Guitars by Damien Hirst and Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Jeremy Shotts playing the Red Hot Chilli Peppers hit ‘The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie’

While he hung the guitar on the wall for a while, Jeremy decided “any bass – however beautiful – must be played“. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves! Flea clearly agrees – seen in the photo below playing his spin bass at our spin bass guitar launch night.

Surely any bass – however beautiful – must also be heard? Check out the video below of Red Hot Chilli Peppers on Jools Holland, and spot Flea playing his spin bass guitar to the same RHCP song Jeremy enjoys playing, ‘The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie’.

Flea playing at our spin bass guitar launch night

These uniquely produced charity bass guitars are by Damien Hirst and Flea, the bass player from The Red Hot Chili Peppers. The profits from the sales of the guitars will go to Flea’s charity, Silverlake Conservatory of Music. View all spin bass guitars online here. Email us info@othercriteria.com to enquire about the guitars.

We love to see our clients content with their purchases from us! Send us your photos to website@othercriteria.com and with your permission, we may show the images on our blog!

15th May – 7th June 2013

Marcus Harvey / Fuhrer’s cake / 2009 / Acrylic on inkjet mounted on canvas / 244 x 198 cm / 96 1/8 x 78 in

For this, Marcus Harvey’s first solo show at Vigo Gallery, the artist is embroiled in a battle between the romance of painting and the surety of photography, accentuating and deconstructing their relationship.

Harvey’s highly worked figurative paintings and sculptures seek out iconic forms of Britishness that have an antagonistic relationship to the contemporary British psyche, be they portraits of politicians, criminals, war heroes or landscapes.

Moving through the unsavoury themes of patriotism, British history and machismo without genuflecting to the liberal art establishment through deconstruction and irony, his ambivalence puts the viewer in the position, often uncomfortably, of a coerced or suggested empathy through the seductive nature and performative application of his materials.

This has been the one truly consistent conceptual strand in Harvey’s work where the urgent physicality, the brutishness of his paint, working as emotional expression’ has born the clichéd notion of painting as a factual truth working against the counterpoint of photography as cold, world, fact.

The contextualising photographic backdrops in this instance range from the urban, South East London estates and bleak seascapes of the Kentish coast to his son’s body or and his own upper arm, articulating these surfaces as canvases upon which violent swathes of paint reconfigure tattooed iconography in a meta existence. These images dance tantalisingly in sympathy and at odds, both spatially and conceptually, offering a pugnacious and lamenting take on the deeply unfashionable subjects of ‘hearth’, ‘home’ and ‘country’.

‘Dad’ is a bundle of daubs and marks forming the funerary arrangement of the letters DAD often seen in the picture window of a hearse and at the graveside for what might notionally be called a ‘working class’ send-off, for the paternal figure. The letters hover as paint, graffiti and blooms against a concrete garage wall. Again, the paint darkly implores empathy for the unravelling and beleaguered father figure in contemporary life.

The painting, ‘Isle’, uses the white cliffs of Dover as a metaphor for Britain’s place in a changing, uncertain world. The paint sits proud of an underlying photographic sea.  Britain’s cliffs look strong, poignant and full of history, proud in adversity. Bad weather seems imminent, a storm is brewing and the water on which the painting sits is changing. Shifts of global power and economic woes threaten this mighty fortress. It is not clear where the future lies but still the island stands strong. The tide may or may not turn.

Other images rage against moody backdrops, articulated with brutishness and a factual directness that is neither full of patriotic jingoism nor ironic satire. When we see this images we are there somewhere in between the paint and the photograph.

2nd May – 22nd June 2013

Lehmann Maupin, 520 West 26th Street & 201 Chrystie Street, New York

TRACEY EMIN
I Followed You to The Sun, 2013
neon
22.4 x 72 inches
56.9 x 182.9 cm
Edition of 3
LM17799