Today's Special

Keith Coventry, Kebab Machine 2 (bronze, 109 x 38 x 38 cm. Ed 3), 1998.

... was brought to us by Pace London & Abdullah AlTurki, with installations, sculpture, painting, photography and video works by Gabriel Orozco, Juergen Teller, Elad Lassry, Mat Collishaw, Keith Coventry, and some other artist's work. The exhibition "takes a satirical look at the way society represents, consumes and obsesses over food."

Juergen Teller, 25 works (lightjet digital c-print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. Ed 5), 2010

Between July and September 2014, the multiplication of food imagery included a growing number of cuisines, programmes and social channels across London and beyond, depicting and significantly exploring the relations between contemporary human relationships, like close friends and professional acquainted people, and food eating habits from distinctive parts of the world. Some highlights include,

getting everybody together for lunch at M's garden cooked by M. and myself; meeting with L. and S. at their new house for a diner, sprinkled with a gratifying feeling brought on by a selection of French wines; dinning with A. and C. at a high-street restaurant to discuss the lightness of salads, a selection drawn upon a table cheese and the destructive implications of Brace Brace; getting together with L. and M. for a barbecue at the local park while visioning the Northern counties; eating with V. at the closest pub to conjure about power mechanisms; a light lunch with M. at his being-refurbished-house; be with M. for a pint and peanuts; joining S. and his family for his birthday party and a mixture of disrupted and consumed appearances; and some Samuel Smith's traditional meals at different locations. Overall, today's special has been a time of full of gratifying eating impulses, activities and experiences.

newsfromgloucestershire201201

"Blow ... houses are solid and substantial and intentionally lacking in meretricious brilliance; their quality lies in the use of the best materials worked in the best possible way. Blow was an innocent. A lovable, fastidious personality and a joy in simple things permeate his own house, Hilles, in Gloucestershire. Thrust up on a bastion because of sloping ground, the house looks at though it grew out of the soil. Begun in 1914, it was built on a site chosen for its spectacular views of rolling countryside and woods, but the house was not orientated to take advantage of the view. In Elizabethan fashion, it turns its shoulder to the panorama, only casting a backward glance, so to speak, through a comparatively small number of not very large windows. On the ground floor, only a bay at the end of the Long Room looks out on this side. Hilles was built in stages; but even allowing for this, it does not seek to make a triumphant, unified impression. The broad window bay which goes up above the thatched eaves of the roof is disproportionately big, fitted to need rather than to conventional notions of architecture. The rooms - with their Mortlake tapestries, their panelling, their seventeenth-century furniture - are not without a sense of grandeur; but equally the stone flags of the hall, the elm floorboards and ceilings throughout the houses, the plainness and solidity of the architecture, and the simplified mouldings of the windows and fireplaces suggest a relish for the natural qualities of materials unadorned. The way the life of the house was organised, socially and domestically, completed the aesthetic whole."

in ... p. 244-5