Half way through an anthropology doctorate, Hiller fled its “factuality” for “irrational, mysterious, numinous” art. Some suggest she believed in aliens. Not quite; she was fascinated by “the fact that people believed they were abducted by aliens.” In one work Hiller played back hundreds of such accounts, together, through tiny ceiling speakers – not facts but “a different kind of truth”.
The puzzling non-appearance of Leonardo’s restored Salvator Mundi in its new Abu Dhabi home puts a spotlight on art restoration. Some old paintings have had a hard life and cleaning reveals that some of what is seen is not by the artist. Watching a painstaking restoration, sometimes now public, is “a new kind of art pleasure … [and] always tasty meat for the pigmented naysayer.”
These Scandinavian artists have a knack for the astonishing – they once installed a replica Prada store out in the Texas desert. Now it’s a derelict community swimming pool inside a London gallery. This work has the “patina of fiction” and tells a story, with “a wink and a nod”, about the decline in civic facilities. “Gentrification makes everything so smooth and nice but it also excludes people.”
Apparently, Viola was keen to do this show after seeing some Michelangelo drawings. Putting one’s work up against the guy that painted the Sistene Chapel … WOAH!! You can guess the result. The linked piece is admirably restrained – “some fundamental challenges in this pairing”; others cannot resist nasty: “like the difference between a brilliant mathematician and a spaniel with a calculator.”