The Art Book Prize

Lissant Bolton, contributor to the winning book

Last week I attended the annual Art Book Prize, supported by The Art Newspaper and administered by The Authors club, which was awarded to Art in Oceana: A New History by Peter Brunt and Nicholas Thomas at London's National Liberal Club. Contributor Lissant Bolton, the Keeper of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum, collected by £1000 prize from the former TV presenter turned cooking sauce entrepreneur and arts patron, Loyd Grossman. 

Selected from a diverse shortlist of seven books on art and architecture, the editors enlisted a huge team of anthropologists, art historians and curators from across the globe to compile the ambitious survey of Oceanic art from the prehistoric period to the present day. Bursting with lavish illustrations of statues, fabrics, weapons and ritual objects, Bolton told me it took the picture researcher an incredible three years to bring together all the images.

Breese Little

Douglas Perez Castro, Competitive Market, 2011

A friend of mine co-owns Breese Little, a lovely little commercial contemporary gallery in Farringdon, now located in new premises pretty much next door to where they originally were on Great Sutton street. The gallery represents various contemporary artists from the UK and abroad, regularly hosting exhibitions of their work, as well as non-gallery artists, and often holding talks and lectures.

I had been meaning to visit the gallery since it opened over two years and finally went along to the private view of 'Old tin cutlery before the invention of the fork,' the title of which comes from the response surrealist Marcelle Ferry gave to Andre Breton's question 'What is Surrealism?' The show is composed of a selection of artists whose work is loosely linked by the oblique way in which they look at subjects and situations. Hierarchy, convention, expectation and reality are set aside and taboo's are addressed, consequently many pieces having a rather unsettling undertone. This is clearly illustrated in Douglas Perez Castro's, Competitive Market, 2011 (above), in which a line of farm workers walk in single file on their way to work but on the wall their shadows show a pack of sharp toothed wolves carrying rakes and machetes.

Works by Armen Eloyan, Rose Wylie, Paa Joe, Mino Maccari are to name just a few other artists works on show.

Liftoff of the last lunar mission, Apollo 17, 1972

In the room upstairs there is another exhibition composed of 100 vintage NASA photographs entitled 'For all mankind: Vintage NASA Photographs 1964-1983.' It provides an overview of a 20 year space exploration with some digital footage as well. Many of the photos on display have original NASA catalogue stamps on the reverse and includes the worlds first picture of the earth taken from the vicinity of the moon in 1966 and the first ever full earth view in 1972.

If you get a chance make sure to pay a visit before it closes on February 22nd.