Image Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill

Discovered in 1973 by Bofill, the Cement Factory was just an abandoned factory that comprised of over 30 silos, underground galleries and huge engine rooms. Most people wouldn’t give this run-down abandoned old factory a second glance if they were to pass by it. However, architect Ricardo Bofill saw it as a building full of potential with its unique design, enormous spaces and large arched windows and it inspired Bofill to transform it into his current workspace and home. The Cement Factory currently hosts Bofill’s architectural offices, achives, exhibition space, guestrooms, gardens and his personal apartment.

Ricardo Bofill is a Spanish architect who leads the international architectural and urban design practice Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura. He currently has over 1000 projects in 50 countries.

Image Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill

Image Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill

Image Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill

Two years later, in 1975, the 3,100 metre complex stands in the midst of gardens with eucalyptus, palms, olive trees and cypresses. The interior space has not been crammed up with too many items and together with the original abundant space and height; it provides the space with a lofty style. Bofill demolished part of the old structure but preserved some parts of the factory like the eight remaining silos which became offices, a library, laboratories and a space known as “The Cathedral”, which is currently used for exhibitions, concerts and cultural functions.  

Ricardo Bofill currently lives and works in The Cement Factory and claims that it is the only place where he can concentrate and create his projects. Looking at the incredible transformation, it’s difficult to believe that this land was ever a ruined factory.

The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee – Making Visible spans over three decades of the career of one of the great innovators of all time, Paul Klee. Audiences will get to explore his innovations and ideas from his emergence in Munich in the 1910s, through his years of teaching in Bauhaus in the 1920s to his final paintings after WWII. The exhibition brings together over 130 colourful drawings and paintings from collections around the world which the artist created, catalogued or exhibited together at key moments in Klee’s life.

Born in Switzerland in 1879, Paul Klee was one of the most renowned artists to work at the Bauhaus and is considered to be a radical and influential figure in European modernism. After his death in 1940, Klee left more than 10,000 works of diverse art. Klee is well-known for his abstract patchworks of colours and unique ‘oil transfer’ paintings, which can be seen in some of his works such as They’re Biting 1920 and Suspended Fruit 1921.

The exhibition will be held at the Tate Modern, from 19 October 2013 – 9 March 2014. It goes on for 17 rooms and takes the audience on a journey from when he first encountered cubism in 1912, to when he died in 1940, mainly focusing on the decade Klee spent teaching and working at Bauhaus in the 1920s. The exhibition follows the notebooks that Klee himself kept about how he wanted the rooms to be arranged in what sequences and runs of work from different periods. Through this method, the exhibition allows the audiences to enter Klee’s thought process in each painting and idea showcased.

‘A wonderful party going on inside a sullen black crag’: Opened Mountain, 1914 (detail). Photograph: Private collection

Most of Klee’s working method in any painting or drawing was generally the same. It starts with an abstract mark – a square, triangle, circle, line or a dot and then will evolve into something bigger. For example, a dot can turn into a line which then becomes a tightrope. Twenty lines later, streaming in parallel across a page, and you find a ploughed field or a river. A triangle arrives, and the scene now is a pyramid, a temple of a passing yacht. Most people have said that to study Klee’s art, you need a lot of time and attentiveness as there is always so much to read from his paintings, from the coded symbols to the underlying grammar.

They’re Biting, 1920: ‘a fishing trip that hinges on a single imbalance’. Photograph: Tate

Blain|Southern gallery held an exclusive exhibition this year, showcasing works created in the early 1990s from the late Felix Gonzales-Torres and Britain artist Damien Hirst. The exhibition brings together Gonzales-Torres’ famous minimalistic installations mirroring Hirst’s abstract paintings from his ‘Visual Candy’ series. The audience was able to touch and take the candy, while altering but not destroying the work.

Hirst once said that ‘art is about life – there isn’t anything else.’ Gonzalez-Torres’ work closely agrees with Hirst’s statement as most of this wok explores personal life, relationships and identity with socio-political issues of public and private space.

Damien Hirst at the opening of Candy

Felix Gonzalez-Torres is well-known for his installations and sculptures that utilised common materials such as light bulbs, clocks, paper and candies. Born in 1957, Gonzalez-Torres died in Miami in 1996 but his work is included in the permanent collections of major institutions such as The Museum of Mordern Art, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA.

Damien Hirst is well-known to be one of the world’s most successful contemporary artists. Born in 1965, the public started to pay attention to him in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated the exhibition Freeze. Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation and has works in numerous permanent collections including Tate Modern, London and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.

Gonzalez-Torres presents Untitled (1992), where hundreds of individually wrapped candy are strewn across the floor and piled up in mountains. This work is an interactive piece, where visitors can actively participate, freely choosing to touch, take or consume the candy, engaging in a multisensory experience. The idea behind the work is to learn to let go of the idea of permanence and that the work can be manifested repeatedly in different forms and continually change shape through every presentation, therefore making the form a constant state of flux.

Art by Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Untitled

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (1992)

The show also exhibits Hirst’s Visual Candy paintings (1993 – 1995) and Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spill work acts as a counterpoint to the paintings. The Visual Candy Paintings are mucky oil paint splodges of varying sizes on canvas, a bit like squashed Spot Painting. While supposedly abstract, the paintings are meant to depict medicinal pills that can be seen and a depiction of the psychological effects of happy, mood enhancing drugs. Like every drug, Hirst describes how, ‘in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease… the colours project so much joy it’s hard to feel it, but it’s there. The horror underlying everything.’  Therefore, despite the bright and optimistic colours, the painting carries a sort of tension and darkness that comes alone with the inevitable low that follows any high.

Damien Hirst, Jolly, 1994 Oil on canvas, 119 × 84.5 cm © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2013 Photography: Prudence Cummings

The exhibition brings two brilliant artists together to bring life to art and showcases the ways in which each artist used the signifier of candy during the 1990s to explore the questions of pure aesthetics and identity.