Griselda Murray Brown

Artists aren’t exactly known for their accommodating, easy-going ways. More often, it’s words such as “egocentric” and “introverted” that spring to mind. In reality, though, few artists work in total isolation, especially once they have achieved a certain level of success. The likes of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have teams of assistants making their work – yet these people, never namechecked, can hardly be called collaborators. At the other end of the fame scale, collaboration is crucial for s…

Where sport leads, culture follows. To tie in with Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games in July, visual arts centres all over Scotland will be showing work by Scottish or Scottish-trained artists made in the past 25 years under the umbrella Generation. The exhibitions run from April to November and take place everywhere from the National Gallery in Edinburgh to Orkney’s Pier Arts Centre. But what does the project say about contemporary art in Scotland? When the Glasgow-based artist Douglas Gordon won t…

Not every business that moves into a new building invites the public in too. But that is precisely what one of London’s most prestigious picture framing firms will do this week. The John Jones Arts Building opens on Thursday, fitted out with light-filled workshops, conservation studios – and a non-selling art gallery with a café. On a site behind Finsbury Park train station, a busy interchange in a formerly overlooked corner of north London, the new building gives credence to the perhaps unlike…

In a world saturated with images, handwriting is a strangely private thing. Most celebrities could drop their shopping list in their local supermarket (were they to shop there) and no one would suspect it of having a famous author. David Shrigley’s handwriting, however, is instantly recognisable. Known for his scratchy drawings with deadpan captions exposing the vanity and banality of contemporary life, Shrigley had major exhibitions in 2012 at London’s Hayward Gallery and Manchester’s Cornerhou…

“In those days you would come to this area and it was like the end of the world. It reminded me of those Edward Hopper paintings, those totally desolate places.” This is how Ziba Ardalan describes the post-industrial part of east London where she set up her non-profit art gallery, Parasol Unit, 10 years ago. On a quiet street between the bars of Shoreditch and the restaurants of Islington, Parasol is still somewhere one is unlikely to happen upon. Yet the area has changed since Ardalan first vi…

The Prince of Wales certainly gets people talking about architecture. His pronouncements on, and interventions into, designs for new buildings date back to 1984, when he was invited to speak at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) on its 150th anniversary. He shocked his hosts by denouncing the modernist architect Peter Ahrends’ proposed extension to the National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle”. Ahrends’ design was later scrapped and the speech was said to have sparked a “style wa…

Mari Vanna Mari Vanna is a curious piece of old-world Russia on Knightsbridge, a place where regulars pore over newspapers from home and sip black tea from tall glass tankards away from the traffic jams outside. Not one inch has been left unadorned: there are painted tables and cane-backed chairs, ornate dressers displaying Russian dolls and fine china, and old photographs on the patterned wallpaper. Afternoon tea consists of tasty pelmeni (meat-filled dumplings), vareniki (the vegetarian vers…

Ignoring the old adage about the things one should never work with, Pierre Huyghe is an artist who works with animals. He brought an aquarium to London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2011, and at Documenta 13 installed a compost heap in a Baroque garden complete with a sculpture of a nude woman with a beehive for a head and a real dog sniffing about the detritus. Fresh from a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris last year, which is due to travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Novembe…

The African-American painter on stereotypes, the western canon and who decides market value

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