I lost my art to a Starship Trooper

I lost my art to a Starship Trooper

It’s hard to ignore an exhibition which goes by the catchy title of I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper. The show in question, which opens at the Griffin Gallery in London today (12 January-24 February), is not actually about 1970s disco, exploring instead appropriation and why artists look to their forefathers for inspiration. Catherine Loewe, the London-based art advisor who has curated the exhibition, says: “The exhibition’s title comes from the 1978 Hot Gossip song of the same name, and also refers to the artist Glenn Brown, who used the title for one of his paintings, a meticulous rendition of a Rembrandt. Through this appropriation, Brown united something old and almost sacred with something modern, and this, in part, was the genesis of the exhibition.” Brown is among the twelve artists featured along with Gavin Turk who is showing Large Transit Disaster (Blue, Copper & Ochre, 2013) from the Transit Disaster series evoking Andy Warhol’s Death and Disasters silkscreens (1962-63). Meanwhile, Nick Hornby’s sculpture Muse: Experiments in Colour (2015) came to life after the artist visited the Cast Courts at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Intriguingly, the Rise and Fall of Young Sen by Henry Hudson is the UK artist’s take (in plasticine) of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1733).