Jo Applin

In September​, a suitcase filled with sculptural odds and ends was discovered beneath a spiral staircase in Louise Bourgeois’s house in Chelsea, New York. It had been tucked away behind a rail of clothes and forgotten. Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98, but the suitcase hadn’t been touched in more than forty years. I was staying at the house next door, where her archive is kept,...

‘Little TV Woman: I Am the Last Woman Object’ (1969)

Nicola L.​ is best known for the soft vinyl sculptures of feet and other body parts she made in the 1960s and 1970s. These giant cushions were paired with other ‘functional objects’ including plastic lamps shaped as eyeballs and lips, curvaceous wooden chests of drawers and head-shaped bookcases. In I Am the...

Between​ 1978 and 1983, Charles Jencks worked with the architect Terry Farrell to turn his family’s Victorian end-terrace home in Holland Park into Cosmic House. Jencks died in 2019, two years before the house opened to visitors and nearly fifty years after he defined ‘postmodern’ architecture as an ironic, pluralist style signalling ‘the death of modernist...

‘Altarpiece’ (1915)

In​ 1932, aged seventy, Hilma af Klint rewrote her will. She stipulated that her paintings, notebooks, drawings and writings be kept from public view for at least twenty years after her death: by then, she hoped, audiences might be ready for her work. In the event, it took more than four decades for it to be seen in public. In 1986, a selection of...

Since​ 1977 Barbara Kruger has explored the relationship between politics and power in text and image-based works that surprise, exhort, instruct, plead, insist, cajole and otherwise boss us about. In addition to her familiar wall-mounted billboards and projections on show at the current Serpentine retrospective (until 17 March), sound installations dotted about the gallery repeat stock...