art-Corpus

Review of Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan at Tate Modern

2012-02-28T20:57:00.000Z

28/02/12

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan

Tate Modern

28 February – 27 May 2012

If art is to be considered playful, experimental, and a way of making and breaking rules, then the prolific works of Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) can certainly be seen to epitomise these concepts. Fascinated with numbers, words, dates, sequences, magic, coincidences and games, Boetti began producing sculptures in the late 1960s, and, initially, was caught up in the Arte Povera movement, before turning to mock this and produce his own manifesto (1967). Many of the principles remained consistent, however, and he held a firm belief in the motto “mettere al mondo il mondo”, which translates both as “bringing the world into the world” and “giving birth to the world”, the title of one of his biro works from the 1970s, but also reflecting his attitude that artists oughtn’t necessarily invent new things, but rather work with what the world already has to offer. Tate Modern’s current retrospective, Game Plan, takes the visitor on an exciting and unpredictable tour through some of Boetti’s serendipitous creations of ordered disorder (or should that be disordered order?), traversing the world, to Afghanistan and back, with no two visitors taking the same route. Works are not arranged chronologically, but, rather, thematically, and no one path is prescribed, allowing as much of an element of chance into the exhibition as into the production itself.

Boetti was a keen traveller who visited Guatemala, Ethiopia, Morocco, Japan, and, most importantly, Afghanistan, where he set up the One Hotel and later employed a band of (well paid) workers. During his travels, he began a series of works involving the postal service, including La Mole Antonelliana (1970-1975), for which he sent postcards of Turin back to Turin from seven cities around the world. Another postal work, Viaggi Postali (Postal Voyages) (1969-1970), involved his sending of envelopes to false addresses, including, for example, to dead artists such as Marcel Duchamp. These were, in due course, returned to him, photocopied, placed inside a larger envelope, and resent. In this way, a work was built up, comprising many layers and journeys, as well as the input of external “artists”, in this case the postal workers, who would apply their stamps at random.

Whilst Boetti often employed others to (co-)produce his works, enjoying the added layers of their input, Serie di merli dispositi a intervalli regolari lungo gli spalti di una muraglia (A Row of Merlons Set at Regular Intervals Along the Ramparts of a Wall) (1971-1973) remains a personal work, documenting the artist’s own life. It consists of a series of framed telegrams, sent at intervals which double in length from one to the next. Boetti had predicted the date of his death to be due to fall on 11 July 2023 (something also denoted in earlier plaques and embroideries), and thus he left space in the frame for the telegrams still to come. Unfortunately, however, his calculation was incorrect, and he died unexpectedly early in 1994, leaving one poignant gap for the telegram due in 2016, which, now, will never be sent.

Boetti’s interest in travel also extended to the production of a series of geopolitical world maps, Mappa, between 1971-1994. Spanning this critical period, the embroideries provide an interesting documentation of the changing political borders during the Cold War, charting the progressive break up of the USSR. Although varying in scale and angle from map to map, the countries are, where possible, coloured according to their flags. There is a story of chance associated with even these, however, since, in 1979, Boetti received a finished map, sent back from his workers in Afghanistan, on which the ocean was a beautiful baby pink. Supposedly this was due to his landlocked embroiderers not knowing what an ocean was, nor how it should be coloured, and thus simply choosing an easily available colour for this large expanse. Boetti was, however, so pleased with this intervention of happenstance, that he never again dictated the colour for the ocean, and remained proud of how little he determined the look of the finished works. Similarly, with his biro drawings, each sheet in a multi-part work would be created by someone different on his behalf, and, although the identity of each remains unknown, the different personalities shine through in the various mark makings. These scribbled works also seem to have the depth and texture of embroidery, and, as with many of his works, contain layers of hidden messages, encoded through the use of large white commas relating back to the alphabet down the side of the sheet.

As well as hiding messages and using codes, Boetti was intrigued with systems of classification, and, in the late 1970s, he collaborated with his wife, Annemarie Sauzeau, to produce a book and two large-scale embroideries, listing the thousand longest rivers in the world (Classifying: The Thousand Longest Rivers in the World, 1977). As Sauzeau stated, however, “[classifications] will always be provisional and illusory,” especially, it would seem, where water and tides are involved. Boetti, of course, enjoyed this element of unpredictability, and elsewhere invokes classifications solely in order to abuse them. So, for example, he adds anomalous pictures of a motorcycle and a stone amongst the animals in his drawing Regno animale (Animal Kingdom) (1978).

This game of rules and exceptions, and order and disorder, is a key element in all of Boetti’s work. In fact, one piece even bears the title Ordine e Disordine (Order and Disorder) (1973), and consists of 100 embroidered panels, arranged at random on a wall, each spelling out their titular words. Evoking the same notion, but this time using images, the series Aerei (Aeroplanes) (1978; 1984; 1989) shows the artist’s ongoing attraction to multiplicity, with an overloading of machines in the sky, overlapping and interweaving, intruding on one another’s space, but not crashing.

Maximum saturation of the canvas is also achieved in the later series Tutto (Everything) (1989; 1992-1993; 1994), where Boetti has traced the outlines of images from magazines and newspapers, and then had them embroidered in myriad bright colours, like a nursery rug, but with no two areas of the same shade touching one another, and in the jigsaws he had made from earlier series of works, to be given to children on Austrian Airlines, including Faccine (Little Faces) (1979), for which he created a hexagonal grid and asked the children to fill in the faces in felt tips of their choice. This, it would seem, is the artist coming full circle from his own early child’s play sculptures, where he stacked and packed objects such as paper doilies (Colonna, 1968), to a stage whereby he offers up an idea and allows children to play for themselves.

The exhibition closes with a work set apart from the rest, outside on the balcony. Boetti’s first sculpture using cast bronze, this Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) (1993-1996), showing the artist standing fully clad under a hosepipe, offers an ambivalent interpretation. In one way, it may seem humbling and meek, but, with a cleverly concealed heating mechanism underneath the artist’s scalp, which makes the water from the hose evaporate on contact and disappear in a cloud of steam, it might also be suggestive of a man with such an overload of ideas, that he needs to cool himself down. Either way, as the exhibition’s curator, Mark Godfrey, says: “[there is a] stream of ideas now heading out into London which is hopefully going to touch a lot of people over the next few months.” The invitation to join in and play is there for the taking.

Image:

Aligherio Boetti

Aerei, 1989

Courtesy of Carmignac Gestion Foundation

Also published at: http://www.rovesandroams.com/2012/02/alighiero-boetti-game-plan-at-tate-modern/

One Giant Leap and Limited Edition Saatchi Gallery Suite at the Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill

2012-02-25T20:26:00.000Z

One Giant Leap

Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill
from 1 February 2012
and
Limited Edition Saatchi Gallery Suite
Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill
1 February–30 April 2012

by ANNA McNAY

The Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill – has been partnered with Frieze Art Fair since 2008. In an ongoing bid to attract artists and collectors, the hotel has launched a collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery to host a series of exhibitions in its expansive marbled foyer, Montagu dining room, and Churchill bar, as well as to produce a limited edition suite, offering guests the opportunity to live and sleep amongst works from the gallery’s collection. With the goals of opening up art to a wider audience and exploring how different pieces can work within a non-gallery situation, the project has certainly created a stir among the hotel’s guests.

To read the rest of this review please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/reports/one-giant-leap-2012.asp

Copyright © 1893–2011 The Studio Trust. The titles Studio International and The Studio are the property of The Studio Trust and, together with the content, are bound by copyright. All rights reserved

Review of Alternative Loudest Whispers 2012 at the Conference Centre, St. Pancras Hospital

2012-02-20T17:23:00.000Z

20/02/12

Alternative Loudest Whispers 2012

The Conference Centre, St. Pancras Hospital

2 February – 26 March 2012

I’m an FtM transman.

After I transitioned, a non-trans person commented to me:

“You’re very convincing.”

“Thank you, so are you,” I replied.

(Simon Croft, wall text to accompany Convincing, 2012)

What does it mean to be convincing, to shape one’s identity so as to fit into society’s mould, to find a sense of belonging? These are themes which are explored in some depth in Alternative Loudest Whispers 2012, a multimedia art exhibition showcasing works by 11 London-based LGBT artists, both trained and self-taught, as part of the nationwide LGBT History Month.

Croft’s work greets you as you enter the long and brightly lit corridor gallery at the Conference Centre, St. Pancras Hospital, a space curated by Peter Herbert of The Arts Project. A grouping of drainpipes, some only knee-high, others as tall as an adult, stand proud, wrapped in carefully cut out black and foil lettering, repeating, over and over, “You’re very convincing,” representative perhaps of the crowd that forms society at large, looming tall (and threatening?) around the individual, seemingly uniform in shape and posture. Mirrors on either side of the installation serve to multiply the effect, as well as to draw the visitor in to look at himself, thereby also questioning his own appearance. As it happens, these mirrors were already in place when Croft came to install his work, but serendipity can sometimes be kind.

Issues of externalised identity are further highlighted in Daryl White’s various portraits, mixed in both media and style, several of which incorporate masks, be they gas masks, ones akin to Pulp Fiction’s gimp, or merely the made up face of a performer, the subject also of a number of Pascal Ancel Bartholdi’s ethereal silver gelatine prints, capturing friends and strangers against a smoky stage set backdrop.

Marion Hack’s Man with Earing [sic] (2011), sketched in charcoal and chalk, depicts a shadowy face, with eyebrows slightly drawn, and, aside from a hint of red on the lips, overwhelmingly dark and downcast. Brighter in colour, but equally questioning with regards to where one belongs, is First Out (2012), a nostalgic portrayal of the recently closed café-bar, but seen from the outside looking in, filled with happy faces, a crowd of which the onlooker is not a part. Historical documentation is also brought to play in Hack’s Suffragette 1912 (2011), A.T.S. (2007), and Reclaim the Night (2010), which look back at and celebrate those who have played a part in the battle to bring us to where we are, and to gain us the relative freedoms we enjoy today.

Space and place are themes picked up on by Titus Davies in A Room of My Own One, A Room of My Own Two, and Travels Under My Sink (all 2009), series of photographs, depicting the artist lying beneath and beside a bed, and uncomfortably contorted to fit into the small ‘cupboard’ space beneath a kitchen sink. Again, questions are raised regarding belonging – not only the matter of where, but perhaps also to whom, and as who?

This is something that can well be questioned in art, as further shown by Caroline Halliday’s sculptural works, including The Artist’s Hat (2001), a swing made out of hair, wood, and wire, which came out of a project of the same name, and, to her, represents ‘a place where the artist in all of us can be free to dream’ and to wear his or her ‘artist’s hat’ (perhaps another take on the mask?). Also by Halliday, Secret Lives (2008), comprises a long work bench decorated with a number of paper houses, in descending height order like a set of Russian dolls, made out of pages of her journals. Deconstructing personal secrets and turning them into dwellings themselves, rather than thoughts which dwell inside us, we return, once again, to the notion of words and language as a medium for expression and a portrayal of who and what we are. From Croft’s consideration of the impact of throw away comments, to Halliday’s use of the considered and contemplative written documentation of our deepest thoughts, these ideas are conclusively brought together by the exhibition’s title, Loudest Whispers, which captures perfectly the desire of the artists to use their work to explore and in some cases proclaim, both privately and publicly, loudly and at a whisper, who they are, and how they see themselves.

Images:

Simon Croft

Convincing (installation shot)

2012

Pascal Ancel Bartholdi

War and Peace

Titus Davies

Travels Under My Sink (detail)

2009

Caroline Halliday

Secret Lives (detail)

2008

Review of Mondrian || Nicholson: In Parallel at the Courtauld Gallery

2012-02-18T18:17:00.001Z

18/02/12

Mondrian || Nicholson: In Parallel

The Courtauld Gallery

16 February – 20 May 2012

When Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) first met Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) at the latter’s studio in Paris in April 1934, Nicholson was an up and coming British artist, and Mondrian a well-established and successful Dutch painter. They already shared some common interests and aesthetic ideals in their penchant for abstraction and shared preoccupation with the colour white, but, as their friendship bloomed over the coming decade, so too did an extraordinary creative relationship between the two men. It is this relationship which is the theme being explored in the latest exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, a small but focused two room show, arising, as is often the case in this institution, from one particular painting in its own collection: in this instance, Nicholson’s 1937 (painting) (1937).

Opening with a couple of works from shortly before the two men met, Mondrian’s Composition with Yellow and Blue (1932) and Nicholson’s 1933 (Six Circles) (1933), visitors are given an insight into how the men worked independently at the beginning of the politically turbulent decade. Mondrian’s composition is one of a series where he was playing with moving about his trademark black lines and squares and rectangles of colour, and adjusting the thickness of the lines to see what effect this might have. Nevertheless, in comparison to his later works, there is a stability here, a kind of dynamic equilibrium, which would be difficult to dislodge. Nicholson’s work, on the other hand, is one of his early reliefs, from a time when he was still cutting his lines and circles freehand (he later moved on to increasingly employ a compass and ruler).

On the next wall, we find Mondrian’s Composition with Double Line and Yellow (1932), which, although also produced before the artists’ first meeting, is significant for its being the first work of Mondrian’s purchased by Nicholson’s first wife Winifred in 1935. In fact, it was the first work of Mondrian’s to be bought by any English collector, and Nicholson and Winifred were to play a key role in getting the Dutch artist known, bought, and exhibited in this country. The two artists were also often shown together, as, for example, in the 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at MoMA in New York, where they were paired as leading exponents of ‘geometrical abstraction’.

Two years later, with war appearing imminent in Paris, and with Mondrian having been included in the Nazi’s Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, Nicholson sent an invitation to his friend, enabling him to leave France and come and join the Nicholsons and a wider community of international avant-garde artists (including Henry Moore, Naum Gabo, and Nicholson’s future wife Barbara Hepworth), in Hampstead, where Nicholson also found him a studio-cum-bed-sitting-room. It was here that Mondrian began to make his lines much thicker, multiplying them, and pushing his colours to the very edges of the canvas. He wanted to make his white as opaque as possible, and, to reach this goal, painted it over with many layers, sometimes even wet on wet, which has resulted in a number of visible cracks today. Another interesting side effect, however, is that the intersecting black lines have the appearance of being almost ‘cut in’ to the white, thus giving a sense of relief, as with Nicholson, who always carved his works out of single pieces of board, rather than taking the easier option of overlaying separate sheets. 1935 (White Relief) (1935), for example, which is one of Nicholson’s largest works, is carved from a mahogany table leaf, bought from Camden Market.

Whilst there are indeed a great many parallels between the two men’s works, as the exhibition’s title would suggest, the curators also hope that the conversation engendered between the pieces on display will highlight some of their outstanding differences. For example, aside from the appearance of relief resulting from Mondrian’s layering of white paint, he was very much an artist concerned with flatness of the surface, and with creating a punctuating rhythm using lines and colours. Nicholson, on the other hand, is famous for his reliefs, and for the lines he created through the use of shadow and depth, with the contrast of white and more neutral tones. When he began to add colour back into his work in the latter half of the decade, he placed it centrally, whereas Mondrian, by this time, was pushing his colours further and further to the edges. He also framed his works quite deliberately so that they could expand on the walls, whilst Nicholson framed his so as to contain them.

The outbreak of the Second World War finally separated Nicholson, who moved to Cornwall with Barbara Hepworth, and Mondrian, who declined their offer to join them, preferring to remain in a city environment in New York. The exhibition concludes with two final works, produced on different continents, yet reflecting the closeness between the two men, and a similarity never again to be attained, since Mondrian died two years later, and Nicholson returned to figuration. Nicholson’s 1940-3 (Two Forms) (1943), with its many coloured squares and rectangles, is perhaps as close to a Mondrian as he ever got, and could be interpreted as a homage to the friend he was missing. Mondrian’s Composition No. III White-Yellow (1935-1942), on the other hand, seems to build space within space, with a pair of vertical lines down the centre of the canvas pushing outwards, really expelling the colours, and letting the white break through from behind. The lines, however, take centre-stage and dominate the work, capturing the essence of Mondrian’s theory of art, and their parallel form also resonating particularly here, with the title of the exhibition, thus providing the perfect closure.

Images:

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982)

1937 (painting)

Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 91 cm

The Courtauld Gallery, London,

Samuel Courtauld Trust

(Alistair Hunter Bequest, 1984)

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982)

1936 (white relief)

Oil on carved board, 79.5 x 91 cm

Private collection

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982)

1940-43 (two forms)

Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 59.5 cm

National Museum, Cardiff

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)

Composition No.III White-Yellow, 1935-42

Oil on canvas, 101 x 51 cm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis)

Review of Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space at the Serpentine Gallery

2012-02-18T17:58:00.000Z

17/02/12

Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space

Serpentine Gallery

7 December 2011 – 19 February 2012

Lygia Pape (1927-2004) was a leading Brazilian artist and founding member of the Neo Concrete movement, dedicated to the inclusion of art in everyday life, whose output and styles are so diverse that her current exhibition at the Serpentine, a pared down version of a larger show held in Madrid last year, and her first major exhibition in the UK, has been described by Adrian Searle as having the feel of a group show [‘Lygia Pape: modernist with a bossa nova beat,’ The Guardian, 07 December 2011]. Nevertheless, there are a number of themes which seem to permeate and link the highly experimental and daring works on display.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://blog.darlingcollective.com/?p=369

Review of Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern

2012-02-13T16:13:00.000Z

13/02/12

Yayoi Kusama

Tate Modern

9 February – 5 June 2012

Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) is one of Japan’s best-known living artists, and certainly one of its greatest curiosities. Having voluntarily admitted herself to hospital back in 1977, she has remained living there to this day, and, as such, her rare appearance at the press view of Tate Modern’s current retrospective was a spectacle in its own right, with the international media going crazy for this diminutive, unassuming woman in a wheelchair, scarcely noticeable, in fact, had it not been for her vibrant red hair.

When Kusama undertook a year’s training in the traditional Japanese art of Nihonga painting in Kyoto in 1948, this was already a radical step for a woman at that time, and her daring developments, experimentations, performances, paintings, and installations since then have scarcely been less audacious. This exhibition seeks to highlight key turning points in her career, which spans over six decades, and concludes with a range of stunning new works, displayed here in London for the first time.

The first couple of rooms contain some of the few remaining examples of Kusama’s really early works from Japan, including her Nihonga style Lingering Dream (1949), a memento mori with decaying sunflowers with butterflies, in which the details on the veins are almost human, and vegetal and animal matter merge in a surreal and unsettling way. A set of 30 small works on paper follows, described by curator Frances Morris, as a ‘Pandora’s box of experimentation’, with watercolours and gouaches, ink, pastel and tempera, exploring not just colour and form, but also texture, through the use of frottage techniques.

In the mid-1950s, however, Kusama, having already received considerable critical acclaim in Japan, decided she wanted to leave for the United States. She arrived on the West Coast late in 1957 and moved to New York six months later. Here she was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, and began to produce a large-scale series of paintings entitled ‘Infinity Net’. Largely white, from a distance, these works only really become more interesting as you approach and look beyond and behind the surface. Repetitive brushstrokes, scalloped shapes, thick globules of white paint, as if squeezed directly from the tube, almost like toothpaste, these works offer a sense of movement across their surfaces, like writhing tadpoles or spermata.

In the early 1960s, Kusama began to work with sculptures, and her interest in the phallus increased. Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963), her first room installation, contains a white painted rowing boat, covered in phalli, and the neighbouring room, which contains a number of her ‘Sex Obsession’ and ‘Food Obsession’ Accumulation Sculptures from the following years are scarcely less phallocentric: furniture, shoes, clothes – nothing escapes her penile adornment.

As the sixties progressed, and hippie culture took hold, however, Kusama adapted herself once again, and began exploring the medium of performance art. She held various Body Festivals in which naked participants were encouraged to paint polka dots on each other’s bodies, on animals, and on plants, and to engage in orgy parties. Her film, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1968), which was a hit on the arthouse festival circuit at the time, documents these events, to a chant-like soundtrack by pop-rock band The C.I.A. Change, with such slow moving imagery, that, I have to confess, for me, it verges on generating a sense of tedium.

Perhaps it was all too much excess for Kusama as well, since, in 1973, she decided to return home to Japan, a move which she found it hard to adapt to. She was also hugely impacted by the death of her close friend, American artist, Joseph Cornell, with whom she had enjoyed what she describes as a romantic and passionate, but platonic relationship.

After moving in to the hospital in 1977, she set up a studio within the medical faculty, and returned to making smaller scale sculptural objects by hand. Leftover Snow in the Dream (1982) is a disturbing construction of plasticine, wood, and paint, resembling a display cabinet, stuffed full of oversized embryos, packed in place by phalli. This corporeal theme continues also in her paintings from the following decades, which fill the canvases with overly complex biomorphic forms, reminiscent of her earlier tadpole/spermata motifs, and continue with her trend of obsessive repetition, dense patterning, and layering.

Kusama is probably best known, however, for her ‘immersive environments’, large-scale full-room installations which transport the viewer into another world. I’m Here, but Nothing (2000) is a darkened room, set up like any normal living room space, complete with television, shelving unit, tables, chairs, sofa, lamps, but lit solely by fluorescent polka dots. One step further, and created especially for this show, is Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life (2011), a magical and entrancing end to the chronological tour through this hypnotic woman’s life. A small dark passage, covered on the walls, floors, and ceilings by mirrors, and hung with a myriad tiny cherry tomato sized lights which flicker from one colour to another, reflecting in their millions, and stretching seemingly boundlessly into, indeed, an infinite space. This is the ultimate work, a crescendo which cannot be superseded. Whether or not Kusama is, herself, stuck in some 1960s hallucinatory trance, functioning purely on medication doled out by her doctors, or actually living a life of such sheer brilliance, we will probably never know, but, whatever the secret, it is one which is a pleasure for the visitor to be permitted to experience, even if only for a short while.

Images:

Yayoi Kusama

1965

Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo

Photo: Eikoh Hosoe

Kusama posing in Aggregation - One Thousand Boats Show

1963

Installation view, Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York 1963

The Passing Winter (detail)

2005

Presented by the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2008

Photo: Tate Photography

Also published at: http://www.rovesandroams.com/2012/02/yayoi-kusama-at-tate-modern/

Review of Kinetica Art Fair 2012 at Ambika P3

2012-02-13T16:05:00.000Z

13/02/12

Kinetica Art Fair 2012

Ambika P3

9 – 12 February 2012

Kinetic art is art that has a life of its own – or so claim the organisers of the fourth Kinetica Art Fair, taking place this February at Ambika P3, a 14,000 square foot, triple height, subterranean space on Marylebone Road, built originally in the 1960s as the construction hall for the University of Westminster’s School of Engineering. The expansive concrete space couldn’t really have a more appropriate history for this fair, which, itself, is a celebration of technology and engineering, science and invention, light, sound and movement. Pioneered by artists such as László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), and Alexander Calder (1898-1976), contemporary kinetic art both looks back at and pays homage to early Modernist glorification of man’s increasingly manipulative power and innovation, but also allows for a wide and exciting range of more experimental works, employing the ever increasing possibilities offered by new media and computer-generated artificial intelligence.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.rovesandroams.com/issueiv/

Review of The Mystery of Appearance: Conversations Between Ten British Post-War Painters at Haunch of Venison

2012-02-12T17:46:00.000Z

12/02/12

The Mystery of Appearance: Conversations Between Ten British Post-War Painters

Haunch of Venison

7 December 2011 – 18 February 2012

It might at first seem a little unadventurous to put on a show featuring artists for whom major retrospectives are concurrently running not so far across town (in this case, David Hockney at the Royal Academy and Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery), but Haunch of Venison’s current exhibition, featuring ten of Britain’s most important post-war painters, is worth its weight in gold. Displaying over forty large and small scale paintings and drawings, some on loan from major galleries, others which have not been seen in public for many years (including Frank Auerbach’s Primrose Hill, Winter Sunshine (1962-64)), the exhibition seeks to offer a fresh view on the works, methods, and personal interactions between Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow.

The first room concentrates on nudes, and, although some are indeed highly abstracted through the artists’ use of thick impasto paint, they nevertheless celebrate the continued dedication to figurative subjects by these resilient painters during a period when abstraction was so ‘à la mode’. Thus, for example, the visitor can compare the diametrically different, but yet equally enchanting, works by Freud (Girl on a Turkish Sofa, 1966) and Auerbach (Reclining Figure, 1972), which, although similarly sized and posed, demonstrate the extremely varied possibilities offered by the same medium when applied with such different technique. Consisting merely of a few dabs of orange, yellow and white oil paint on a darkly grounded board, Auerbach’s figure nevertheless bears just as much a sense of weight, and is just as recognisable as a figure, as Freud’s intricately detailed girl, with her dirty feet and oversized, twisted and bared bottom.

This exploration of texture and technique continues throughout the other rooms, with the second gallery including a mix of both landscapes and portraits, all absolutely relishing in the joy of daubing on the paint as thickly as possible. Kossoff’s Self Portrait II (1972), whilst recognisable as a face from afar, becomes an indistinguishable sea of colour and pigment as one approaches. Nearby, his Seated Woman No. 2 (1959) is so substantially besmeared with deep brown paint that it takes no great leap of the imagination to see the logical progression to contemporary abject works of art employing not paint, but excrement. There is something extremely tactile about this piece, as if all tools might have been laid aside, and Kossoff have employed his hands. It is playful and fun, like something a young child might proudly produce for his parent.

In contrast to this, the third room makes reference to the continued influence of the Old Masters, exemplified, perhaps predictably, by Bacon’s Pope I – Study after Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (1951), reminding the visitor that these painters, whilst breaking new ground, were, nevertheless, historically and technically educated in their field. Upstairs is ample further evidence of this, with a range of studies, showing both method and skill, including a variety by Caulfield, in which his mark up grids and hastily scribbled notes regarding tone and colour are clearly visible.

As the subtitle to the exhibition highlights, however, it is the conversations between these men which perhaps offers us most insight into the progression of British painting in the post-war period. Downstairs in the bookshop are a delightful row of photographs by Bruce Bernard, showing the artists in their studios, both at work and play, and the catalogue to accompany the exhibition contains an enlightening essay considering how their relationships impacted on their work, as well as some insightful writings by the artists themselves. Thus, whilst the range of works by Hockney and Freud in their own personal shows cannot be expected to be matched, it is nevertheless a privilege to be able to see them here, set amongst their contemporaries, contextualised and reevaluated, and displayed in the impressive newly renovated Bond Street gallery space taken over by Haunch of Venison last autumn.

Images:

Frank Auerbach

Primrose Hill, Winter Sunshine

1962-64

Oil on board

104.1 x 144.8 cm

Private Collection

Photo: Peter Mallet

Frank Auerbach

Reclining Figure

1972

Oil on board

38.1 X 40.6 cm

Private Collection, N.Y.

Leon Kossoff

Willesden Junction, Summer No.1

1966

Oil on board

91.4 x 152.4 cm

Private Collection

©Leon Kossoff

Francis Bacon

Pope I - Study after Pope Innocent X by Velasquez

1951

Oil on canvas

197.8 x 137.4 cm

Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

©The Estate of Francis Bacon

Review of Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

2012-02-12T16:52:00.000Z

12/02/12

Lucian Freud Portraits

National Portrait Gallery

9 February – 27 May 2012

‘Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s only a chair.’ And yet despite, or maybe precisely because of, such a frank attitude towards his works, the exhibition marking the culmination of the National Portrait Gallery’s Cultural Olympiad is the first show of Lucian Freud’s (1922 – 2011) works to focus solely on his portraiture, in the true sense of the word.

Spanning seven decades, from the early 1940s until his death last July, the exhibition showcases 130 paintings and works on paper, including both iconic and rarely-seen paintings of his lovers, friends, and family, each a record of an intimate relationship, personal and private. The idea for the exhibition initially came about following a conversation between Sandy Nairne (Director of the National Portrait Gallery) and Freud, in 2006, after it was known that London would host the 2012 Olympics, and the artist was keen for it to be one of the capital’s countdown events for the London 2012 Festival.

The works on display are arranged broadly chronologically, and trace Freud’s stylistic development. The first rooms are filled with his early works – smoother, flatter, more evenly toned than the Freud we later came to know and expect. This was the period when he was learning to paint, and his subjects are primarily himself and his first wife, Kitty Garman, the daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein. He has described himself, during this period, as ‘aggressive’ in his approach, moving from feature to feature, using a very fine brush (half the size of his little finger), to achieve intricate, almost forensic, detail. Garman described the experience of sitting for him as ‘like being arranged’, yet her grip on the rose (Girl with Roses, 1947-8) and kitten (Girl with a Kitten, 1947) is, in each instance, so tight, it is almost strangling. Was this Freud’s intent, or more a reflection of herself and her anxiety? In each picture, her gaze looks out sideways beyond the viewer, almost vacantly. In the slightly later Girl with a White Dog (1950-1), however, with its disturbing, but recognisably Freudian, green tinge, she faces forwards, staring directly both at and through the viewer – and therefore also the artist himself – almost defiantly. This is perhaps a sense of foreboding of the couple’s coming separation.

Freud was a painter of personality, capturing the character of his sitters, their psychology, rather than, necessarily, a physical likeness (although each and every one of his sitters is, nevertheless, easily recognisable). He was a master of capturing expressions and moods, as, for example, in A Young Painter (1957-8), of whom one wonders, with his rumpled brow and parted lips, what it is he is feeling: consternation, anger, concern? Similarly, Head of a Child (1954), with its wide eyes and open mouth, cries out with terror, fear, and anguish.

Woman Smiling (1958-9) marks the transitional moment in Freud’s career, at which he first stood up to paint (and never again sat down). He simultaneously also began using thicker, horse hair, brushes, and introducing a more varied palette, with less blending, and more vigorous brushstrokes. ‘As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.’ Freud had a fascination with the landscape of the skin and reputedly claimed there to be no such thing as bland or generic skin, and not even his portrait of his baby daughter, Bella, (Baby on a Green Sofa, 1961), spares the subject from his keen observation. As fellow artist (and sitter) Frank Auerbach (born 1931) has said, Freud’s work is ‘raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art…’

Freud’s portrayals are honest to the point of brutality. Take, for example, his portrait of John Deakin (1963-4), a chronic, red-faced, alcoholic with prominent ears; Man in a Blue Shirt (1965), a portrait of George Dyer, Francis Bacon’s lover, who later committed suicide, unashamedly revealing his hare lip and broken nose; and A Man and his Daughter (1963-4), depicting a bank robber who lived beneath the artist in Paddington, with livid scars across his face. It is unsurprising, then, to learn that Freud believed that if a painting didn’t have some drama to it, it was nothing more than paint out of a tube.

Yet there is also a tenderness to his paintings. Pregnant Girl (1960-1), a portrait of Bernadine Coverley, the mother of Bella, shows her with her head turned to the side on the pillow, breasts exposed, collar bones prominent, shoulders rounded, wisps of dark hair falling across the porcelain skin of her face – a sentimental expression of beauty and fragility.

Freud’s models often assumed unusual and uncomfortable poses, and he always required the sitter to remain present even whilst he was painting the background, fully aware of their impact on the space. ‘I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know.’

The show would not be complete without including some of Freud’s portraits of Leigh Bowery, the performance artist, large, majestic, monumental paintings, but hung here in a small, intimate side room, selected, according to curator Sarah Howgate, to convey the size of the studio in which the works were made, and, of course, of Sue Tilley, the amply proportioned benefits supervisor who featured in a number of portraits in the mid 1990s.

The final room, of his later works, contains nudes which are gritty in all senses: their subject matter as brutal an exposure as ever, but also the texture and surface of the work – it is almost as if he had mixed some substance into the oil paint to create a raised and undulating fleshy surface. The show concludes, however, with an unfinished portrait of his gallery assistant, David Dawson, and his dog Eli, Portrait of the Hound (2011), on which Freud was working until shortly before his death on 20 July 2011. Nairne is keen to emphasise, however, that the show was planned, until very near the end, with the collaboration of Freud himself, and, as such, it is very much a ‘living exhibition’, not a memorial. Indeed, for an artist who imbued each portrait with so much energy, character, and life force, what else could it be?

Images:

Girl with a White Dog (1950-1)

Reflection (Self-portrait) (1985)

Private Collection, Ireland

Photo: Courtesy Lucian Freud Archive

Review of Hugo Dalton: Mother Nature B.D.S.M. at Bermondsey Project Space

2012-02-11T15:15:00.000Z

11/02/12

Mother Nature B.D.S.M.

An exhibition by Hugo Dalton, curated by Edward Lucie-Smith

Bermondsey Project Space

27 January – 19 February 2012

Walking into this large warehouse in the middle of an industrial estate in Bermondsey is like straying on to the set of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Entry to the 7,000 sq. ft. exhibition space, cold and dark, is through plastic meat flaps, and the soundtrack of piano music, composed by James Dooley to accompany the show, has resonances of the falsely calming use of Beethoven’s Ninth in A Clockwork Orange. The premise of this exhibition is that Mother Nature is a Dominatrix: fetishistic, enslaving, and omnipotent. But to what extent is this impression carried over?

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://blog.darlingcollective.com/?p=355

Review of Migrations: Journeys into British Art at Tate Britain

2012-02-07T21:56:00.000Z

07/02/12
Migrations: Journeys into British Art
Tate Britain
31 January – 12 August 2012

The remit for Tate Britain is that its collection should be one of British art. Clearly, however, this is problematic, given not only the state of our multicultural society today, but also the Commonwealth, not to mention the preceding British Empire and beyond that the universally quite peripatetic nature of artists to study, find patronage, escape persecution, and so on. Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, Migrations: Journeys into British Art, largely comprising works from its own collection, takes this conundrum as its starting point, as it seeks both to raise and explore questions about the formation of a national collection of British art against a continually shifting demographic.

The show spans some 500 years, beginning with the influx of painters and sculptors from Northern Europe in the 16^th century. Following the Reformation, portraiture became the most acceptable form of painting in Protestant England and Scotland: artists such as the German Hans Holbein (ca. 1497-1543) and the Dutch Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) were esteemed more highly than British trained artists, and, coming at the bidding of our Royal family, are now known for their iconic images of our kings Henry VIII and Charles I respectively.

A couple of centuries later, however, Britons began to travel abroad, and thus the birth of the 18^th century Grand Tour, a critical part of any young gentleman’s education. Ideas were cross-cultivated from the continent, and small memento images were produced by artists such as Canaletto (1697-1768) and brought back as souvenirs. When war prevented Englishmen from travelling abroad in the 1740s, however, Canaletto himself came to London for a nine year stay, and, during this time, he painted a good many English landmarks, including London: The Old Horse Guards from St. James’s Park (ca. 1749), on loan here from the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation.

Not long thereafter, in 1768, the Royal Academy was founded in London in order to teach and promote art in England. It is a solidly British institution, yet almost one third of its founding members were migrant artists active in Britain at the time.

Over the coming centuries, dialogues between different nations and artistic styles continued to increase. In the latter half of the 19^th century, whilst Paris became acknowledged as the centre for art training, London remained the more stable centre for patronage and commercial artistic success. As such, many British and American artists (including John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)) went to train in Paris before settling in London, and numerous French artists, including James Tissot (1836-1902) whose work is included here, crossed the channel both to find work, and also to escape the political aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. These artists brought with them many new styles and ideas, some more accepted into British society than others. Tissot, for example, despite his attempts to adapt in accordance with British taste, continued to be criticised for his overly frilly and elaborate touches. Whistler, on the other hand, who adopted the Thames as one of his key subjects and produced a great number of Nocturnes, focusing on the atmospheric effects of light on water, was graciously accepted, and remained in London until his death.

The exhibition’s coverage of the 20^th century begins with the two quite disparate, but equally influential, Jewish art exhibitions held at the turn of the century: Jewish Art and Antiquities, starring works by William Rothenstein, which argued that Jewish art was essentially just a part of British art, with no independent identity, and The Twentieth Century: A Review of Modern Movements, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914, which, through its attempt to align Jewish art with Modernism, argued for a distinct identity. This section of the exhibition, along with the adjacent works by refugees from Nazi Europe, is indeed a joy to peruse, containing highlights by the likes of Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), David Bomberg (1890-1957), Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Naum Gabo (1890-1977) and Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948).

The same might also be said of the works by artists such as F.N. Souza (1924-1959) and Rasheed Araeen (born 1935), which are included in a section on artists who moved to Britain from Commonwealth countries in the 1950s and 60s, but, as the wall texts freely admit, felt, at the time, largely ignored and marginalised by such mainstream galleries as the Tate itself.

The 1960s works range from Gustav Metzger’s (born 1926) auto-destructive art, showcased in the form of a video of the Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art (1965), which restages an event from 1961, whereby Metzger sprayed a nylon canvas, hanging on the Southbank, with acid, so that it slowly decomposed, revealing the vista of St Paul’s Cathedral on the other side, to David Medalla’s (born 1942) conversely auto-creative sculptures, exploring the processes of transformation, and the notion of ephemerality. Certainly, standing watching his bubbles spill out from atop Cloud Canyons No 3: An Ensemble of Bubble Machines (1961, remade 2004), one is transported elsewhere, somewhere high above an earth demarcated by country borders and state lines.

The 1980s are represented largely by works considering the poetics and politics of diaspora and displacement, and the creation of identity in a racist but increasingly migrant-populated Thatcherite Britain. Sonia Boyce (born 1962) considers the identity she is forced to adopt as a black person born and raised in this country, and Keith Piper (born 1960) similarly uses text and photo montage to deconstruct and challenge representations of British history with relation to the African diaspora.

The central part of the exhibition space is taken up by rooms showing video works from the past ten years, supposedly epitomising the very nature of migration, with the moving image itself something transient which does not exist until it find a temporary shelter on a screen. Zineb Sedira’s (born 1962) Floating Coffins (2009) is a 14 screen installation, filmed in the harbour city of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, home to the world’s largest ship graveyard, but also the departure point for West African immigrants hoping to reach the Canary Islands. Using the sea as a metaphor, and with shots of circling migrating birds, questions of belonging and displacement, beginnings and endings, are brought to the fore.

The show’s curators – and there are number of them, each working on their own specialisms – have each, in their own section, put on a good display, and, indeed, questions are raised about how, or even whether, one ought to consider Britishness in relation to art. Nevertheless, the aspiration to keep the rooms open and flowing fluidly one to the next, so that the works can speak to one another across both time and space, is, perhaps, a little too ambitious, and, overall, there is very little coherence between the vast variety of works on display. As an open house exhibition, showcasing some of the Tate’s best acquisitions, it is certainly worth a visit, but don’t necessarily expect to come away with a neatly bound narrative. That said, isn’t the need for this just a pitfall of the tightly curated contemporary art exhibition world in which we now live, where everything is parcelled, explained, and offered to the viewer on a plate? Maybe being left to wander through 500 years of art, drawing your own conclusions about the developments, cross-fertilisations, and impacts of political and social change, is not such a bad thing after all?

Images:

Canaletto

London- The Old Horse Guards from St James’s Park

c.1749

Tate

Lent by The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation

James Tissot

Portsmouth Dockyard

c.1877

Jacob Kramer

Jews at Prayer

1919

Tate

By courtesy of the William Roberts Society

Photo: Tate Photography

Keith Piper

Go West Young Man

1987

Tate

Francis Alys

Railings

2004

Tate

Photo: Tate Photography

Review of Daniel Rapley: Covenant at Payne Shurvell

2012-02-02T11:47:00.001Z

02/02/12

Daniel Rapley: Covenant

Payne Shurvell

27 January – 3 March 2012

3,116,480 characters

1,189 chapters

783,137 words

31,102 verses

66 books

Such is the content of the King James Bible, first printed some 400 years ago, and now the key work in Daniel Rapley’s first solo exhibition since graduating from Chelsea College of Art and Design last summer. Entitled Sic, and filling some 1,500 sides of A4 paper, this handwritten copy of the entire text took Rapley nearly 700 hours to complete, spread over more than a year, with his getting up every morning to spend two hours at work. Displayed in a showcase, however, the visitor now only gets to see the first page of his travail, and whether or not he believes that the wad of paper underneath does actually contain the rest of the script is, as it were, a matter of faith.

For such is the role of art and the art gallery in contemporary society, as far as Rapley sees it. Brought up with the Bible, but no longer religious, he disregarded this enquiry as irrelevant, saying instead that there is, regardless, an intrinsic relationship between art and religion. Artworks are presented with authority and power in a white-walled gallery, the modern day temple or church.

The title of the exhibition is Covenant, an agreement based on trust, and many of the works in the show grew out of this initial concept. Forty (a Biblical metaphor for any long period of time), for example, is a stack of 40 identical pencil drawings, reading ‘I did not want to make this drawing 40 times but I did anyway,’ again with only the front frame visible to the visitor.

Each of Rapley’s works is a labour intensive task, but yet his goal is also to conceal much of this effort, with what remains on view often appearing almost simplistic. In Poiesis, for example, a delicate collage of flowers cut out individually from a popular field guide to British plants, reference is made to the Heideggerian usage of the term to refer to a ‘bringing forth’, and a sharing of ideas and knowledge between an artist and his audience. And Rapley’s works are also demanding of their viewers, requiring time to be read and digested. Exigencies 1-7, for example, (the title chosen again for its connotation as the religious term for the interpretation of a text), consists of seven large pages (approximately A1 in size) of writing, or, as Rapley terms them, pencil drawings, relating, in a diary entry style, events and coincidences which occurred during the time he was working on Sic. Each one is drawn freehand, although they are so neat and exact that one might easily be mistaken into believing that they were prints. (Rapley will not reveal the secret of his method!) One story tells of how, as he developed RSI in his right wrist, he came to copy 2 Chronicles ch.15 v.7, which states: ‘Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak for your work shall be rewarded’, and, how, accordingly, over the next few days, his wrist strain subsided. Another discloses how, upon transcribing Job ch.15 v.23, ‘He wandereth abroad for bread…’, Rapley was reminded of his having forgotten to buy his own favourite bread whilst out shopping the previous day, and how now, upon returning to Sainsbury’s, he found it out of stock, and was forced to travel ‘abroad’ to an Iceland store. The coincidences abound, and, again, the faith of the reader is put to the test. Is this actually possible, or is it all too far fetched? And, of course, if it is to be believed, well then, surely this series offers some evidence for the verity of the Bible transcription project itself?

Throughout the tales, Rapley uses the third person, referring to himself as ‘the artist’. He does the same in Totem, a different, dark coloured work, hanging separately in the gallery’s entrance hall, and produced as a limited edition print. Based on the tombstone of Martin of Tours (who died in 397AD), one of the first saints whose remains were venerated as a holy site, the varnished print also incorporates some of Rapley’s blood. Apparently he rather liked the idea of putting something quite so personal into an edition, a train of thought stemming perhaps from his MA thesis in which he compared the presence of the saint in a holy relic to the presence of the artist in an artwork. Naturally, however, there are also resonances with the religious themes of sacrifice and the Last Supper.

Rapley describes his works as performative, but only in suggestion. There is something deadly serious, but yet also undeniably comic about this exhibition, and the stories related in Exigencies 1-7 cannot help but elicit a smile (about which Rapley himself also smiled). Nevertheless, the sincerity with which he explains his work and ethos are enough to engender faith both in him and in what it is he is trying to sell us – more than can be said for many a commercially-oriented artist these days. Go along and see for yourself, and take the time to read the tales and invest back some effort in return for the many laborious hours taken (if you choose so to believe) to produce the work on show.

Images:

Sic (detail)

Ballpoint on A4 ruled paper

67 x 59 x 115cam (Plinth unit)

Sic

Ballpoint on A4 ruled paper

67 x 59 x 115cam (Plinth unit)

Exigency 1

Pencil drawing on heavyweight paper

63 x 83.5 cm

Exigencies 1-7 (detail)

Pencil drawing on heavyweight paper

63 x 83.5 cm

All images courtesy of the artist, Daniel Rapley, and Payne Shurvell Gallery

Also published at http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1946979

Review of The Seen and the Unseen: paintings by Marguerite Horner and The Near and the Elsewhere: group show curated by Gaia Persico at PM Gallery and House

2012-02-01T11:40:00.001Z

01/02/12

The Seen and the Unseen: paintings by Marguerite Horner

and

The Near and the Elsewhere: group show curated by Gaia Persico

PM Gallery and House

25 January – 25 February 2012

PM Gallery, a 1940s annex to Sir John Soane’s grade I listed Pitzhanger Manor House of 1800, has been described as West London’s premier contemporary arts venue, and, to its credit, it is currently hosting two exhibitions, very different in style, yet related in theme, which certainly make the trip out to Ealing worthwhile.

Marguerite Horner’s solo show, The Seen and the Unseen, comprises a collection of her recognisably haunting grisaille street scenes, largely inspired by her recent experiences of small town America. The grey skies, streets, and parking lots, devoid of populace, are bisected by bright white road markings, lamp posts, trees, and telegraph wires, and the heavy monotone is further broken at more random points by the insertion of a solitary red car, or, in the case of Vanitas (2010), a woman with bright red lips.

One wall is dominated by three larger works from 2007, Immutable Light, Ineffably Perceived, and Walled in by Feelings. These are blacker than the rest, with a more yellowish glow to the grey. They depict the dark exterior walls of houses, spooky and foreboding, lit by moonlight piercing through the clouds. Whilst, again, no inhabitants are visible, lights nevertheless burn brightly indoors, echoic, perhaps, of Hitchcock’s Bates’ mansion, or, in the case of Ineffably Perceived, where we look down also over the distant lights of a town and see the house as that of a recluse, set apart, high on a hill, something more akin to the bizarre residence of Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Adolescent, Help, and Swept Away (all 2011) trial a new effect, reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s squeegee works, rendering the images blurred, as if we were moving past at high speed. Are we to imagine ourselves in one of the many cars (a recurring motif in Horner’s scenes), is it just the wind in the trees, or is it perhaps all merely the nebulous scenery of a dream? If so, is this dream a nightmare? Ought one to feel threatened? Certainly the emptiness hangs heavy, and there is something uncanny and unsettling about the desolation – a definite sense of unease. But what is actually more oppressive: this fearful emptiness, loneliness, and barren space, or an overcrowded city, heaving with modern life? Horner herself says that she uses her painting precisely so as to access a space for contemplation away from the fast pace of modern life. There is certainly a sense of somehow being outside of the scene, looking down upon it, reinforced by titles such as The Guardian (2011) – but who is it that is watching, and over what or whom? Like a plague-swept empty world, a stage set with all the features of habitation but lacking the actors to fill the roles, the cars seem to take the place of living, breathing creatures, representing the transience, not only of life, but also of time and space – do we ever really inhabit somewhere, or are we bound to always only be passing through?

The second exhibition, The Near and the Elsewhere, a group show curated by Gaia Persico and bringing together works by 15 international artists, follows this thread still further, considering the impermanence of architectural structures themselves. With paintings, photography, sketches and films depicting buildings both elegant and derelict, overcrowded and empty, purpose-built and basking in their full designer glory, the visitor takes a stroll through a wide-range of contemporary metropolises, experiencing the full life cycle of the inhabitable structure. Greg Girard’s House on Huashan Lu, North View, Lane 322, Huashan Lu (2005) for example, focuses on a derelict building, falling apart and its windows boarded up, but with light still burning from within, juxtaposed against brightly lit tower blocks in the dark night sky beyond. Ferit Kuyas’ Construction Site (2005), on the other hand, whilst, upon first glance also appearing to be a scene of destruction, is actually one of the birth of a new habitation, taken from his series City of Ambition.

Peter Piller (More Beautiful from Above, 2002-2004) provides aerial views of houses, as if coming in to land at an airport, and Michael Wolf (a01, 2005, and a57, 2009, both from the series Architecture of Density) takes us in so close to the windows and balconies of the tower block, that it takes on a life of its own, becoming the living, breathing model of the portrait. This metaphor of the building as an organism is taken to the extreme, however, in Edgar Martins' Untitled (Atlanta, Georgia) (2009) in which the white interior of a house has been attacked and left mutilated with holes in its ceiling, spewing out pink insulation materials, nauseatingly semblant of hacked flesh or brain matter. If one heeds the title of the series from which this print is taken, This is not a House, then one comprehends that the structures and habitations depicted both here, and in Horner’s show, really are something more than mere exterior casings – they are creations which have taken on a body and soul of their own, and which have their own life cycles and incarnations, sometimes outliving their inhabitants, sometimes not. It is apt then, that the setting for these exhibitions is PM Gallery, part of Pitzhanger Manor House, which itself was rebuilt by Soane, later left to fall into ruin, reinstated in 1901 as Ealing Public Library, and is now open to the public as a cultural venue, with gallery attached. I imagine the number of passers through will multiply for the duration of this pair of exhibitions, and I can only too heartily recommend going along and becoming a part of the history of this building yourself.

Images:

Marguerite Horner

Passing Through

2011

oil on linen 50x50cm

Marguerite Horner

Walled in by feelings

2007

oil on canvas 92x122cm

Marguerite Horner

Ineffably Perceived

2007

oil on canvas 122x92cm

Marguerite Horner

Swept Away

2011

oil on canvas 50x50cm

Greg Girard

House on Huashan Lu, North View, Lane 322, Huashan Lu

2005

Courtesy of Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver/Toronto

Edgar Martins

Untitled (Atlanta, Georgia)

from the series This is not a House

2009

Courtesy the artist, The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK branch), The Wapping Project Bankside

Review of Philippe Pasqua: Solo Exhibition at Opera Gallery

2012-02-01T11:00:00.000Z

01/02/12

Philippe Pasqua: Solo Exhibition

Opera Gallery

26 January – 15 February 2012

Often described as the French Francis Bacon, Philippe Pasqua’s canvases can hardly be called as a pretty sight. The terms ‘abject’ and ‘disturbing’ have been used far more commonly, and yet there is something simultaneously beguiling about them. Not exactly because you are drawn in closer, since the dimensions of these works are huge – larger than life, looming down over you from afar – but because there is something confrontational and something unexplained, something that makes you want to find out more.

Untitled for the main part, the portraits, worked up from photographs, are detached from any background or context. Mixed media on paper, laid down on canvas, the faces, eyes usually closed, are beautifully drawn, with rubbings out to create intense effects of shadow and light, then washed in colour, before being subjected to violent splashes of paint in the most vibrant reds, purples, pinks and blues, making one question whether the dream-like state of the subject, seemingly peaceful, mightn’t actually be one of death. Indeed Pasqua has worked intently with the theme of death, not only in his paintings, which also include series on transsexuals, prostitutes, and children with Down’s Syndrome, but also in his sculptures, made out of skulls, bedecked, in a Hirstian manner, with jewels, butterflies, and often thick paint.

Even his nudes are overhung with a large question mark. A black and white girl, for example, hangs at the top of the staircase, sitting with her legs apart, exposed and bare, apart from a vest. Again daubed with splattered paint, and no more than a mere sketchy outline of her limbs, the dark black hair and shadowy face beggar the question of what her story might be. Is she damaged? Vulnerable? Provocatively eliciting attention? Desirous? It is impossible to tell.

Similarly with the children on show in the lower gallery, again sleepy looking, drugged even, their mouths slightly parted, sensual and enticing, but inappropriately so. Who are they? What has happened? Are they asleep, dead, suffering, at peace? Each viewer must draw his own conclusions. The information to accompany the exhibition cites Lucian Freud as having said: ‘The role of the artist is to disturb the human being,’ and if ever there was doubt as to the verity of this statement, Pasqua is living proof.

Images:

All by Philippe Pasqua

Untitled

Mixed media on paper, laid down on canvas

Also published at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1946719

Review of Art Erotica at the Gallery, Cork Street

2012-01-30T13:55:00.000Z

29/01/12

Art Erotica

The Gallery in Cork Street

19 – 27 January 2012

This past week saw the launch of a new annual event in the London art calendar, both showcasing the talent of emerging and established artists, whilst also raising funds for a small but worthy charity. Opened by the internationally renowned art critic and historian, Edward Lucie-Smith, whose own books (which number nearly 200 in total), include titles such as Sexuality in Western Art; Erotica – The Fine Art of Sex; and Ars Erotica – An Arousing History of Erotic Art, Art Erotica, held in The Gallery on Cork Street, was the brainchild of Kathryn Roberts, who is also the founder and director of the Cork Street Open Exhibition, which has now been running for four summers.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://blog.darlingcollective.com/?p=330

Review of James Yamada's Parasolstice Winter Light Project at Parasol unit

2012-01-28T11:23:00.000Z

27/01/12

James Yamada: The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees

Parasolstice – Winter Light 2011

Parasol unit

23 November 2011 – 18 March 2012

American artist James Yamada (born 1967) is known for his installation works which explore the interaction between nature and technology. For the inauguration of Parasol unit’s new annual outdoor winter project, Parasolstice – Winter Light, which will feature works by international artists interested in the phenomenon of light, he has created The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees, a kind of aluminium gazebo with 28 neon tube lights built into its roof, blue and white, and at an intensity known as full spectrum light, mimicking the strength of the sun. These wavelengths are recognised by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to be highly beneficial for the treatment of SAD (seasonal affective disorder), whereby a lack of sunlight in the winter months can lead to depression, loss of energy, and sleep deprivation. As such, light of this intensity is commonly used in therapy. At Parasol unit, however, visitors are invited to bask in the winter sun for free, sheltered from the elements, and looking out on to the peaceful garden oasis, all the while only minutes away from the hubbub of Old Street roundabout. Small trees and shrubs growing by the pond reflect the bright white gleam of the artificial tree trunks supporting the structure – a collision of the natural and the manmade. These startling white buttresses stand out brightly against the grey winter sky, reflecting the sterile sanitation of modern medicine, and raising questions as to which is more salubrious: the proximity to nature with its hardy vegetation and vast sky opening up above the nearby high rise office blocks, or the antiseptic clinical science so commonly used to prolong life in today’s ‘advanced’ society? There is something awe-inspiringly sublime about the aspect of each, and their head on confrontation here is both calming and inviting of reflection, whilst simultaneously unsettling and thought provoking – an experience that takes you out of yourself and your glum day to day concerns, even if only for the duration of your exposure to the healing rays.

Image Credit
James Yamada: The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees (2011)
Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London, installation view, 2011
Photo by Stephen White

This review was first published by Roves and Roams at: http://www.rovesandroams.com/2012/01/james-yamadas-parasolstice-winter-light-at-parasol-unit/

Review of The Body in Women’s Art Now, Part 3 – ReCreation at ROLLO Contemporary Art

2012-01-24T15:32:00.001Z

24/01/12

The Body in Women’s Art Now

Part 3 – ReCreation

ROLLO Contemporary Art

20 January – 2 March 2012

Philippa Found, the director of ROLLO Contemporary Art, initiated the three part exhibition, The Body in Women’s Art Now, in 2009, as a response to the massive under-representation of women artists in the canon of western art history. Of the 2,300 works on show in the National Gallery, for example, just four of these are paintings by women artists, and, at Tate Modern, women artists represent just 12% of the collection, with only 29% of solo exhibitions between 2000-2009 representing women artists’ work. Since the early years of the feminist art movement, in the 1960s and 70s, the body has played a key role in many women artists’ work as they have sought to reclaim its image from the male gaze of earlier centuries. The three exhibitions in this series, which have each been shown at ROLLO Contemporary Art in London and at the New Hall Art Collection in Cambridge, concentrate on work created by a range of international women artists since the year 2000 in which the body is a central component.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://blog.darlingcollective.com/?p=303

Review of UnderWire Film Festival Winners Screening at Shortwave Cinema

2012-01-16T10:18:00.000Z

16/01/12

UnderWire Film Festival Winners Screening

London Short Film Festival

Shortwave Cinema, Bermondsey Square

Saturday 14 January 2012

The UnderWire film festival was launched in 2010 by Gabriella Apicella and Gemma Mitchell to both celebrate and help provide a platform for short films made by, and, in the case of the XX award, portraying interesting representations of women. In an industry still blighted by gender imbalance, the founders are seeking to encourage a greater diversity of perspectives and experiences. They therefore look to showcase all kinds of film, from drama to documentary, animation to music video and artist film. All submissions must, however, be under 20 minutes in length.

The second UnderWire festival was held in November 2011, with awards for best director, best editor, best screenwriter, best composer, best cinematographer, best producer, and then the XX award. The range of submissions was impressive, and judging no mean feat, but the winners deserved every ounce of praise steeped upon them. This weekend, as part of the larger London Short Film Festival, the winners from UnderWire were screened once more, as an hour long compilation, at Shortwave cinema, on Bermondsey Square.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://blog.darlingcollective.com/?p=231

Review of Helen Carmel Benigson: The Future Queen of the Screen at ROLLO Contemporary Art

2012-01-12T20:52:00.001Z

12/01/12

Helen Carmel Benigson: The Future Queen of the Screen

ROLLO Contemporary Art

11 November 2011 – 13 January 2012

‘[...] the notion of identity used to be a narrative of geography or politics; now it is a profile – controlled, reduced and with the potential to be fantasy, reality or a mixture of the two.’

Certainly, the question of identity – both in reality and fantasy, the here and now, and in cyberspace – are key concepts repeated over and again in Helen Carmel Benigson’s easily recognisable video, print and performance works. A recent graduate from the Slade MA Fine Art, Benigson was named last July as one of the Independent’s top ten young British artists to watch out for. Perhaps better known as her alter ego, rapper Princess Belsize Dollar, Benigson has already had a busy debut to the new year with this solo show at ROLLO Contemporary Art, and a work featuring in the travelling group show, The Body in Women’s Art Now: Part 3 – ReCreation, also due to come to ROLLO in mid January.

To read the rest of this review please go to: http://blog.darlingcollective.com/?p=209

Review of Linear B: A Memorial Project Responding To Works In The Collection Of Greek Artist Nikos Alexiou at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich

2012-01-05T17:33:00.001Z

05/01/12

Linear B: A Memorial Project Responding To Works In The Collection Of Greek Artist Nikos Alexiou

The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich

17 November 2011 – 6 January 2012

Linear B was an ancient syllabic script which predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries, existing from ca. 1500 - 1200 BC. The Linear B project takes the notion of this script as the beginning, and seeks to create a new visual and conceptual language, and, with it, to propose a model of the exhibition as a dialectic in which artists are able to respond to one another and interact. The idea is to open up the questions prevalent on the contemporary art scene, regarding the roles of the artist, the curator, and the collector, and looking at how and where these inevitably overlap. Furthermore, questions are raised regarding the nature of personal and private collections, as opposed to public ones, whereby the former may still be driven by love and personal taste, without regard for the financial value of a work.

Nikos Alexiou was a Cretan born artist, collector, and curator, with a collection of over 200 modern and contemporary works, all of which he kept in the same building as his own studio, and which thus, in a way, became a part of his own oeuvre. In 2007, he represented Greece in the Venice Biennial by creating drawings and constructions for the pavilion, referring to the mosaics in St Mark’s. His work is meticulous, precise, and methodical, using repetitive patterns and designs.

The Linear B project was born in 2009, although co-curator and artist, Christina Mitrentse, had met Alexiou four years earlier when they co-exhibited in the first Athens Biennial and he began collecting her drawings. She initially invited him to exhibit his floor installation at the Celestial Contrakt group show in Hackney Wick in 2009, and, from this, a friendship and collaborative artistic relationship was born. Sadly, Alexiou died in February 2011 but, through the Linear B project, his work and his collection will live on.

For the project’s inaugural exhibition, also the starting point of the Stephen Lawrence Gallery’s 2012 Olympic Programme, seven contemporary London-based artists were selected to themselves choose a work from Alexiou’s collection and to respond to it in their own way. Upon Alexiou’s death, his collection was donated to the Benaki Museum in Athens, but many of the works are, nonetheless, virtually present in this exhibition, both in the videos showing, respectively, a film of an exhibition curated by Alexiou in the medieval tower on the island of Naxos, and an edited slide show, by the curators, of his entire collection, as well as in pages from a catalogue to his show The End (Once More) (2007), displayed on the window sills, and evidencing the microscopic detail of his own work. Additionally, one wall is hung with two giant sheets of an 11 sheet digital print – Alexiou’s last work – Grid (2010), intricately webbed, embroidery-like, dark, foreboding, but alluring nevertheless. This has been responded to by Mitrentse herself, whose Bed Constellation (2011) fills the main floor space like something out of a dark fairy tale, with that same twist of witchcraft and innocence, mythology and futurism. Decorated with over 200 printed stars, it represents all of the works in Alexiou’s collection, whilst a giant leather bound book, with the gilded cover text “only when its dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight,” refers to his death.

Other pairings in the show include Jonas Ranson’s articulate Plans For A New Mausoleum At Halicarnassus (2011), a response to the similarly architectural Independent Landscape No. VI (2004) by Vassili Balatsos, and Alex Zika’s Find The Others (2011), a curious step-like construction, wedged atop a pile of National Geographic magazines, which somehow derived from a reaction to Adam Chodzko’s Meeting Here Everyone Welcome (2000), a text-based poster edition.

Perhaps the most obvious work in the exhibition is Marsha Bradfield’s What Does The Artist Do After The Death Of The Curator? (2011), a 10 minute video responding primarily to Bernhard Cella’s work of the same name (2007), but, more broadly, to Alexiou’s whole collection, where each picture, for her, represents a letter, and, together, they build up to create a new language. This work, and the exhibition as a whole, are to be seen as an experiment – a research project and a model – a way forward along a new pathway of interaction. The artists whose works are being responded to have all been alerted to the fact, and some have even been to see the show, provoking responses to responses. Narrative networks, multiple dialogues: it is all an ongoing process. Further Linear B exhibitions are already being planned, firstly in Munich, and later in Italy, each time with a new selection of local artists responding to further works from Alexiou’s collection.

Linear B is very much a conceptual show. It is almost more interesting to read and talk about than to see in the flesh, much as is the case for much contemporary art these days. Whilst part of me regrets this loss of the celebratory aesthetic quality so integral to visual art, it equally ought to be recognised that it is precisely this quality which motivated the project in the first place – an investigation into the role of the collector who collects for love, not monetary value; a celebration of his personal taste and pleasure; and a study of his choices and responses to them, further inviting others to choose and respond themselves, thus becoming part of the collection, and extending it beyond its initiator’s death. Thus to suggest an answer to Cella’s and Bradfield’s question: the collector-as-curator never really dies. Or, as Mitrentse suggests, the collection itself becomes a performative work of art and takes on a life of its own.

Images:

Nikos Alexiou

Grid (detail)

Digital print on paper, dimensions variable

Christina Mitrentse (responds to Nikos Alexiou)

Bed Constellation

Silkscreen print on cotton, ed. 2, bed

Christina Mitrentse (responds to Nikos Alexiou)

Bed Constellation (detail: leather book)

Jonas Ranson (responds to Vassili Balatsos)

Plans For A New Mausoleum At Halicarnassus

Silkscreen print on paper edition of 2

Bernard Cella

What Does The Artist Do After The Death Of The Curator?

Limited edition print

Marsha Bradfield (responds to Bernard Cella)

What Does The Artist Do After The Death Of The Curator?

Video still

For further information please see Nikos Alexiou's website or the Linear B project website.

Review of Nothing in the World But Youth at Turner Contemporary

2012-01-03T19:54:00.000Z

03/01/12

Nothing in the World But Youth

Turner Contemporary, Margate

17 September 2011 – 8 January 2012

When I began working as an intern for Turner Contemporary a year ago, I was sick. Having been seriously ill for several years, spending a large part of that time in hospital, I felt unable to return to my previous career, and didn’t know where to turn instead. I felt like a child again, or, rather, an adolescent: past the stage of innocence and security, but not quite ready or able to take on the uncertainties of the future.

Coming from a background in academia, it was the research aspect of the internship which attracted me, and my qualifications in that area sufficed to get me selected. And now here I am: fully settled on a career in the art world, having, in the interim, gained varied experience as well as employment as a writer, researcher and part-time curator. I am about to embark upon an MA in the History of Art, and I have recently moved further away from my parental home and the hospital which previously kept me bound. Put quite simply, I have come of age, and the process was enabled, to a large degree, by my involvement with this exhibition.

For Nothing in the World But Youth is just that: one big coming of age. Or, rather, many individual comings of age, many group comings of age, many cultural comings of age – a look at adolescence, as portrayed in art and the media, as well as by young people themselves, from 1890, when the concept of adolescence as a distinct phase of life began to be recognised, to the present day.

I will not call it a survey show, for it isn’t. It neither proceeds chronologically, nor does it claim to be all-inclusive, for how could such a challenge ever be met? The initial idea for the exhibition developed out of conversations between Karen Eslea, Head of Learning at Turner Contemporary, and young people in Margate who spoke of their isolation and feelings of being stigmatised. And, of course, Margate has a longstanding history as a place of youth activity and experimentation, best known as one of the seaside resorts favoured by the Mods and Rockers in the 1960s.

So as to render the exhibition accessible and appealing to all, both young and old, it has been arranged around four key themes: place, space and territory; groups and individuals; responsibility and rebellion; and sexuality and growing up. Works included range from those produced by well-established and famous artists to contributions from local students and school children; from paintings and drawings to sculptures and film works; from clothing to shoes; from letters to comics and magazines, posters and flyers: there is something for everyone. Alongside Mary Quant’s tasteful tan nail varnish (1966), a dispo paper dress (1968), an Adam Ant makeup box (1980s), and varying shoes and boots representative of different trends and ages, hangs a green velvet jacket belonging to David Bowie, which he customised with felt tip pen stripes when he was just 13. These items are displayed in cabinets which have been custom made by Matthew Darbyshire, and painted by his mother, to recollect his own childhood bedroom furniture from the 1980s. As gallery assistant Penny Jackson says: “This show has been both curated and created.”

The first thing that greets you as you climb the stairs or exit the lift at gallery level is a compilation of film clips showing youth in Margate across the decades. This sets the scene for a show which is, as John Kampfner, Chair of the Board of Trustees, puts it, being held at an “international gallery at the heart of the locality.” As you cross the balcony, which looks out over the sea, framing the view which makes Margate such a spectacular location and a draw to so many artists throughout history, you have the opportunity to immerse yourself further, by selecting DVDs to watch from the Teenage Wildlife vidéothèque, curated by artists and filmmaker Esther Johnson, or to thumb through various comics from the past century. On the facing wall, one is also greeted by local writer and artist in residence Iain Aitch’s photo gallery of Margate residents back in the heyday of their youth, hanging next to recent portraits, as they are now.

The theme of individuals and portraits continues into the next gallery, where we encounter many iconic photographs, including Corinne Day’s seminal shoot of Kate Moss as a young teenager (Kate, 2008), Diane Arbus’ old before their time Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C (1963), Jacob Riis’ journalistic photograph (Showing their Trick, Hell’s Kitchen Boys) of a group of young toughs in Manhattan, re-enacting an everyday crime, which, when published in 1890, caused widespread panic about youth, and a bewitching sepia image of Marie Bashkirtseff, a young Russian artist, whose journal, published in 1889, has been likened to a female counterpart of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, and which inspired American psychologist and educator, G. Stanley Hall, to define “adolescence” as a distinct phase of life in 1904.

We are also greeted by a life-size painted bronze by Marc Quinn, A Moment of Clarity (2010), which stands menacingly in the doorway, a youth in a hoody, but based upon the painting by 17^th century Spanish artist, Francisco de Zurbaran, Saint Francis of Assisi in his Tomb. Swapping a monk’s hood for a tracksuit hood, does this change the character and intent of the wearer, or is it a reminder that appearances are only external, and one ought not to judge and fear on these grounds alone?

Another sculpture with religious connotation is found in the West Gallery, in the form of Ron Mueck’s Youth (2009-2011), a black teenager lifting his t-shirt to reveal and cautiously inspect a knife wound in his side, resonant of the wounds inflicted upon Christ on the cross.

The South Gallery explores the theme of responsibility and rebellion and contains a couple of walls pasted with posters and flyers from the Mott Collection, dating from late Punk and other subcultures of the 1980s, whilst Mark Leckey’s video compilation, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), shows footage from the underground party scene in the UK. In direct contrast to this are photos from the Imperial War Museum’s collection of young girls hard at work, and letters and journal entries from the Mass Observation archive, which express, with a tragicomic twist, the emotions and experiences of young people during the war years.

The timing of this exhibition, itself already in planning for ten years, could not be more apt, with the recent highlighting of the issue of youth, following August’s riots. This theme of violence is also included in Martin Brand’s series of riot images, Fight for Your Right (2005), and photos by Algerian born Mohamed Bourouissa, from the same year, capturing similar events across France, emanating from the Parisian suburbs.

Clearly adolescence corresponds to a period of change, the transition between childhood and adulthood, both physically and psychologically. The final gallery looks at issues related to sexuality, sexual identity, and gender. Androgyny has long been a representative motif, introduced over a century ago when an older female actress, Nina Boucicault, already 30 years of age, was cast to play the role of Peter Pan in the 1904 stage production of J. M. Barrie’s book. Sadie Benning’s video, Flat is Beautiful (1998), picks up on this theme, addressing issues of sexual identity. Works by Sarah Lucas are more overt in their sexual innuendo, and David Hockney’s We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) depicts two young men kissing at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. Perfectly capturing the androgyny of teenagers on the cusp of puberty, and with an air of both innocence and nonchalance, posing almost provocatively, are Rineke Dijkstra’s near life-size, swimwear clad girl and boy, Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26 1992 and Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 23 1992 respectively. In contrast to, or perhaps as a result of, this seeming naivety, there is also a series of large photos of teenage mothers, Into the Arms of Babes (2005), by Michelle Sank, and, next to these, a heart searing set of sketches by Mary Husted, who, falling pregnant as a teenager in the 1960s, was forced to give her son up for adoption, being allowed just ten days with him, during which she made these pencil drawings. Completing the circle of pregnancy options is Paula Rego’s Abortion I-VIII (1997), a disturbingly gothic series of etchings.

Many other big names are also on display, including, to mention but a few, Peter Blake, Martin Boyce, Phil Collins, Dexter Dalwood, Chantal Joffe, Henry Moore, Walter Sickert, Juergen Teller, Andy Warhol and Francesca Woodman. And, of course, J.M.W. Turner himself, since it is integral to the concept of the gallery to have at least one of his works on show at all times. Although he predates the period covered in the premise of this exhibition, he is incorporated thematically, through the showing of a number of beautiful and precocious sketches and watercolours made during his childhood and teenage years.

In a speech at the opening night, Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder and director of Kids Company, spoke of how she has seen, with her own eyes, the power of art in changing things for young people. Not only have many contributed to this exhibition in terms of works displayed, but there are also a number of local teenagers acting as guides around the gallery. It is no exaggeration then, when Batmanghelidjh continues: “This institution and this exhibition are an absolute celebration of everything that is good in our young people.”

As sociologist Richard Hoggart wrote about We are the Lambeth Boys, one of the films on show in the Teenage Wildlife vidéothèque, “it sets out to show, not the whole truth, but some aspects of the truth, wholly.” This is an apt description of the exhibition as a whole, a show so vast and appealing that, although there are inevitably gaps, visitors, both young and old, will want to return again and again to find and re-experience their own truths.

Images:

Santiago Mostyn

Callie on the Sandbank

from Excerpt All Most Heaven

2008

Credit Santiago Mostyn

Sarah Lucas

from Self Portraits 1990-1998

Eating a Banana

1990

courtesy the artist, Sadie Coles HQ London

Inkjet print on paper

JMW Turner

St John's Church, Margate

1784

Pen and ink and watercolour on paper

Peter Blake

Self Portrait with Badges

1961

courtesy Tate London 2011

Oil on board

Originally published at: http://www.rovesandroams.com/2012/01/nothing-in-the-world-but-youth-at-turner-contemporary-margate/

Review of Helen Finney: Note to Self at Xavier White’s, Blackheath

2011-12-21T10:57:00.003Z

21/12/11

Helen Finney: Note to Self

Xavier White’s, Blackheath

25 November – 29 December 2011

Glossy lips, plump and ripe, oily skin, hair follicles… Every minute detail, every blemish, nothing escapes these larger than life portraits by Helen Finney, on display this month at Xavier White’s in Blackheath. Painted in thick oils, and focusing in so closely on just the eyes, nose and mouth, these brutal yet beautiful canvases are honest to a fault. Clogged eyelashes, as if applied with an oversized mascara brush, strands of a fringe, glistening teeth. From a distance, the palate appears quite minimal – mottled skin tones, sometimes pallid, other times sun-kissed – yet as you draw in, you notice the many many colours, applied in an almost pointilliste manner, creating the illusion of human flesh. There is something quite abstract about these images, despite their most figurative of subject matter. The scale is so immense, and the viewpoint so intimate, that it becomes almost impossible to tell who is male, who is female. Does it even matter? The face is reduced to a bundle of features, shared by us all. And yet no two noses are the same; each person is recognisable as an individual. Especially the paintings of Finney herself, her eyes a startling blue, her skin a delicate porcelain.

Two larger works stand out from amongst the snapshots – Dear Jon… and You Never Saw Me. Each of these portrays a full length Finney, or, to be more accurate, several full length Finneys, overlaid as shadowy silhouettes against a dark background. In the former, where she is on the phone, this suggests not so much a sense of movement, but of duration. You ask yourself: what is being said? Is it a break up call? A make up call? Trying to read the expression gives no clues, since, as with the faces all around, the features do not speak. They are perfect, they are precise, they are truthful, but perhaps too truthful, and too decontextualised. Human flesh, viscerality, tangibility. But abstracted beyond emotion.

Similarly, You Never Saw Me, which shows Finney from behind, dressed in stockings and a basque, with buttocks bared and hand on hip, is nowhere near as erotic as it sounds. Here the blurred outlines suggest something of a vision, a dream – indeed, as the title suggests, was this scene ever witnessed, or just imagined? Again, flesh, presence, instinct. A harsh rawness. Humanity stripped bare.

There is something unnerving about these works. They draw you in and repel you all at once. Beauty and fascination, but the horror of reality revealed uncomfortably close at hand. One thing is for sure – I would not want to be Finney’s model!

Images:

All © the artist

Note to Self

Dear Jon...

You Never Saw Me

Strength

For further information, see: http://helenfinney.webs.com/

Review of Vika Verb: From Womb to Womb at East Gallery, 214 Brick Lane

2011-12-21T10:06:00.004Z

21/12/11
Vika Verb: From Womb to Womb

East Gallery, 214 Brick Lane

13 – 18 December 2011

bird. woman. egg. Such is the title of two of the works in Vika Verb’s first solo show, taking place in East Gallery, nestled amidst the vintage treasure troves and multitudinous bagel shops at the lively northern end of Brick Lane. And, indeed, these motifs recur throughout her works, across many different media, as she experiments eagerly for ways to capture a certain lightness, and, as she herself phrases it: “In a world dominated by reason, profit and logic, […] to search for and revive the true meaning of femininity and its inherent value.”

The theme, one of cycles, periods, and women’s lives, with which she has been working for a couple of years now, has become very personal. In fact, she confesses to feeling not only exhausted, but also something of an emptiness, and the need to turn to something else for a while, having poured herself into these creations. The main set of drawings, encapsulating the subject of the show, is Cycles and Periods (Blood, Entry, Fruit, Ground), a set of four drawings representing the four cycles of a woman’s life: her first menstruation, her first sexual encounter, child birth, and the menopause, two of which Verb has already experienced, two of which she felt able to imagine through a sense of collective memory passed down from her female ancestors. The drawings, made, as is preferred by Verb who finds acrylics and oils too heavy, in ink, are intricately detailed and overflowing with symbolism. Her use of silver leaf brings to mind jewellery and femininity, the foliage has something organic about it, and the patterning is almost prehistoric – a term Verb repeatedly employs when talking about her work and subject matter. She is looking back to a time when women weren’t dominated by men, when femininity was about spirituality and a sense of connection. In tribal ritual, sacred objects may not be touched by menstruating women, and this is not because they are felt to be dirty, but, quite the contrary, because they are seen to hold such power that it would be impossible not to disrupt the weaker masculine power of the object. This sense of ritual is all too present throughout Verb’s work.

Take, for example, the works I mentioned already, bird. woman. egg (I, II) and the related Metamorfishes (I, II, III). These came about after Verb found a dead bird lying in the street and felt compelled to pick it up and take it home. Unsure what to do with it, she kept it for a while in her freezer. She was then inspired to go on a trip to Epping Forest, bird in tow, along with some fish and some eggs. Once there, she stripped bare, and took a reel of photographs of herself and the objects, setting the timer and running to take up position, thus scarcely having time to pose, and certainly not to ensure focus or composition. The outcome is beautiful and natural. For bird. woman. egg (II), the visitor is invited to click through a slide projection show of images revealing Verb’s own body, the bird, the eggs, leaves, foliage… Is this sexual? No, not at all. It is a simple presentation of the body, the feminine, and nature. Somehow, in modern society, nakedness has become taboo, especially of women. But this is a celebration, a return to our roots, a recognition of life and where it comes from. Metamorfishes (I, II, III), originating from that same excursion, are a set of black and white photos depicting Verb and two fish in the forest. In the first, she holds them over her eyes; in the second, in her ears; and, in the third, over her breasts – a female version of the Japanese three wise monkeys and the proverb they embody – “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” – whereby the element of speech, for women, who traditionally speak less than their male counterparts, is replaced by the suggestion of nourishment provided for their offspring?

Eggs recur again in 192 eggs, a tribute to all those ova women lose each month of the year, and named according to the number of periods Verb has had to date. A wicker basket containing (near enough) the said number of (hens’) eggs is watched over by two papier mâché faces, casts of the artist herself, wrapped into fabric bodies, contorted, clawed, and with long tails. They may look arguably like lizards, but Verb contends they are, in fact, birds, since birds are where it all begins: bird. woman. egg.

Ideal Imperfections is a series of prints, taken from the first menstruation drawing which, for Verb, epitomises the concept of “womb to womb”, and of the umbilical connection between us all, each one containing a deliberate error. Printmaking, she explains, is a very masculine technique. It is all about precision: lining up the paper, having the watermark where it should be, applying the right amount of ink. Mistakes, on the other hand, are typically associated with women (think of Eve in the Garden of Eden), and so this deliberate subversion reclaims the method for womankind. A new experience for Verb, printmaking offers her the chance to work with what she loves most: lines. “Lines are what are most important to me. Not colours. Lines. Lines and dots. Dots free me. I like to get to a state where I don’t analyse.”

In fact, she likes to get to a state where her works take on characters of their own, with whom she can converse. In Dreams of a 700-year-old Woman, ink blots are transformed into creatures, strange and surreal, often blurring features of various species. Asked why she mixes abstraction and figuration like this, Verb explains that, for her, abstraction is about emotion and feelings, but, to have feelings, you need a character. Thus it is all about releasing that character and finding the narrative. Telling the story.

The question might be, whose story is it which is being told? Is it purely personal, or is it one belonging to all of womankind? For the most recent work included in this show, Lunar Drawings (first to twenty eighth), Verb read her lunar horoscope daily for a month, considered its predictions, and then, at the end of the day, produced a drawing reflecting both on this, and on what actually happened in reality. Again, strewn with a menagerie of creatures, many revealing bright red vulva, some in a state of transformation, “they act as a reminder that every female has the power of the moon, of the animals, of the fish, of the plants. It’s a shame we don’t use it now. As soon as women start to fight for their rights, they become male. Aggression of this sort is not feminine. We have the power, but we should look inside ourselves and find it there.” A return to prehistoric feminism? A celebration of nature and spirit. An exploration and experimentation with many different techniques. An artist to keep an eye on.

Images:

All © the artist

Cycles and Periods (Blood, Entry, Fruit, Ground)

Metamorfishes (I, II, III)

Print from the series Ideal Imperfections

Ink drawing from the series Dreams of a 700-year-old Woman

For further information, see: http://www.vikaverb.com/

Review of Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage at the Hayward Gallery

2011-12-17T09:14:00.002Z

17/12/11

Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage

Hayward Gallery

28 September 2011 – 8 January 2012

Born in Switzerland in 1962, Pipilotti Rist, acclaimed as a pioneer of video art, has often also been pigeon-holed as a feminist artist because of her repeated use of the female body as both landscape and subject matter for her work. “Politically,” she agrees, “I am a feminist, but personally, I am not. For me, the image of a woman in my art does not stand just for women: she stands for all humans.”[1] And, indeed, her work is a visceral celebration of the human body, both inside and out.

Her current survey show – her first in the UK – which fills the Hayward’s ground-floor galleries, and spills out on to the terrace and into the toilets and café, brings together over 30 works, from when she burst on to the international art scene back in the 1980s, to today, including a number of especially commissioned pieces, one of which was not finished until the morning of the press view. There is nothing conventional about any of them: both content and placement deviate playfully from visitors’ expectations. So, for example, in Yoghurt On Skin – Velvet On TV (2009), we are confronted with tiny LCD screens hidden inside shells and handbags, whilst Pimple Porno (1992), a 12-minute video loop of a man and woman having sex, is buried inside a child’s cot, and Selfless In The Bath Of Lava (1994) projects up through a tiny hole from deep beneath the ground (“We had to dig down 200 metres below the Southbank and bury a woman who is now held there in purgatory” jokes Rist).

Several works are also projected across the gallery floor so that visitors can move in and around them, becoming part of them. Amongst these is Mutaflor (1996), in which the camera draws near and enters a naked Rist’s mouth, is ejected through her anus, and then loops right back to her mouth. In a similar vein, Digesting Impressions (1996), projected onto the abdomen of a dangling swimsuit, takes us on an endoscopic journey through the oesophagus, stomach, and intestines. There is more to this work than just a document of the bodily process, however – it might be taken as symbolic also of the digestion of information and the impressions with which we are continually confronted from the world around us.

The abdomen is perhaps the most significant part of the body for Rist: “This part of the body is very sacred, as it is the site of our entrance into the world, the centre of sexual pleasure, and the location of the exits for the body’s garbage.” As such, she considers underpants to be “the temple of our abdomen,” and this might help explain their proliferation in her sculptural works. Created specifically for the Hayward, Hiplights or Enlightened Hips (2011) consists of 300 pairs of pants in various sizes, individually lit from the inside, and hanging on a washing line outside the gallery. Inside, the first artwork one encounters is a giant chandelier, Massachusetts Chandelier (2010), also created from a large number of undergarments, but this time lit from the outside by projections. “I have no pants anymore!” jokes Rist, pulling down her trousers a little.

You cannot help but smile, both at the artist herself, whose wicked sense of humour captivates the audience, but also at her work. There is something comical, something cheeky, something reckless about it. Something childlike too? Her name, of course, is not her birth name, but one she adopted as a teenager in honour of Pippi Longstocking, the stripy-legged heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s tales. But no, I wouldn’t call it childlike, maybe just simple and uncomplicated – as Rist herself says, she is using things around us and turning them into something beautiful. Others might call her work provocative, exaggerated, hysterical even. “But then,” as Adrian Searle concedes, “women are often accused of being hysterical when they tell unpalatable truths, or assert themselves.”[2]

There is, however, an undeniably Freudian aspect to Rist’s work. Elisabeth Bronfen[3] suggests that she epitomises female curiosity, and thus contravenes the concept of the drive to avert one’s gaze from the unpalatable. What Rist offers us is an exaggerated aversion of this aversion of the gaze. Her camera forces us to look at what we don’t really want to see, from genitalia and pubic hair (Red Bodily Love Letter, 1992/2007, and Blue Bodily Love Letter, 1992/1998) to menstruation (Blood Room, 1993/1998). But her goal is not to shock us: she is simply depicting the facts of life, expressing reality. And yet, at the same time, there is something about it which is not at all real, a hallucinatory quality, something dreamlike. Administering Eternity (2011), another new commission, is perhaps the best example of this. With white voile curtains floating in the breeze, scattered cushions handmade out of stuffed items of clothing, a soundtrack of bells, Tibetan monks, the wind, and a music box tune played back at half speed, we enter into a mesmeric, relaxing, fantasy world, surrounded by images from the most beautiful of dreams: flowers, plants, cats, mouths, skies, spirals, undergrowth, lambs… Visitors themselves become part of the experience, capturing and projecting images, as if they were emanating from their own fantasy. Rist has described her works as audiovisual poems, and there is something undeniably poetic about the atmosphere in this room. It would be possible to sit here for hours, day-dreaming, meditating, drifting through this psychedelic trance.

Less comfortable, however, is the earliest work on display, I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986). Made whilst she was still a student in Basel, this film features Rist dancing about half-naked, always out of focus, singing in a distorted voice (played back at the wrong speed). For this show, the video is being projected inside a larger construction, A Peak Into The West – A Look Into The East (or E-W) (1992/2011), shaped like the beam from a projector, into which visitors must insert their heads, an act which both reaffirms and simultaneously subverts the aggression of the gaze.

As Bronfen[4] concludes, Rist’s work is based upon a “self conscious disturbance of visual and cinematic expectations.” She is a master of video and film technology, whose haptic camera work enhances the viscerality of her subject matter. Whilst

classic film editing – known as continuity editing – is all about a striving for coherence, and an attempt to make the audience forget the presence and mediation of the camera and the fact that they are watching a film, Rist deliberately reminds her viewers of this very thing. She incorporates jerky movements, out of focus shots, distorted sound, jagged lines, and colour filters. In Bronfen’s words, this is a display of her “radically disjunctive excess;” but Rist herself simply says: “I try to find some coherence, but I’m not there yet.” As she continues: “We change every day. We are only a biological meat machine. When we meet someone, we have a conversation which changes us. Tomorrow we are someone else.” And, indeed, I challenge any one of you to leave this exhibition the same person you were when you entered.

[1] ‘Pipilotti Rist: “We all come from between our mother’s legs,”’ by Laura Barnett, in The Observer, 04/09/11, available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/04/pipilotti-rist-exhibition-hayward-gallery Accessed 14/12/11

[2] ‘Pipilotti Rist: big time sensuality,’ by Adrian Searle, in The Guardian, 26/09/11, available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/26/pipilotti-rist-hayward-gallery-review Accessed 14/12/11

[3] ‘Pipilotti’s Rist’s Use of the Feminine Body and Cinematic Gaze’, lecture by Elisabeth Bronfen, Blue Room, Spirit Level at Royal Festival Hall, 13/12/11

[4] Op cit. cf. also her essay in the catalogue to accompany the exhibition.

Images:

Pipilotti Rist

Eyeball Massage Installation view at the Hayward Gallery.

Photo Linda Nylind

Administrating Eternity (2011)

Pipilotti Rist

Eyeball Massage Installation view at the Hayward Gallery.

Photo Linda Nylind

Selfless In The Bath of Lava (1994)

Pipilotti Rist
Eyeball Massage Installation view at the Hayward Gallery.
Photo Linda Nylind
Foreground: Massachusetts Chandelier (2010)
Staircase: I Never Taught In Buffallo II (2003/2011) wallpaper

Originally published at http://www.rovesandroams.com/2011/12/pipilotti-rists-eyeball-massage-at-the-hayward/

Review of Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up at PayneShurvell

2011-12-13T14:55:00.000Z

13/12/11

Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up

PayneShurvell

4 November 2011 – 7 January 2012

PayneShurvell’s small gallery space is currently full to the brim with a mass of works by some big name artists, including Peter Blake and Bruce McLean, both hanging on the walls and strewn across the floor, loosely linked by the theme of cigarette packets and printed matter, or, rather, the disappearance thereof, in the age of radical digitisation and prohibition of tobacco advertising. The soundtrack to this exploration into the changing visual and cultural landscape is provided by Nicky Coutts’ Eastern (2010), a re-enactment of the final scene in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by thirty non-professional actors in Tokyo. Playing on an eight and a half minute loop, the repetitive Western music soon begins to grate, but it certainly sets the scene for nostalgic flashbacks to the heyday of social smoking.

“Listen, while I tell you a story…” Rudolf Reiber’s artist’s book (Where the flavor is, 2011) is a compilation of texts from the many Marlboro cinema advertisements, themselves often featuring rugged cowboys riding high in the saddle across panoramic landscapes. Peter Blake’s one-off print, made especially for this show, and bearing the same title, also harks back to iconic advertising imagery, this time of Lucky Strike. Finally, in the 1980s, Niall Monroe worked as a tobacco pack designer for STAR, and his work of the same name displays a number of limited edition packets, culminating in the cult design, launched only in Switzerland, celebrating the fall of the Berlin wall.

But is all of this soon to be a thing of the past? Recent legislation in Australia means that from December 2012, all cigarette packaging must be plain and logo free. It is perhaps with this in mind that Marie-Jeanne Hoffner shot her short film in which she uses a scalpel to dismantle, scrape clean, and reassemble a Gauloise packet (Untitled, 2011). Dermot O’Brien takes this one step further by turning his Marlboro packet into an intricate and tiny model of the Bates Motel (Untitled, 2011).

The concept for the show comes from Andrew Curtis, an artist himself, but who also works in a print studio, and who is worried about the demise of this medium. Thus, other works included in the exhibition, which are not focused on the tobacco industry, include Greg Day’s Studland (2011), a large collage comprising ripped and torn posters from advertising billboards, and Gerhard Lang’s Unrecorded Leaf (2011), a series of five frottages made from leaves, each with a slight outline as if it were shaking in the breeze, purportedly exploring the interaction between man and his landscape. A leaf, after all, is the basis of all printed matter.

Perhaps the most innovative work, however, is Their Grassy Places (1971-2011) by Bruce McLean. In the 1960s, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford commissioned their gardener to use fertiliser to create their profiles on their lawn at Woburn Abbey, and a photograph of this was published in the Daily Mirror. McLean then bought the rights to this image and reprinted it in Studio International as an art piece. He later tried to resell this to the Daily Mirror, but they were not interested. For Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up, McLean is inserting his print into a copy of the Daily Mirror bought for each day of the show’s run. He will then sign each of these as an edition. Whether or not the Daily Mirror will be interested now, who can say? Either way, what this peculiarly intriguing exhibition makes clear is that, despite the dying habit of handwritten notes, the homogenisation of books, newspapers and letters into online media, and the banning of cigarette advertising (not least following the actual death of three of the Marlboro campaign’s cowboys, two from lung cancer, one from emphysema), the interaction between visual and printed matter, and the potential for its exploitation, is far from dead.

Images:

Rudolf Reiber

Where the flavor is

Artist’s Book

2011

Dermot O’Brien

Untitled

Laser cut card, Marlboro packet, adhesive

2011

Bruce McLean

Their Grassy Places

45 newspapers containing a screenprint signed and specifically dated by the artist

Edition of 45

1971-2011

Review of Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt at Ordovas

2011-12-13T11:05:00.002Z

13/12/11
Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt

Ordovas

7 October – 16 December 2011

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669) lived over 300 years apart, and, on the surface, there is not much similarity between their work, so one might well wonder why Pilar Ordovas has chosen to inaugurate her new gallery on Savile Row with an exhibition looking at the connections between the two artists. A small show, comprising just six Bacon paintings (amongst them, two triptychs and one diptych), one Rembrandt, and then a number of working documents and related items, it is, nevertheless, worth a visit, and her well reasoned premise for the link is not actually as tenuous as it might at first seem.

The inspiration for the exhibition came back in 2006 when Ordovas was handling the estate of Valerie Beston, who had looked after Bacon during his time with the Marlborough Gallery. Amongst the items, Ordovas found a photograph, a facsimile of which is included in this show, taken by Irving Penn in June 1962, and depicting Bacon in his studio, with a pinned up, crumpled, and paint-spattered image of Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Beret (ca. 1659) in the background.

It is well known that Bacon took a lot of inspiration, sometimes quite directly, from a number of his artistic predecessors (perhaps most notably Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, ca. 1650), and his collection of books, photographs, and reproductions filled his studio like a treasure trove. In his interviews with David Sylvester, recorded between 1962-1985, Bacon discusses his art historical interests quite candidly. Martin Harrison, in his essay in the catalogue to accompany this exhibition[1], suggests, however, that the opinions and preferences expressed in this source might well be interpreted in a distorted manner, since Bacon was often looking back in retrospect, rather than expressing his attitude from the time. His admiration for one artist, though, can be seen to remain constant – and this artist is Rembrandt.

Bacon held Rembrandt’s self-portraits, of which there are around sixty, shared between the media of paint and etching, in especially high regard, and spoke in depth about the Self Portrait with Beret in particular, extolling the fleeting application of paint, lack of intricate detail (the work is thought to be unfinished), and what he termed the “anti-illustrational” aspects, such as the deep shading around the eye-sockets, making it appear as if there were none. According to Sylvester, it was from looking at Rembrandt that Bacon learned “how to use an extremely restricted range of colour, how to dissolve forms into space and how to destroy the picture-plane.”[2] In his own words, Bacon praises the late portraits of Rembrandt for being those in which “he made a tightrope walk between appearance and caricature.” [3] In the film clip from an interview with Sylvester[4] being shown in the gallery, Bacon goes on to describe Rembrandt’s style in the beret-clad portrait as “the same as Abstract Expressionism [but] much more exciting and much more profound” because he is trying to record an actual fact, namely, that of self appearance. Certainly, his dark palate, thick brushstrokes, and gestural use of colour to highlight contours, are far from the naturalistic precision of his ancestors. Although the concept of a psychological portrait is not contemporaneous with Rembrandt, it would seem that Bacon would like to attribute something deeper than a pure physical likeness to the Old Master’s work, and, certainly, this attempt to capture something of the true character of the sitter was a goal of Bacon himself.

Notoriously antagonistic towards the prevailing tendencies towards Abstraction and Expressionism, Bacon was dedicated to the figurative in content, if not typically in style. His portraits are mere sketchy suggestions, with distorted figures, areas of bare canvas, strange box-like objects, and a vividly non-naturalistic palate. Indeed there is an undeniable likeness between his paintings and their subjects – perhaps more so than in some photographic style images – but, to my mind at least, this is achieved more through his abstraction and distillation of character than through any careful and planned mark making. Irrational marks they may be, but how else could the irrational character of these artists be so succinctly portrayed?

Whilst one cannot attempt to draw too many conclusions from this small comparison, and whilst it would certainly be out of place to attempt to infer too great a likeness between the two artists’ works, the many photographs and reproductions of Rembrandt’s work that Bacon had in his studio, various of which are on show here, and the obvious attention he paid to them, evidenced by the paint smudges and finger prints with which they are besmirched, do suggest that there is a connection which, until now, has been largely overlooked. As such, as well as simply to enjoy the contorted and agonised Bacon self-portraits and, of course, the glory of there being a Rembrandt hanging amongst them, a visit to this new Mayfair gallery space is to be recommended.

[1] Martin Harrison, ‘Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt’, essay in exhibition catalogue of the same name, Ordovas Gallery, 2011

[2] David Sylvester, ‘The Paintings of Francis Bacon’, The Listener, 3 January 1952, p29, cited in Harrison, op cit

[3] Transcript of Bacon interviewed by David Sylvester, December 1971; Hyman-Kreitman Archive, Tate Britain, cited in Harrison, op cit

[4] Sunday Night Francis Bacon. Interview with David Sylvester. BBC Television; dir. Michael Gill, 1966

Images:

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Self-Portrait

oil on canvas

35.5 x 30.5 cm.

Painted in 1972

Private Collection

Rembrandt Harmenz. van Rijn (1606-1669)

Self-Portrait with Beret

oil on panel

30.7 x 24.3 cm.

Painted circa 1659

Musée Granet, Communauté du pays d’Aix-en-Provence

Working document: Fragments of Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1660, from the book Rembrandt by Tancred Borenius, London: Phaidon Press, 1952 and leaf from book, A Pictorial History of Jazz by Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer Jnr, London: Robert Hale Limited,1955 (pp.79/80)

Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Francis Bacon Archive (Reg. RM98F1A:79)

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Study for Self-Portrait

oil on canvas

152.4 x 140 cm.

Painted in 1964

Private Collection

Review of Laurel Nakadate at the Zabludowicz Collection

2011-12-12T16:59:00.002Z

12/12/11

Laurel Nakadate

Zabludowicz Collection

29 September – 11 December 2011

www.zabludowiczcollection.com

Oops! I did it again

I played with your heart, got lost in the game

Oh baby, baby

Oops! You think I’m in love

That I’m sent from above

I’m not that innocent!

(Oops! I Did it Again, Britney Spears, 2000)

On the surface, Laurel Nakadate’s collection of video works portray a young, sexy American idol girl, dressed in little more than the skimpiest possible bikini top and shortest shorts, chewing gum, dancing about provocatively to her walkman or stripping with and for ugly middle-aged men with whom she seems quite clearly to have the upper hand. But scratch the surface and is it really as casual and playful as it seems? And if there is exploitation here, who is exploiting whom?

Nakadate’s first UK solo exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection brings together a large body of her filmic and photographic work from over the past ten years, and also includes a couple of specially commissioned pieces. For I Want to Be the One to Walk in the Sun (2006) and Stories (2005), two of the longer films in the collection, Nakadate travelled across America, hanging out at truck stops, gas stations, and other less than salutary locations, looking to meet men with whom she could go home and make her work. Sometimes this would involve teaching them simplified versions of strip poker, live on camera, other times just asking them to follow her in the dark in a disconcerting style. In between encounters, she is seen in a maid’s outfit, with a dog humping her leg, and pole dancing around lampposts and a support on the porch of a weather-boarded chapel, to the soundtrack of Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. Nothing but a sexual being, the spiritual emptiness and loneliness are resounding.

This loneliness comes across again in Love Hotel (2005), for which Nakadate spent a week alone in Tokyo, staying in various short-term establishments intended for amorous liaisons. To the soundtrack of Bonnie Tyler’s Angel of the Morning – “then slowly turn away, I won’t beg you to stay with me” – she acts out love scenes with an absent, invisible lover. Particularly poignant also is the line: “I’m old enough to face the dawn.” For is she? There is something naïve and childlike to her performances, despite their obvious sexuality. In Greater New York (2005), for example, shot in the wake of 9/11 and capturing “small personal moments,” visions of her dancing to a backdrop of fireworks (a recurrent motif in many of her works: “… I attempt to find beauty in the world. […] Fireworks are so grand, and perfect, and then, only moments later, so wholly disappeared”[1]) and scenes of natural innocence, such as squirrels frolicking in the park, Nakadate cajoles a baby bird, quite obviously dead, to get back up and return to life. Similarly touchingly, Exorcism 3 (Dancing in the Desert for Britney) (2009) contains a performance carried out on the Salt Flats in Utah, about which Nakadate explains that she “danced as an attempt to exorcise Britney Spears’ sadness. I wanted to spare her…” Yet how genuine is this childlike simplicity, when, at the same time, she steadily holds the viewer’s – voyeur’s – gaze?

Britney is clearly an influence on Nakadate. Another work, the three-channel installation Oops! (2000), shows the efforts she made to teach men she met through random encounters to join with her in dancing to this song. In preparation, she watched MTV eight hours a day for a week to transcribe and learn the choreography. She then also bought a Hello Kitty boom box to take with her to the men’s homes. To return to the lyric with which I began: “I’m not that innocent!”

Good Morning Sunshine (2009) stands out from the other works in the exhibition, not only because it is scripted (and without musical accompaniment) and stars three girls (selected via an open casting call on Syracuse, New York) rather than Nakadate herself, but because there is a chilling role reversal. Repeating the same scenario three-times over, once with each girl, Nakadate, armed with her camera, and taking on a sinisterly seductive male role, enters the bedroom, wakens the sleeping beauty, and gradually gets her to stand up and strip: “You know you’re the prettiest girl, right? […] Let me look at you. […] Show me your feet. […] What’s underneath your shirt? […] Don’t be nervous…” The girls, silent for the most part, with the occasion shy smile or nod, stand coyly, equipped with teddy bear, looking uncomfortable, but complying nevertheless. They are being manipulated and groomed, watched and exploited, devalued.

In amongst the films, spread across two small back rooms upstairs, are 365 A4 photographs comprising 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears (2010), produced between 1 January – 31 December 2010, during which time Nakadate photographed herself crying on a daily basis, purportedly to “deliberately take part in sadness each day.” But these shots – some naked, some not, and ranging from lying on her bed or in the bath, to standing before the mirror, to travelling by plane or train – capture so much more than sadness. They are moments of anguish, desolation, and despair: revealing the cruel truth behind the performances of sexual bravado and laughter. Stripped bare, we see a vulnerable girl with a lack of self worth, seeking meaning, seeking belonging. Listen again to the lyrics of her carefully selected background songs: in Lessons 1-10 (2002), where Nakadate films herself acting as an art model in a man’s house, dressed as a school girl, in provocative lingerie, or spread eagled naked across the desk, Patsy Cline croons out You Belong to Me. Beyond words, however, is the choice of Satie’s haunting Gymnopédie for Where You’ll Find Me (2005), which reenacts the death and crime scenes of a number of young girls across America, sometimes stripped, beaten and bloodied, always alone. Who will miss them? Will they be noticed when they are gone? Once again, the desperate longing to be loved is apparent, this time to the shocking extent of seeking solace in death.

In an interview for Art Talk![2], Nakadate says: “there’s nothing more pathetic than a chance encounter that you try to turn into something real.” Sometimes, however, it takes such extreme action to distract you from the emptiness you feel inside; sometimes it is all you believe you are worth. Don’t be fooled by the superficial cavalierness of Nakadate’s films. Certainly, she is “not that innocent”, but, equally, there is much more to her overt sexual provocation than meets the eye.

[1] From the wall text accompanying 51/50 (2009), a three minute film of Nakadate dancing in front of fireworks, to the soundtrack of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.

[2] Viewable on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDNAlw3b-I, accessed 10/12/11.

Images:

Laurel Nakadate

Still from Oops!, 2000

3 channel video

3:33 minute loop

Edition of 5

Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Laurel Nakadate

Still from Oops!, 2000

3 channel video

3:33 minute loop

Edition of 5

Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Laurel Nakadate
From the series 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, 2011
September 4, 2010
Ink Jet print
8-1/2 x 11 inches
Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Laurel Nakadate
From the series 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, 2011
February 9, 2010
Ink Jet print
8-1/2 x 11 inches
Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Review of Dara Birnbaum at the South London Gallery

2011-12-10T09:54:00.000Z

10/12/11

Dara Birnbaum

South London Gallery

9 December 2011 – 12 February 2012

As someone who is notoriously sceptical about the extent to which video works ought to be considered art, Dara Birnbaum’s multi-channel installation, Arabesque (2011), being shown for the first time as the centrepiece of her solo exhibition at the South London Gallery, certainly convinced me of the possibilities. Born in New York in 1946, and trained initially in architecture and painting before becoming a pioneer in the burgeoning field of video art, Birnbaum’s works span over three and a half decades, from the early 1970s to the present day. Thus, whilst Arabesque amply fills the main gallery space, with its haunting soundtrack echoing through the corridors, bookshop, and café, it is put neatly in context alongside her oldest surviving installation, the black and white two channel work Attack Piece (1975), as well as eight small screen works from around the same time, all on display in the upper galleries.

Concerned with the relationship between the camera, the subject, and the viewer, as well as with gender stereotypes and women’s roles, her early works are a mixture of performance, politics, and psychological portraiture. Everything’s Gonna Be… (1976), for example, which is showing on a small monitor with its own headphones, presents a narrative about various US presidents and their affairs or encounters with girls, whilst, next door, six small screens run in parallel, Six Movements: Video Works from 1975, each a chapter on its own, and each a different length, some with sound, but none with headphones. With one long bench down the middle, and three screens on either side, the viewer becomes embroiled in the tension, distracted by the repeated scraping of a chair in Chaired Anxieties: Slewed, and the heavy breathing from Addendum: Autism, in which Birnbaum, performing her own work, rocks back and forth, eyes wide open and darting about in fear, paranoid, swallowing hard, panting, distressed, like a wild animal. On the opposite wall, in Control Piece, the movement is slower, but the exploratory hand creeping across the screen, the messy hair, and the psychiatric patient appearance are equally disturbing. Surrounded and entrapped, the viewer feels watched, unable to escape, unsettled to the extreme.

Attack Piece, as its title would suggest, is also fraught with tension. One screen shows slides, abruptly jolting and clicking through their sequence, whilst the opposing wall is filled with images from a handheld video camera, at times too blurry to make out, but mainly of Birnbaum herself, armed with a still camera, and filmed by her male collaborators (including David Askevold, Dan Graham, and Ian Murray). The whir of the motor and the motion sickness inducing jerkiness make it hard to watch, but the holiday snapshot set up, with 1970s clothes, hair, and cars, entice the viewer with an enrapturing fascination. I do wonder, however, quite how different my perception of this seminal work is from that of the contemporary 1975 audience.

For me, though, the real star of the show is Arabesque, and it would not be an exaggeration to say I could have sat there all day watching it over and over, being carried away on the melancholic chords of Clara Schumann’s Romanze 1, Opus 11, juxtaposed against her husband Robert’s better known Arabesque Opus 18. The screen on the right shows footage from the 1947 film about the couple, Song of Love, a melodramatic silent biopic about their relationship and her nursing him through his phases of depression and madness; the three left-hand screens show edited clips, taken from YouTube, of girls performing these works, overwritten with extracts from Clara’s diary, expressing her passion, grief, loneliness and feelings of inadequacy:

“… And I believe that a quieter life would leave me too much time for my grief…”

“… People fall in love with things they know in their heart they can never have…”

“… I need the love which beautifies daily life – if that were to go my life would go with it…”

“… Words always seem so feeble compared with what I feel. Feeling is so many-sided and words have but one side…”

But music and art achieve here what words alone cannot. The work explores and articulates the intensity of a range of relationships: between lovers, between a musician and his/her instrument, and with oneself. The passion these engender reverberates across the entire gallery, and accompanies the visitor for the rest of the day, stirring joy and pain, happiness and tears. If that doesn’t qualify it as art, I don’t know what does.

Images:

Arabesque (2011)

Film still of pianist Iris Weingartner from Arabesque (2011) taken with her permission from YouTube.

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris

Addendum - Autism (1975)

From Six Movements - Video Works from 1975

Single channel video, black & white, mono, 7' 20

Edition of 10

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris

Attack Piece (1975)

Two channel video installation, black & white (transferred from film & slide footage)

2 mono audio, 7' 40"

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris

Photo: John Berens

Arabesque (2011)

Four channel video installation, four stereo audio, 6' 30"

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris

Photo: John Berens

Review of Paul Noble: Welcome to Nobson at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street

2011-11-26T10:38:00.000Z

26/11/11

Paul Noble: Welcome to Nobson

Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street

10 November – 17 December 2011

Oh to be inside the mind of the artist! Or, in this case, maybe preferably not… For Paul Noble’s mind must be a very peculiar place indeed. He has spent the past 15 years envisaging and designing Nobson Newtown, a Brave New World where Heaven (2009), enclosed in high brick walls with deterrent shards and empty plinths, has no way in or out, whilst Hell (2009) seems welcoming, with its art deco fencing and open gates. The concepts behind this dystopia are as skewed as the artist’s unsettling perspective, and the towering sketches (Welcome to Nobson, 2008-2010, the centre piece to the exhibition, is a massive 452 x 715 cm) loom over you, a mixture of empty space and intricate detail.

Drawn in gentle graphite, these architectural plans are precise and elaborate. No detail is overlooked. From the shadows of the fences to the toilet rolls and bin bags, the stones in the walls, each individually engraved, and the geometric accuracy of a²+ b²₌c²(2009) in which two enlarged slides, taken from the Escher-like playground area of the town, are placed in opposition to one another, forming perfect Pythagorian triangles. But if you look too closely, prepare to be disturbed, for this is a perverted vision. Balls and chains, manacles and hand-shaped paddles hang from the bare branched trees; a strange, dark, hooded sculpture lurks sinisterly outside the walls, a phallus protruding from his head; and inside the spookily empty space, worm-like creatures toil away in the bleak futuristic towers.

The main gallery is entered through a beaded curtain, heavy and foreboding, swallowing you into the labyrinthine world. The visitor is immediately dwarfed, not only by the size of the beads and the scale of the sketches, but also by the two monumental marble sculptures standing guard (Three, 2011 and Couple, 2011). Pink-tinged, with translucent red veins, they loom overhead like giant erect penises. Intimidating and unnerving, elements taken from the sketches made real in the here and now.

The most disturbing work of all, however, is undoubtedly Ah (2010). Hanging in a separate side gallery, along with a strangely ritualistic wooden bell, hung with carved hazelnuts (Wooden Bell, 2011), and the outline of a figure composed out of charred stones (Stone Figure, 2011), this Gordian phantasm concatenates all the most perverse elements into one debauched scene: pipes with faces; roving eyeballs; piles of excrement with limbs engaging in anal intercourse with one another, whilst simultaneously self-pleasuring and eating hotdogs with legs of their own; Orwellian pigs; horses with teeth and hats; guns; cannons; scarcely disguised Swastikas… Engraved at the centre are the words: “One hand on the plough, the other on the sword.” Is this the motto of Nobson Newtown? Where heaven is evil and hell enticing, a place of purgatory, from which there is no escape? By now I felt I’d hedged my bets long enough, and it was time to make my get away whilst the going was still good.

Images: Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Review of Jonathan Lasker: The 80s at Timothy Taylor Gallery

2011-11-25T01:24:00.000Z

24/11/11

Jonathan Lasker: The 80s

Timothy Taylor Gallery

19 November – 23 December 2011

Jonathan Lasker builds his paintings up like a collage. Matt backgrounds in pastel shades, smooth and merely decorative, provide the backdrop for frenzied black scribbles, vertical and horizontal lines which run away with themselves into frantic knots, overlaid in turn by thick and vibrant scrawls of primary reds and yellows, squeezed from the tube with only the slightest touch of the brush. Celtic knots, spaghetti tangles, balls of wools – repeated motifs detached from their background, gestural scrawls, a cacophony of voices. With titles such as When Dreams Work (1992) or Heavy Mental (1985) these works do indeed both evoke and elicit a screaming rush of thoughts – the noise of the mind, undeciphered, purged directly on to the canvas. Optical confusion, eye ache, mental exhaustion. And then the peeling back of shapes, like a Matissean cut-out, revealing a calm beneath. Biomorphic shapes, or “blobs”, flowing from one image to the next.

In their press release, the gallery suggests that Lasker’s paintings make us aware of how we look at art, by emphasising the paintings’ constituent elements, most notably the differentiation between figure and ground. I would suggest they do much more than this, making us aware of the differentiation – and overlap – of visual and verbal vocabularies and thoughts, of the conscious and the subconscious, the rational and the irrational, of conception and perception[1], and of silence and noise. Prepare to leave this exhibition with your head whirring and thoughts racing.

[1] The contrast between conception and perception was raised by Shirley Kaneda in an interview with the artist for BOMB 30/Winter 1990, available at http://bombsite.com/issues/30/articles/1276 (accessed 24/11/11).

Images:

Jonathan Lasker
The Big Picture (1988)
Oil on canvas
96 x 132 in / 244 x 335 cm
(T007764)

Jonathan Lasker
Cosmic Shorthand (1988)
72 x 102 in / 183 x 259 cm
(T007763)

Review of Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany at the Saatchi Gallery

2011-11-21T15:50:00.000Z

21/11/11

Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany

Saatchi Gallery

18 November 2011 – 30 April 2012

With Germany’s ever increasing strength as the political and economic powerhouse of Europe, it is perhaps timely that the Saatchi Gallery’s latest offering should be a survey of contemporary German art, showcasing some 24 artists from or based in Germany, who, although perhaps little known in the UK, are making it big on the continental European arts stage. The title of the exhibition, Gesamtkunstwerk, can be translated as a “total, ideal, or universal work of art”, or as a “synthesis of different art forms into one all-encompassing masterpiece”. The term, first used by the German writer and philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff in 1827, has been assimilated into the study of aesthetics, although it is perhaps best known for its Wagnerian associations, after the composer used the term to describe his ideals of artistic integration. Accordingly, an underlying theme of this show is the ongoing academic battle between a narrow concentration on art history and a wider, if somewhat undefined, field of visual culture, whereby the distinction between high and low art forms is lost, and anything image-based becomes worthy as an object of study. German post-war culture and society, politics and the media, consumerism, gender – all of these topical themes bear their mark on the show’s contents, which, in short, offers a rollercoaster ride (in the case of Zhivago Duncan’s Pretentious Crap (2010), quite literally) through the broken images and discarded scraps of every day life.

Upon entering the exhibition in gallery one, you might well be forgiven for thinking, however, you had mistakenly arrived elsewhere. This is a quiet room, at odds with rest of the gallery. Dimly lit, it is filled with wooden carvings and plaster sculptures by Markus Selg, displayed on plinths, and recalling the imagery of the classical era. Trauernde (2008) would not be out of place in a church, and Betender (2009), a kneeling white plaster figure, has a crib-like air to it, not just from its backbone of straw.

Proceeding through into gallery two, however, you remember where you are – this is, after all, the Saatchi Gallery, not the British Museum! Met with a cacophony of colour and pattern, André Butzer’s large canvases of street art style imagery depict highly impasto, hollow-eyed amoeba, recognisable icons of modern day life, or, as Butzer himself describes them, just “the kind of things Donald Duck would do when he paints”?

Another artist who plays with the concept of iconology is Julian Rosefeldt in his Global Soap (2000-1). A series of four headshot composites, taken from international TV soap operas and compiled according to expression, these studies of modern day melodrama reference German art historian Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) systematic investigation of religious painting, and, Rosefeldt hopes, present the contemporary counterpart in an age where “soaps have taken over the function of the church.”

Celebrity life is further picked up by Kirstine Roepstorff in All Possible Experiences (2006), a collage in which she intersperses foil stars and newsreel images to create a map of the modern day media constellation. Another work by the same artist, You Are Being Lied To (2002), which, from a distance resembles an idyllic Garden of Eden scene, with trees, grass, water, flowers, and glitter, is, upon closer study, a rambunctious display of masculinity, with motorbikes, boats, fighter jets, sports and barbecue paraphernalia.

Josephine Meckseper counters this androcentric display with her politically engaged, feminist installations, confronting and reappropriating consumerist advertising imagery relating to the role and place of women. Shoes, stockings, fashion magazine adverts: a true 1950s woman’s closet, but, diffused with critical commentary, including a photograph from a demonstration with placards bearing “Fight the new Colonialism” and a toilet brush, her non-complicit standpoint becomes quite clear.

Charred remains feature heavily throughout the exhibition as well. In Dirk Bell’s Abgrund (Abyss) (2008), a gently painted grisaille of a naked figure, lit by a real neon light, the subject is half hidden behind a charred net curtain, and stands upon a ledge with shards of broken mirror and charred human bones. On the opposite wall, Friedrich Kunath’s First Life Takes Time Then Time Takes Life (2010), presents seven frames of ostensibly the same still life composition, consisting of a piece of toast leaning against a pineapple-shaped ceramic vase, albeit with the toast becoming progressively burnt from image to image – perhaps a warning of the continual destruction that so easily goes unnoticed in the world when you do not keep a close eye out? Finally, Thomas Helbig’s Jungfrau (2005) and Vater (2005) are riotous sculptures built from all manner of found (and burnt) materials: animal jaws and teeth, an eagle’s head and wings, an elephant’s trunk, and various delicately beautiful legs and arms, remains from classical antiquity. These works are so disturbing that I left the gallery hallucinating such monstrosities were emerging from the underground escalators to drag me down to their world!

More every day detritus is utilised by Ida Ekblad, who embeds “the discarded remains of contemporary culture” into wet panels of concrete. Isa Genzken, on the other hand, turns her castaway items into totemic sculptures, incorporating snapshots of her own and others’ pasts: toy cowboys and Indians, retro chairs, dolls, Christmas decorations… It is her polyptych, Kinder Filmen I (2005), with its mirrors, coloured strips, holograms and warning tape, all overlaying exquisite Renaissance images, which might, however, be seen as a summation of the whole exhibition. Colour, vibrancy, image, modern media and classical beauty, it epitomises the question of what precisely is the object (and subject) of art today. You will certainly leave this show with something to think about.

Images:

André Butzer Ahnenbild 2411 (2006)
Oil on canvas
280 x 460cm

Isa Genzken Geschwister (2004)
Plastic, lacquer, mirror foil, glass, metal, wood, fabric
220 x 60 x 100 cm

Courtesy the Saatchi Gallery, London

Interview with Rachel Howard re. Folie à Deux at Blain|Southern

2011-11-17T16:27:00.002Z

17/11/11

Rachel Howard: Folie à Deux

Blain|Southern, London
12 October–22 December 2011

by ANNA McNAY

Rachel Howard is not an artist to shy away from heavy subject matter; sin, suicide, madness, the fragility of the human condition. Trained at Goldsmiths, and studio assistant to Damien Hirst from 1992–1996, Howard is a widely exhibited and successful artist in her own right, recognisable for her trademark use of household paint, which she separates into pigment and varnish, to create a dragging effect of colour across the canvas. Her current exhibition at Blain|Southern, Folie à Deux, is named after the clinical definition for a psychosis in which delusional beliefs are transmitted from one individual to another. Studio International spoke to Howard about her inspirations and fears.

To read the rest of this review please go to:

http://www.studiointernational.com/reports/rachel-howard-2011.asp

art-Corpus

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07/02/12Migrations: Journeys into British ArtTate Britain31 January – 12 August 2012

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Review of Paul Noble: Welcome to Nobson at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street

Review of Jonathan Lasker: The 80s at Timothy Taylor Gallery

Review of Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany at the Saatchi Gallery

Interview with Rachel Howard re. Folie à Deux at Blain|Southern

07/02/12
Migrations: Journeys into British Art
Tate Britain
31 January – 12 August 2012