Tuesday 31 January 2017

Review of Sheida Soleimani: To Oblivion at Edel Assanti

31 January 2017
Sheida Soleimani: To Oblivion
Edel Assanti
20 January – 18 February 2017


Brought up with the stories of her parents’ dramatic escapes as political refugees from Iran, Sheida Soleimani (b1990) only discovered that this was not the norm, at the age of six, when she began school and learned English. Having been in hiding for three years, her father made his escape on horseback over the mountains. Her mother was captured and held prisoner, tortured and raped, for a long time thereafter. Finally having been released, she and her young daughter (Sheida’s older sister) were reunited with her husband in Ohio, where Sheida was born and brought up. At art school, Soleimani wanted to make work about her parents’ experiences, but, on the advice of her tutor, realised she needed to contextualise her stories. Her first major success, National Anthem (2016), exploring Iran’s turbulent past and present through still life and self-portrait, lost her the right to Iranian citizenship. Her latest work, some of which is on show in the solo exhibition, To Oblivion, at Edel Assanti, continues in the same vein, speaking out about the disappearances, rapes and murders of women in Iran today.



Read the full review here





Tuesday 24 January 2017

Review of Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts at the Whitechapel Gallery

24/01/17
Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts
Whitechapel Gallery, London
18 January – 16 April 2017


“Presentations of work by women artists are usually accompanied by sob stories and violins,” says Kathryn Wat, chief curator of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), Washington DC – the only international museum dedicated to the exhibition, preservation and acquisition of works by women artists of all nationalities and periods. She continues: “They tell how women couldn’t get into academies, couldn’t get sponsorship, but, nevertheless, went on to achieve. But, with photography, it’s different because women have been at the forefront of this medium since the very beginning.” The one-room display at the Whitechapel Gallery, Terrains of the Body, co-curated by Wat, presents photography and video works from the NMWA collection, as part of the London gallery’s programme of opening up rarely seen collections from around the world. Building on the legacy of 1970s’ feminist art, the exhibition includes works by 17 contemporary artists from five continents, from the 80s to today, presenting woman as creator and subject of her work.



Read the review here



Thursday 19 January 2017

Essay: Jane Walker

19/01/17
Digging into the Quicksands of Time: Jane Walker’s Divided Cities as a Metaphor for Civilisation’s Lack of Civilisation

‘It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision.’[1]

Throughout history, nations and cities have been divided. Reasons have been various, but include race, class, politics and religion. Even today, in the so-called ‘first world’, cities such as Nicosia and Jerusalem remain riven and Rome has an independent country – the Vatican City – at its centre. In our contemporary society, divisions are proliferating – nations are becoming disunited and, witness the Brexit vote in the UK, unions torn apart.

In her recent series of paintings, Jane Walker both divides and unites, creating jigsaw-esque topographies of ‘divided cities’, with stark boundaries, but new borders: Marseilles meets London; Paris meets New York; travel is both prohibited yet made conceptually possible.

Walker has long been painting cities and professes to a strong interest in the English topographical watercolour tradition. Initially wanting to become a concert pianist, from the age of seven, and with a brief foray into the study of medicine, she went on to train at the Royal Academy Schools (1987-90), at first painting more traditional portraits, but a visit to India led her away from conventional Western figurative painting. Attracted to ornate Eastern window traceries, her own work became increasingly linear and decorative. A move to Sheffield 18 years ago then provided Walker with wide-reaching views from her studio, looking out and down across an ever-changing cityscape. She began to paint what she saw, but not quite as she saw it…


All two-dimensional art requires some form of spatial translation, be it through the use of formal techniques, such as linear perspective, creating illusory space that makes the viewer ‘see’ three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional canvas, or the more contemporary choice of choosing to play with a viewer’s visual perceptions of the world itself, subverting the figurative or landscape traditions and questioning the very language of painting. Walker, impressed by the compressed space in the work of her tutor, Sonia Lawson, sought to escape the confines of illusionistic space and mimesis. ‘The background space in my work is deliberately undefined, unanswered,’ she says. While, at first glance, her works might seem to resonate with modernist and abstract expressionist paintings – lines of emotion, vivid colours, intertwined and bouncing off one another, sparking conversations and kindling feelings – a closer look reveals a depth within her canvases, as well as recognisable figurative elements. Her artistic trick, then, is to invert what she sees so that the larger buildings are on top, weighing down on the smaller ones. Taking a slightly bleak, if realistic, view, Walker sees this as a metaphor for what is happening to cities today, whereby the pressure of increasing populations, high rents, lack of space and congestion hangs heavy. Her lines, which, on the surface, seem to hold things together, are brittle. One worries as to how much more pressure they can take.

While Walker’s linear style might be seen as an exploration into post-cubist – digital even – formal deconstruction of the pictorial space, it is arguably also an employment of Byzantine – or inverse – perspective. Walker herself describes ‘a move backwards to a fragmented medieval space’. Byzantine perspective – frequently used in the painting of icons – locates the vanishing point outside of the painting, where the viewer stands, rather than within the painting, as is the case with linear perspective. The viewer thus experiences multiple points of perspective, which has been described by the Atelier Saint-André as ‘allow[ing] the viewer a window into the Kingdom of God’.[2]


Perhaps not inappropriately, then, Walker’s paintings also call to mind medieval illuminated manuscripts. From a distance, the horizontal sequences of marks might easily be mistaken for lines of Arabic or Hebrew script. Even on knowing whence the imagery derives, one cannot help but look for hidden meaning in the calligraphy – this ‘indelible writing on the landscape’. And elements are indeed buried in these archaeological canvases and panels, for Walker works in layers, building up and sanding down, creating a palimpsest out of ghostly traces. Between the planes is a pictorial space, different from the illusion of space suggested by perspective. Aware of this scriptural similarity, Walker sometimes creates an edge to her composition, like the decorated border of a manuscript – another demarcation or boundary line, attempting, perhaps, to restrict the growth of the cities within. Metropolises abound enough.

It was a friend’s throw-away comment that the line seemed to be the most important aspect of her work, that led to Walker ridding her practice of nearly all else, focusing solely on this line – reducing her painting to its drawn – or perhaps written – essence. For more than a decade, Walker worked in watercolour, her painting becoming increasingly graphic. She sees her current style as a distillation of watercolour techniques, transferred to oil paint.

Her process begins with photographs that she takes from high vantage points – the Natwest Tower, the Empire State Building, upstairs in her studio – looking down over cities. She inversely projects these images on to her panels, canvases or papers and traces the outlines in black, simplifying and subtracting as she goes. She then builds up layers of wash, in different colours, before painting over the black lines in white. This, she sees as ‘almost like trying to write across things’, creating a photographic reversal, transcribing and translating. Layers are built using primer, often repeating the process – reprojecting, redrawing, relayering, repriming – to create a mesh of hidden worlds. With her divided cities, each section is drawn from the projection of a different city, arbitrarily partitioned, amorphously shaped. Areas are marked out atlas-like, new boundaries defined with primer. String and cotton are sometimes worked into the layers, adding further tension and divisions – every strand, every mark, demarcating, dislocating, dissevering. Vertical clefts appear when the paint drips downwards, pooling at the bottom, in contrast to the tiny buildings, collapsing under the increasing weight above them, dissolving into nothing, sinking into the quicksands of imagination, vision and time.

Colour is significant to Walker as well. Sometimes she paints ‘stripes’ across her compositions, dividing the cities still further. Contrarily, the wash on top softens their outlines, blurring the boundaries beneath. Identifying with the Northern landscape tradition, in which light is important, yet colour tends to the monochrome, Walker sees her lines as the encapsulation of light – almost as if she were drawing with rays, tracing the photograph as if it were itself a drawing. In between these lines, beneath and above, she uses complex, contrasting colours, pushing the boundaries in yet another dimension. On the surface, she often uses silver or gold, to pull out the imagery still further. Like the Sienese master, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s, Walker’s linear and decorative style maintains a lyrical note, with the use of colour creating pattern and rhythm. Depending on the angle from which you approach one of her works, the white outlines luminesce and reflect – or perhaps refract – different colours from their inner rainbows. There is an element of batik, or of scratching away at the surface to reveal what lies beneath.

Indeed, Walker describes her work as ‘trying to do something between writing and image-making’ and as ‘looking down and seeing what we’re going to leave behind’. The ruins of previous civilisations lie hidden beneath the sand, sometimes covered over and built upon, before being rediscovered and revealed. This ongoing process of defining, destroying, disguising and deciphering – humankind’s action towards its urban habitat – is metaphorically re-enacted in Walker’s work. Thus, while her compositions, overall, might seem – even seek – to divide, they most certainly do not blind. If anything, they open their viewers’ eyes to a whole new realm of possibilities and understanding, both for the past, the present and the future. If only civilisation could learn some civilisation.








[1] Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem, Boston: Awakened Press, 2011
[2] www.atelier-st-andre.net


Images © the artist

See more of Jane's work on her website





Wednesday 18 January 2017

Review of Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter at RWA, Bristol

18/01/17
Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter
RWA, Bristol
10 December 2016 – 19 March 2017

One of the somewhat contrary signs of success for an author is when her works are well known by the general public, even if they have not been quite so widely read as to match this awareness. Such seems to be the case for Angela Carter (1940-92), whose vivid and enduring imagery and fantastic metaphor have influenced generations of readers and visual artists – many through the active enjoyment of her written word, which paints its own pictures using syntax and vocabulary as its paintbrush and palette; others through a form of collective osmosis. To mark the 25th anniversary of Carter’s untimely death – at the age of 51, from lung cancer – and the publication of a new biography, the RWA in Bristol (the city where Carter studied and wrote five of her nine novels) is hosting a fabulous exhibition, comprising artworks that inspired Carter and contemporary works influenced – directly or indirectly – by her writings.



Read the review here





Friday 13 January 2017

Review of Bonnard: En toute intimité at the Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France

13/01/17
Bonnard: En toute intimité
Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France
26 November 2016 – 23 April 2017

With the title Bonnard: En toute intimité, one might well expect an exhibition focusing on the artist’s nudes, or more erotic elements of his work, but, just as Tracey Emin’s tent, Everyone I Have Every Slept With 1963-1995, includes those with whom she simply enjoyed (or otherwise) the intimacy of a shared bed – or womb – so this beautifully curated show at the Musée Bonnard, in the artist’s ultimate hometown of Le Cannet, on the Côte d’Azur, looks at those people, places and things to which the artist was especially close at different points throughout his life. Arranged largely chronologically, it comprises about 60 works from the museum’s collection, alongside a handful of loans, and a number of new acquisitions from the Musée d’Orsay.



Read the rest of this review here




Image:
Pierre Bonnard
Paysage, soleil couchant (Landscape at sunset), c1923. 
Oil on canvas, 59 x 72.5 cm. 
Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, gift from the Fondation Meyer pour le développement culturel et artistique, permanent loan from the musée d’Orsay, Paris. 
© Adagp, Paris 2016. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.