Interview with Shani Rhys James

04/08/20
Interview with Shani Rhys James

Published in full in edition 2 of The Flux Review

Review of Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

20/02/17

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)

Dulwich Picture Gallery
8 February – 4 June 2017

This is the first major monographic exhibition of work by Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), and the curators, Sarah Milroy and Ian A C Dejardin, are at pains to emphasise their wish to separate Vanessa Bell the artist, and Vanessa Bell’s art, from the many stories and dramas surrounding Vanessa Bell the person, as part of the Bloomsbury Group. Certainly, her work deserves attention – “Vanessa Bell the painter was as radical as Virginia Woolf the writer,” wrote the Guardian critic Fiona MacCarthy, when Bell’s work was shown as part of The Art of Bloomsbury at Tate in 19991 – and she stands strong as an artist in her own right, not just as the sister of Virginia Woolf, the wife of Clive Bell, or the lover of Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Nevertheless, no matter how hard one tries – and the curators of this exhibition really have tried – her art cannot be separated from her life. In fact, even they concede as much in the “At Home” section of the exhibition, where they portray the complex (or, perhaps one could argue, remarkably simple, in the way she lived them out) interpenetration of her roles as mother, wife, lover, sister and artist.

Read the review here

Review of Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion at Two Temple Place

11/02/17

Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion

Two Temple Place

28 January – 23 April 2017

As artists continue to be priced out of even the farthest reaches of London’s boroughs, and many move down to places on the south coast, such as Hastings, it seems there is something of a revived rural exodus to mirror that – or, more correctly, those – of the early- to mid-20th century, when numerous artistic communities established themselves in the county of Sussex, with guilds, enclaves and retreats. Exemplifying the many faces of modernism, these various groupings might, at first glance, seem as different from one another as chalk and cheese, but biographical and conceptual links can be made, weaving a deft narrative of the period and its protagonists, and this is precisely what the sixth annual exhibition, in the successful winter exhibition programme at Two Temple Place, has achieved. The result, Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion, brings together painting, film, sculpture, furniture, music and photography from more than 30 lenders and nine museums and galleries. What the curator, Dr Hope Wolf, describes as a “visual cacophony of styles and media” is contextualised against the late-19th-century interiors of the London venue, making visible the very style from which many of the artists included sought to depart.

Read this review here