Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

12/10/19
Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms at Tate Liverpool

18/07/16
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms 
Tate Liverpool
18 May - 18 September 2016

Published in The Mail on Sunday, 18/07/16
Also published in the Mail Online

Review of Reflections on the Self: From Dürer to Struth at Christie’s Mayfair

10/06/15

Reflections on the Self: From Dürer to Struth

Christie’s Mayfair, London

2 June – 5 September 2015

Artists since time immemorial have painted self-portraits: at times because models’ fees were beyond their meagre means; at times because they found themselves in isolation; at times simply because no one knows anyone as well as he knows himself and such intimate knowledge permits exploration and honesty, the freedom to experiment, and fulfils the desire to express.

For its sixth exhibition, Christie’s Mayfair, the auction house’s dedicated exhibition space, brings together more than 50 artists and 70 works showing the diversity of media, formats and styles used by artists to reflect their selves, from Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) to Thomas Struth (b1954). A rare 15th-century woodcut by the former, The Bathhouse (c1496-97), depicts the artist leaning on a wooden support, a tap comically positioned where his genitals should be, wistfully watching the other men as they bathe. A photograph by Struth, Alte Pinakothek, Self-Portrait Munich (2000), from his Museum Portraits series, looks over the artist’s shoulder at the well-known later self-portrait by Dürer (1500). The exhibition as a whole is framed by this one work.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/reflections-on-the-self-from-duerer-to-struth-christies-london

Review of FB55 in the Fox Reading Room, ICA

24/04/15

FB55

Fox Reading Room, ICA

24 March – 17 May 2015

This was supposed to be a small but fascinating celebration of the 60th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s first exhibition at the ICA. Instead, the business of curating the show became for Gregor Muir, the ICA director, a mystery of the disappearing archive. “I had hoped to show installation shots, I had hoped to show photos of Bacon at the ICA, and I had hoped to present a room in which I could show what the exhibition looked like,” he explains, “but that was, in the end, impossible.”

For whatever reason, there is scarcely any documentation of the 1955 exhibition. Muir scoured the ICA archives from the time, now held at Tate, but all he could find was a test print of an invitation card (through sheer luck, he later chanced on an actual card in a nearby bookshop); the press release; a list of works; and one photograph of an ICA employee standing in front of one of the works, hanging in the then Dover Street Market premises.

So why persist in making a show out of, well, virtually nothing?



To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/fb55-francis-bacon-archival-display-review-ica

Review of Jasper Johns: Regrets at the Courtauld Gallery

01/10/14

Jasper Johns: Regrets

Courtauld Gallery, London
12 September – 14 December 2014

This small but hugely powerful exhibition of work by Jasper Johns (b1930) is the second in the Courtauld’s new series of shows by contemporary artists who speak to a longer history of art. The 10 works selected might be seen not only to summarise the oeuvre of Johns himself, demonstrating many of his known methods and stylistic marks, but also to tell a wider story of art and artists, their processes and interactions, and, more broadly, a prescient – and Old Masterly – tale of life and death.

In the early summer of 2012, Johns was sent a Christie’s auction catalogue for the sale of Francis Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait (1964). In it was a full-page reproduction of a photograph by John Deakin, showing Lucian Freud posing on a cheap bedstead in Bacon’s studio. Bacon had, unusually, used this photograph as the starting point for his self-portrait. Johns became entranced by the image, which, in its reproduced form, had heavy black areas where Bacon had folded and torn the original, and where the copiers had placed the damaged original on a backing sheet, and thick, wiggly lines, where he had creased it. For the next 18 months, Johns worked solely with this image, creating and recreating numerous versions in pencil, pastel, watercolour, charcoal, ink on mylar, oil on canvas and etchings with numerous state proofs. All but the etchings are on display here.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/jasper-johns-regrets-courtauld-gallery-francis-bacon-lucian-freud

Interview: Pinkietessa

14/05/14