Interview with Fabienne Verdier

13/12/16

Interview: Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier: Rhythms and Reflections 

Waddington Custot

25 November 2016 - 4 February 2017

Fabienne Verdier (b1962, Paris) produces large, abstract paintings, characterised by bold, gestural brushstrokes, made using enormous, suspended vertical brushes of her own construction. She combines knowledge and philosophy, learned during 10 years studying with old masters in China, with western expressionism, to create explosions of movement and life on the carefully prepared, layered canvases. Her physical and performative creative practice experiments with reproducing energy lines – invisible forces that are continually evolving – often echoing, albeit unintentionally, natural forms, such as branches, rivers and lightning flashes.

Verdier’s work has been shown alongside a huge variety of artists, including Auguste Rodin, Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly and the Flemish primitives, but watching Verdier in the act of painting most calls to mind Jackson Pollock with his vertical method of pouring, dripping and swirling the paint, using contraptions such as turkey basters.

In 2014, Verdier was the first visual artist-in-residence at the Juilliard School in New York, where she undertook live studio experiments seeking to answer the question of whether painting and music, in the moment of creation, might be “played” simultaneously. Her works in Rhythms and Reflections, her current exhibition at Waddington Custot, London, derive from this experiment, materialising rhythms and reflections on the canvas. They further explore the movement of the body in space and its encounters with lines of force in the landscape as one walks or strolls about.

Speaking to Studio International at the opening of the exhibition, Verdier was palpably excited about her methods and explorations, and full of creative energy.

Read the interview here

Review of Jean Tinguely: Machine Spectacle at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

04/11/16

Jean Tinguely: Machine Spectacle

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

1 October 2016 – 5 March 2017

“I wanted something ephemeral, that would pass like a falling star and, most importantly, that would be impossible for museums to reabsorb,” said Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-91), best known for his kinetic sculptures or metamechanics, of his equally famous self-destructing installations. “I didn’t want it to be ‘museumised’.” It is a moot point then, that, to mark the 25th anniversary of his death, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, where Tinguely co-curated two seminal exhibitions in the early 60s, should (a) be hosting such a comprehensive retrospective and (b) be showing 166 works, 62 of which are machine sculptures, and only 42 of which are, intermittently, functioning. Would an artist who so railed against the white cube walls of formal galleries – “The more immaculate the gallery was and the larger and whiter the museum, the more repulsive were some of the machines I turned up with” – really have wanted his life presenting in such a documented manner, with drawings, photographs, letters, newspaper cuttings, film clips, patent applications, and all sorts of extensive archival material? What could be a more textbook example of being “museumised”?

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Review of Niki de Saint Phalle: Je Suis Une Vache Suisse at Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art

30/07/16

Niki de Saint Phalle: Je Suis Une Vache Suisse

Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art

17 June – 10 September 2016

At first sight, Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art is filled with a menagerie of joyful, celebratory and colourful works: gouache paintings and crayon drawings; sculptures and reliefs studded with coloured glass mosaic; ornate mirrors and intricate yet simple jewellery – all infused with a sense of playfulness and naivety, like that of a child. But look more closely and there is more to the works on display than meets the eye: a gorilla with a gaping hole where his internal organs – including his heart – should be; serpents; skulls; and a satisfied lion, recently having feasted on a man, whose shirt and shoes lay abandoned by the miniature settee. Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, or Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) as she became known, had a traumatic early life, which later unavoidably fed into her artwork, making it more worldy-wise and complex than it might at first seem.

Read this review here