Time Present and Time Past: the uniting of temporal planes in the work of Susanne Kamps

26/05/20

Time Present and Time Past: the uniting of temporal planes in the work of Susanne Kamps

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

[TS Eliot, Four Quartets]

‘Who would not, while looking at the painting of Susanne Kamps, think of Matisse, Dufy, Derain and the Fauves…?’ asks Christiane Dressler in her 2010 essay. Certainly this is the case with the four works submitted to the tenth anniversary of Cynthia Corbett’s Young Masters Art Prize last year, in particular the diptych Behind the Screen (2019), which specifically pays homage to Henri Matisse’s Interior with Aubergines (1911). The vivid colour palette, the fronds of palms, the shuttered windows and tilted perspective all nod indisputably in the direction of the artist whom Kamps admits to having taken as her greatest inspiration since the year 2000. However, it would be far too facile to look only to him, as Kamps’ knowledge of and sampling from art history goes much further, taking in not only specific artists, but also movements, motifs and devices – all of which she subjects to her own interpretation, rendering the finished works, as she terms them, ‘homages’, very much imbued with her own added flavour. Kamps neither copies nor steals (to reference the widely-attributed Picasso quote that ‘good artists copy, but great artists steal’): she absorbs, amalgamates and reinterprets, using the art of past masters much as she uses her collection of photographs, bric-à-brac from her beloved flea markets, and domestic objects – as, in the words of Matisse, a ‘working library’. For me, the artists who come to mind most when looking at her paintings are Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, known for their style of ‘intimism’, or use of the domestic interior, along with the juxtaposition of pattern, planes of flat colour, and, again, the window motif. But there is also Kamps’ use of the diptych, which compositionally opens up the concept of past and present, as much as the looking back to art history for inspiration does on an academic level. 

Read the full essay here

Interview with Raffi Kalenderian

04/06/19

Interview with Raffi Kalenderian 

I first saw the work of Raffi Kalenderian (b1981, Los Angeles) in the Saatchi Gallery’s Painters’ Painters exhibition (2016-17), where his amazing blurring of subject and background, and use of stripes – with an almost unbelievably organic mastery – stood out and made him one of my latest artists to watch. Now, he is having his fourth solo exhibition at Vielmetter, Los Angeles – Memento Vivo – and so we took the opportunity to have a chat by email about what it is that excites him about his work, who and what he likes to paint and some of his influences, and it gave me the chance to glean a little insight into his practice.

Read the full interview here

Review of Patrick Heron at Tate St Ives

16/07/18

Patrick Heron 

Tate St Ives

19 May – 30 September 2018

and

Turner Contemporary, Margate

19 October 2018 – 6 January 2019

It has been a momentous 12 months for Tate St Ives – reopening in October 2017 following a four-year building project, led by Jamie Fobert Architects, to add nearly 600sq metres of gallery space, doubling the existing area – and, in recognition of this, achieving the accolade, worth £100,000, of Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018. The new four-storey extension, with its tall, sky-lit exhibition space, is currently host to the first major exhibition in two decades of works by the local – and hugely significant postwar British abstract artist – Patrick Heron (1920-99), who always wanted his paintings to be seen at different times of day, in different light, just as they can be here.

Read the full review here

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.