Review of Scandal and Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley (BBC iPlayer)

10/06/20





Published in the summer 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain

24/04/17

Queer British Art 1861-1967

Tate Britain, London
5 April – 1 October 2017

“For me, to use the word ‘queer’ is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer” – Derek Jarman

In a year when nearly all of London’s – nay, Britain’s – major (and even lesser) museums and galleries are putting on LGBTQI* related exhibitions to mark the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in 1967, Tate Britain’s Queer British Art 1861-1967 is the biggest and boldest of the lot. What could have – and was being feared by many would – become an androcentric, homoerotic romp, is a well-curated, historically informative and aesthetically compelling exploration of the multifaceted interpretations of “queerness” in the century leading up to this milestone.

The self-declared remit of the exhibition’s curators is to explore “a wide range of sexualities and gender identities” – hence the choice of the word “queer”, rather than any combination of letters and asterisks, also influenced by the fact that, with ever-changing labels, many of those that we use today would not have been used, or recognised, by the artists and audiences in their own times. The starting point of the show – 1861 – was selected because it was the year the death penalty for sodomy was abolished (although it was still punishable by imprisonment) and the decades are traversed chronologically, thematically, and through the representation of artistic groups, such as the pre-Raphaelites and – synonymous with fluid sexuality – the Bloomsbury Group.

Read the full review here

Portfolio: Jo Spence. BP Spotlight at Tate Britain

14/12/15
Portfolio: Jo Spence

BP Spotlight: Jo Spence
Tate Britain
until autumn 2016

Published in the January 2016 print issue of DIVA magazine

Barbara Hepworth: Representing the Work and the Self through Photography

04/09/15

Barbara Hepworth: Representing the Work and the Self through Photography

Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World

Tate Britain

24 June – 25 October 2015

Hepworth in Yorkshire

The Hepworth Wakefield

16 May – 6 September 2015

A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965-1975

The Hepworth Wakefield

18 April 2015 – April 2016

Much as I love looking at the sculptural work of Barbara Hepworth (1903-75), I also love looking at photographs and film footage of the sculptor herself, both at rest and, even more so, at work. Perhaps this quote, from the mouth of the artist herself in 1961, goes some way towards explaining this predeliction: “I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”

This summer sees three shows dedicated to the sculptor: Penelope Curtis’s final offering at Tate Britain and two smaller, but equally rigorous and delightful, exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, home to the Hepworth Family Gift, a collection of 44 of the artist’s surviving working models for her bronze sculptures.

While Tate’s exhibition unsurprisingly largely comprises sculpture, it dedicates one worthy section – Staging Sculpture – to photographs taken by both Hepworth and others, showing her work in the landscape. Many of these, including a series of photo-collages, cutting out photographs of existing sculptures and pasting them on to new backdrops, including a house designed by Richard Neutra in Los Angeles and the interior of flats designed by Alfred and Emil Roth and Marcel Breuer in Zurich, have never been shown before, except for when published in Architectural Review in April 1939. Fired by her ambition to work on a larger scale, Hepworth made these composite images to show how her work might enrich an architectural or natural setting. Photography enabled her to explore such sculptural ideas and only partly came out of economic necessity.

You can read the rest of this essay here