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 Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery

20/11/15

Goya: The Portraits

National Gallery

7 October 2015 – 10 January 2016

The late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya, is not generally thought of in terms of light, rather in terms of darkness. His best-known works are arguably his fourteen Black Paintings, which depict, in very dark terms, the atrocities of the Napoleonic War and the artist’s fear of insanity. However, a third of Goya’s output comprises portraits and more than 150 of these still survive today. The current exhibition at the National Gallery, the first dedicated to this genre of his work, showcases nearly half of them.

Read the rest of this review here

Image:

Francisco de Goya

María Luisa wearing a Mantilla, 1799

Oil on canvas, 205 x 130 cm

Colecciones Reales, Patrimonio Nacional, Palacio Real de Madrid

© Patrimonio Nacional

Interview with Nathan Coley

14/08/15

Interview: Nathan Coley

Nathan Coley: A Place Beyond Belief 

Bruges Triennial

20 May – 18 October 2015

Nathan Coley, who was born in 1967 in Glasgow, sculpts words and phrases out of light – but, very particularly, he uses old light bulbs and scaffolding to create a nostalgic, fairground aesthetic, eschewing neon and its advertorial connotations. Although he accepts full responsibility as the author of the work, the words come from all manner of sources, and, in the varying contexts in which the ensuing works are shown, they gain all manner of meanings, some universal, some unique to the individual viewer.

Coley’s works explore architecture and religion, although he is more interested in what is built by whom and where and why than the building itself. Likewise, he holds no formal faith.

Coley was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, losing out to Mark Wallinger. Tom Lubbock wrote in the Independent: “He may well be the most boring artist in Britain. His work is so dull to look at that you swiftly turn to a printout in search of an explanation – and find the work is wholly explained by its explanation but not made the slightest bit more interesting.” I disagree. Coley’s works are as appealing as they are subtle, as intriguing as they are seemingly simple. They carry layers of possibility and, as Coley points out, are “very photogenic”.

Read this interview here

Interview with Helen Evans of HeHe

12/08/15

Interview with Helen Evans of HeHe

HeHe: Undercurrent

Bruges Triennial 

20 May - 18 October 2015

Man-made clouds, flying carpets and a broken electricity pylon: French-based artistic duo HeHe, comprising British-born Helen Evans (b1972) and German-born Heiko Hansen (b1970), make work focusing on the environment and urban space. Their large-scale interventions are often controversial, but, despite the serious issues being addressed, there is an element of fun to many of them, and a certain aesthetic beauty to others. HeHe were invited to take part in this year’s Bruges Triennial, for which they produced a new work, Undercurrent (2015), which incorporates sculpture, installation, sound and light. Studio International spoke to Helen Evans about this and other projects.

Read the interview here

Interview with Eloise Hawser at the ICA

03/08/15

Interview with Eloise Hawser

Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire

ICA Lower Gallery, London
1 July – 6 September 2015

The light in the ICA’s lower gallery changes colour slowly, switching through a deliciously dilute RGB spectrum; the gentle buzzing hum in the background offers a white noise that could lull one to sleep. In the centre of the room stands a curious contraption: a colour-changer taken from the cinema organ once found at the Stockport Regal. Capable of conflating a spectacle of music and light, cinema organs were developed by the British telephone engineer, Robert Hope-Jones, in the early 20th century, to replace the orchestras that had previously accompanied silent movies. Placed behind often quite ornate art deco-style illuminated glass outer shells – somewhat like a jukebox in appearance – these organs could be played remotely via a pneumatic system, albeit sometimes with a slight time lapse between the organist’s command and the resulting sound.

The colour-changing mechanism is a complex contraption, comprising cams, arms and a spring box or variable resistor. Originally, this would have been connected to a set of filament light bulbs but, here at the ICA, it is fed through an analogue to DCX convertor in the ceiling, which makes the LED lights in the gallery change colour.

Accompanying the mechanism are a couple of films – one showing the cinema organ that remains behind the scenes in Burberry’s flagship store on Regent Street – a former cinema – and an installation of BT cables, expanding the theme of wires and incipient obsolescence.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/eloise-hawser-interview-video-lives-on-wire-ica-london-cinema-organ

Review of André Kertész in Europe at James Hyman Gallery

29/05/15

André Kertész in Europe

James Hyman Gallery

13 May – 13 June 2015

André Kertész (1894-1985) is probably best known for his pioneering modernist work produced in Paris during the late 1920s/early 1930s, including his Distortion series, featuring two nude models with their reflections caught in carnivalesque mirrors, and his later Washington Square images, capturing clouds and silhouettes. His fascination with and dedication to light (“I write with light”, he is quoted as saying) and shadow carry through all of his career, from his earlier photographs taken with an ICA box camera in pre-war Hungary, showing his almost ultra-sensitivity to the lot of his fellows, particularly the poor, the working class and the peasantry (for example, Lovers, Budapest, 1915 and Bocksay-Ter, Hungary, Oct 1914 – the earliest dated print in this exhibition) to his later shots in London in the 1980s.

This May exhibition at James Hyman is aptly time-framed with the largest work in the exhibition, a unique oversized enlargement of Muguet seller, Champs Elysees, May 1^st 1928, printed by Kertész around 1960, portraying an amputee war veteran selling the traditional May flower, lily of the valley, on the steps to a metro station. The show focuses solely on Kertész’s European photographs, some well known, some previously unpublished. Delightful in its insights into the photographer’s life and times, with numerous shots of his contemporaries and their studios, this exhibition refutes the fact that Kertész seldom travelled after moving to New York in 1936. Here we have evidence of many trips to Europe, and, on each occasion, Kertész is seen to do as Kertész always did: to observe the world as if through a lens and to reflect back his unusual vantage point with depth both of field and perception.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2015/05/andre-kertesz-in-europe-2/

Image:

Au Bon Coin, Paris, 1929 
The Estate of Andre Kertesz 2015
Courtesy James Hyman Gallery, London

Review of Liane Lang: An Idle Brain Is Satan’s Shoppe at House of St Barnabas

02/06/14

Liane Lang: An Idle Brain Is Satan’s Shoppe

House of St Barnabas, London

17 March – 17 June 2014

Upon encountering Liane Lang’s work for the first time a few years ago, I was intrigued by how her ‘subjects’ could achieve some of their postures, and by their haunting, timeless appearance and pallid countenance. In the meantime, I have had insider insight into the production process of her silicon ‘dolls’, myself sitting and having my legs and head cast in her studio. But this hasn’t spoilt any of the magic and allure upon being met with Lang’s new projects, each one as thoroughly researched and painstakingly produced as the last.

The most recent, on display in the Bazalgette room within Soho Square’s House of St Barnabas, was produced during a residency at the Casa Guidi in Florence, erstwhile home to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, the Romantic poets, known as much for their love affair as for their works. Elizabeth began writing at the tender age of six, and a large collection of her juvenilia was published by her mother. Suffering from chronic ill health from 15 onwards, Elizabeth spent much of her time in bed – a fate which she exploited well in the production of poetry. After a letter-writing courtship with Robert, who made contact to admire her poetry when she was 38 years old, the two eloped, married at Marylebone Chapel, and left for Italy in the dead of night, accompanied solely by a lady’s maid and a spaniel. Casa Guidi is where they settled and where they went on to produce more exceptional work between 1847 and 1861.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2014/06/an-idle-brain-is-satans-shoppe/