Review of Robert Mapplethorpe: Objects at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg

01/10/16

Robert Mapplethorpe: Objects

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg

29 August – 19 November 2016

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) may be best known for his photographic works and controversial imagery of the underground BDSM scene in the late 60s and early 70s of New York, but he didn’t really begin taking photographs until he borrowed a Polaroid camera in 1971, and then later acquired a Hasselblad medium format of his own. Before this point, he studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, majoring in graphic art (although he dropped out in 1969 without completing his degree). During this time, however, and in the years immediately following, he made a large number of collages and three-dimensional assemblages, compiling everyday objects and found images from (often pornographic) magazines. This small, but enlightening and enriching exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, brings together 12 of these “objects”, rarely ever seen, and recently acquired by the J Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, set up by the artist before his death from HIV/Aids-related complications at the age of 42.

The objects on display show a clear graphic influence, with the triangle – representative of the Trinity and the traditional portrayal of the Holy Family – recurring as a repeated leitmotif throughout. One of six children, Mapplethorpe had a strict Catholic upbringing, which permeates his work, even when its content becomes more explicitly homosexual and contentious.

Read this review here

Portfolio: Sidsel Meineche Hansen

23/03/16
Portfolio: Sidsel Meineche Hansen

Sidsel Meineche Hansen: SECOND SEX WAR

Gasworks, London

17 March – 29 May 2016

“I would like to either abolish gender or multiply it beyond the binary, which would equate to the same thing,” says Danish-born, London-based artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen, whose current exhibition, SECOND SEX WAR, explores how this concept might be (re)produced in virtual adult entertainment.

Among other things, a new animated video, presented on Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets, considers the question of what post-human sex and sexuality might be like. Visitors take on the role of the avatar EVA v3.0 to experience this firsthand. Meineche Hansen is, in part, motivated by the feminist “sex wars” of the late 70s/early 80s, which politicised the concept and representation of female sexuality and led to a split of the feminist movement into anti-pornography and anti-censorship camps. Her own attitude towards pornography is unresolved, but her work debatably falls into the category of 3D porn. But is pornography art? “Sure, if you say it’s art, it’s art,” Meineche Hansen replies nonchalantly.

Alongside the video, Meineche Hansen is displaying a series of polymer clay sculptures and reliefs. Her practice is research-led and a series of seminars, planned for during SECOND SEX WAR, will look at the overlap between pornography and body horror. Although entrenched in academic discourse, they will be open to all. As for the exhibition, however, parental discretion is advised!

Published in the April print issue of DIVA magazine

Display: Sadie Lee

24/11/14

Display: Sadie Lee

Just what do lesbians do in bed? According to classical paintings, they hover close together, arranged in aesthetically pleasing contortions, apparently enjoying blissful arousal by barely touching. Typically, they will bedded in a pleasant pastoral landscape or ancient marble Mediterranean Palacio, with Cupid and his various cherubs hovering nearby.

In her new series of work, specially commissioned for the GFEST Gaywise FESTival Visual Arts Exhibition, Sadie Lee (born 1967) challenges and subverts this classical imagery, reimagining some of the 18^th century Rococo artist François Boucher’s works, with both a lesbian gaze and female empathy. Introducing a certain element of kink, and building on a personal interest in pornography, she rewrites this sterilised version of lesbian sex as an I Modi for the iPhone generation. Her use of vintage imagery from 1970s porn mags echoes the classical masters’ borrowing of imagery from past works as well as their use of models, who were all but sex workers. By expressing the subject’s genuine pleasure, however, Lee introduces an important – and previously absent – element to her versions of these images: empathy with the model. As a lesbian artist, there is also a strong sense of desire. Beautiful yet explicit, her works teeter on the oft debated line between the erotic and pornographic.

GFEST Gaywise FESTival Visual Arts Exhibition: http://gaywisefestival.org.uk/visual-arts/

Menier Gallery, 51 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RU

10 - 22 November 2014

A panel discussion on LGBT 'Myths and Mythology' in art – past, present and future – featuring Sadie Lee, Anna McNay and others, will take place at the Menier Gallery on 21^st November at 6pm. The event is free but tickets must be booked through the GFEST website.

Sadie Lee’s artwork on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sadieleeart

Review of Maryam Najd: Accuracy & Balance – West at Galerie van de Weghe, Antwerp

15/09/14

Maryam Najd: Accuracy & Balance – West

Galerie van de Weghe, Antwerp
5 September – 4 October 2014

Maryam Najd was born in Iran in 1965 and grew up there. She studied art at the University of Tehran but, after the revolution in 1979, life on many levels had become restricted. It was no longer permitted to see naked bodies and so life drawing was never part of her syllabus – at least, the models were always fully clothed. In 1992, she moved to Antwerp having been accepted to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Apart from a few years spent in Berlin and New York, she has been there ever since.

“For me, nudity was something that I had never seen before in Iran. I was touched by it from my very first day in Belgium. It has had an impact on me. The first month at the academy, we had to draw and paint all these models and I was shy even to look at them. I was shocked to see how the nude was represented in society.”

Since then, Najd has found herself repeatedly wondering, in this culture where nudity and naked bodies are so prevalent and where the female form is plastered all over magazines, billboards and television, whether this is part of women’s emancipation, or whether it is, on the contrary, a new form of suppression and shackles – a pressure to look and present oneself in a certain way; a pressure to perform myriad roles, as wife, mother, businesswoman, gym bunny, sex bomb; a pressure to both conform to and stand up against being the object of male desire. Maybe freedom is something beyond all of this. Moreover, Najd wonders where the line is drawn between pop stars, models and performers, who wear tight bodices or scanty outfits and flaunt their bodies provocatively (think Madonna, Rihanna and Beyoncé, to name but a few), and porn stars, strip-club workers, or prostitutes. “Someone like Rihanna, she goes almost naked on to the stage, and we call them ‘artists’, not ‘prostitutes’,” Najd says incredulously. “Do you really need to go that far?” Following this line of curious intrigue, she has been working on a series, or project, the first part of which is currently on show at Galerie van de Weghe, called Accuracy & Balance – with this first instalment carrying the subtitle “West”.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/maryam-najd-accuracy-balance-west-iran-women-nude-pornography

Review of Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) at the ICA

02/09/13

Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper)

Curated by Sarah McCrory

ICA

19 June – 8 September 2013

Turning the corner towards the ICA’s lower gallery this summer, the visitor finds himself entering the target range of an immense, phallic gun. This is sadly somewhat unsurprising, however, given the ICA’s apparent remit to present art which will shock: such extreme efforts to bamboozle have come to be rather commonplace within its walls. Indeed, this whole exhibition, consisting of works on paper by eight artists from the 1940s to today, seems hell bent on creating a scandal. Perhaps it is simply trying too hard, then, since, despite the serious intent of the artists to challenge weighty political issues such as war and feminism, I was left, to be honest, little more than bored.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a belief that as long as it is making a political point, it doesn’t matter whether or not your art is any good; puerile scribbles will suffice. And this is very clearly the case with Judy Bernstein (born 1942), artist of the aforementioned gun, Fuck by Number (2013). The enormous drawing, in black charcoal and red paint, depicts an erect penis/gun, with its testicles as the barrel, shooting an American flag, and surrounded by statistics from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing their horror and futility. Around the corner are smaller charcoal drawings, likewise conflating sexual violence and acts of war, and littered with crude verses and scribbles like those you might find as graffiti in a public toilet.

Alongside Bernstein are works by Margaret Harrison (born 1940), recent winner of the Northern Art Prize. Her offerings are less violent, but no less explicit. In Good Enough to Eat (2) (1971), for example, a dominatrix is sprawled between the slices of bread in a sandwich, whilst in Dolly Parton/Allen Jones (2010), she kneels on all fours, supporting a table top, as in Jones’ own subversive sculptures. Turning the gender balance tables, there are also works like Captain America (1997), where the comic superhero stands astride, displaying a tiny penis and larger-than-life strap-on breasts. The graphic novel style of these drawings blends well with their mix of humour and biting critique of male power.

Upstairs is largely male dominated, apart from Marlene McCarty’s (born 1957) detailed ballpoint drawing of a gorilla enjoying illicit sexual relations with two female scientists. Mike Kuchar (born 1942) presents equally fantastical scenarios in his homoerotic phantasmagoria, commissioned for comic publications such as Gay Heart Throbs.

As the “old master” of social and political critique through art, George Grosz (1893-1959) also has a work on display: Stickmen Meeting Members of the Bourgeois (1946), in which a group of grey, lifeless stickmen are shown aimlessly following two fat, ruddy, sweaty members of the bourgeoisie, the contents of their bulging stomachs exposed to show plentiful beer and meat.

Antonio Lopez (1943-1987) has been credited with influencing the acceptance of diverse ethnicities into the fashion world, through his hedonistic drawings for New York magazines, whilst Cary Kwok (born 1975), who also trained in fashion, has filled nearly a whole room with biro drawings of men at the moment of ejaculation. This, to me, far from shocking, is merely mildly nauseating.

The final contributor is Tom of Finland (1920-1991) who achieved cult status for his erotic drawings of homosexual male encounters, in which his characters are uniformed servicemen, sailors, lumberjacks and biker rebels. Again, these are technically well drawn, and perhaps they were shocking at the time, but now, in an age of mass graphic bombardment, they come across largely as if they were pages torn from a comic book.

Indeed, this exhibition considers the crossover between the commercial and the aesthetic via the medium of drawing, as well as looking at how this has been used to voice political and critical opinion. In some instances, there is intricate detail; in others, childish scribblings. Quite why there needs, however, to be such an overbearing focus on the pornographically explicit, I am not sure. I’m all for freedom of speech and expression, and even for art that truly shocks, but, in this case I was just glad to reach the end.

Images:

Judith Bernstein

DICK IN THE HEAD series

2010

charcoal, pastel on paper

41.5" x 29.5"

Marlene McCarty

Group 8: (Karisoke, The Virungas, Rwanda. September 24, 1967. 4:30pm.)

2006

ballpoint pen and graphite on paper

courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Mike Kuchar

Prehistoric Pets

1980-1990

courtesy of the artist, and François Ghebaly Gallery

George Grosz

Stickmen meeting members of the bourgeois

1946

courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

Antonio Lopez

Gianni Versace Campaign

1984

© the Estate of Antonio Lopez

courtesy the Suzanne Geiss Company

Tom of Finland

Untitled

1963

© Tom of Finland Foundation, Incorporated